"Whenever I see them tearing down these mountains, I just feel this pit in the bottom of my stomach. You know that was somebody’s home or special spot. I feel disgusted, and I feel compelled to stand up and do something about it."
— Junior Walk of West Virginia
Donald John Trump’s decision to pull out of the out of the Paris Climate Accord could be the worst thing that a President has ever done for humankind. Yes, that’s a bold statement, but consider this: If a polluting, smoke-breathing, cinder-making dragon like the USA has been all during the Industrial Age and even into the Post Industrial Age, water, air, ground, and even atomic pollution is going to go haywire. Worse than it’s ever been. Trump might even start giving awards to corporations and companies that are our worst and most vile polluters. He does really draconian things, after all, and such a nightmare scenario isn’t really all that far fetched, now is it?
We’re now down to grinding soils for fossil fuels and decimating rain forests to drain a bit of the most foul, dirtiest, horrid crude imaginable from the greasy oilsands to put in our gas tanks. We’re fracturing the ground underneath suburban, urban, and rural areas so as to pull natural gas and oil from the earth. Fracking causes earthquakes, geologists say. But who are they anyhow, Donald, a bunch of egghead misfits who are also pinko commie freaks?
We’re mining on the top of mountains in Appalachia because there just isn’t much coal in the outlaying areas around these mountains anymore. It’s all been harvested. The land has been depleted of coal so we’re taking it right to the top.
Trump is allowing mining companies to dump mineral-extraction waste and mining sludge into tributaries that pollute our overly polluted rivers and major watersheds to the extent that there just will not be any clean drinking water left. We’ll all be drinking and showering with bottled water and giving our best attempts to wipe the slimy film off the top of these bottles, then at the bottom of the bottle, we’ll have to be careful not to swallow the heavy, most poisonous stuff.
Right after he took office, Trump gave the go-ahead for the continuation of both the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access pipelines. Pipelines leak and sometimes explode. The Dakota Access Pipeline was installed under the Missouri River, which will affect the drinking and bathing water of a lot of communities and cities downstream. Native American protesters, joined by environmental water protectors, fought against the construction of both these pipelines. When Trump took office, though, the pipelines were railroaded through.
Even more important than the nixing of the Paris Climate Accord is Trump’s snubbing of our NATO/Article 5 allies. He’s never said a bad thing about Russia or Vladimir Putin, but he has no problem shoving aside a European leader at the bully pulpit. He’s a bit out of shape and fat, but did he ride in the golf court instead of joining European leaders and take a short walk because he just wanted to show them he’s a big man boss? Even North Korea signed the Paris Climate Accord, but the USA didn’t. The only other dissenters were Syria and Nicaragua. The latest nation to sign was Uzbekistan, on April 19 and overall, the total signatories of the agreement, which was the brainchild of President Barack Obama, was 195. Oh, and that might be another reason why the Great Orange Fraud decided to renege — that Obama guy. Donald, why do you hate Barack so much? Why? Because he had a big inaugural crowd?
Like the brat on the playground flipping his middle finger to the other kids, he’s an antisocial and dangerous misfit.
Trump is just evil. Very evil. So sinister, in fact, that even when Trump’s rural Pony Express faithful cannot drink well water because it is so filthy with pollution, they’ll still cheer him on and re-elect him. They might not be able to afford to go to the hospital because the Republicans have yanked their Obamacare, Medicaid, and Medicare and replaced these cards with something about as worthless as a toy in a cereal box, but they’ll still be wearing those stupid red hats with MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! around town and praising Trump as the Second Coming of JEE-ZUZ!
But let’s hold on a coal shovelin’ moment now. When Trump’s blindly devoted base finally realizes that he has been totally impotent in regard to this economic boon that he’s been promising; when they finally see that his isolationist and protectionist policies have injured our own domestic economy beyond repair; and when there is no food left in the cupboard or refrigerator and food stamps, well they just don’t exist any more, well maybe then his job approval rating, which has dipped below 39% on June 2, will cut into his base now, and then, most likely sometime this fall, dip below the 25% mark.
According to Politico’s May 31 article titled, “Poll: Support for Trump impeachment rises“: “Forty-three percent of voters want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings (against Donald Trump), according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll, up from 38 percent last week.”
"`If President Trump was hoping his foreign trip would shift the conversation away from scandals, he may be out of luck,’ said Morning Consult Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. `Over the last week, support for beginning impeachment proceedings among voters rose from 38 percent to 43 percent,’" Politico reports.
But no, the Republican Congress will never allow that, that impeachment thing, and instead, they will continue with their Tea Party-driven policies, in attempts to turn them into realities that will hurt all except about 25% of the top 1% of the wealthiest of Americans. These arrogant Republican legislating buffoons will continue not to take questions from our mainstream media reporters and Trump will continue on his “fake news, fake news, fake news” shtick, and these Republican legislatures will so infuriate the American general populace that there is no way in hell we will see a Red Congress again come the midterm 2018 elections.
Yes, it’s ever so important for the Congress to turn blue in another year and a half or so, so our Dem leaders can finally impeach this lunatic and perhaps even imprison him. And yes, with Tea Bagging tyrants like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell continuing on their Ultra-Conservative railway into hell, these fools almost seem to be asking their constituents to vote Blue come mid-term voting day.
Yes, these Repugs have all the unmitigated gall of doing whatever the hell they want to do — they’re playing the system so as to set up a dictatorship for Donald Trump. Yes, this is a very strong claim but doesn’t it look that way? His whole intent is to become leader of the world. Yes, this megalomaniacal narcissist, with the true gambler’s soul, now wants to grab that big jackpot now that he’s been President for 134 days. I don’t use religious quotes in my journalistic pursuits, usually, but Matthew 16:26 sums it up best: What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
Don’t jump off a tall building or bridge just yet, though. There is hope. For the majority of us, anyhow. This Trumpensteinian self-will-run-riot, bordering on even some twisted hellish fascism, is only temporary, my friends. There are other signs that Trump’s popularity just doesn’t exist, except maybe in The Great Orange Fraud’s own demented and delusional mind. “President Donald Trump fell to his lowest approval rating among Californians since he took office, with just 27 percent of state residents approving of his job performance, according to a poll released Wednesday,” according to a June 1 posting of The Mercury News.
When Trump made it public that he would withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, he said: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris." Nice alliteration, Tweety Bird, but the Mayor of Pittsburgh is very upset about your lame-brained comment. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” that Pittsburgh voted nearly 80% in favor of Hillary Clinton, so Trump did not create a heart swell in his base, but actually, a deep resentment from the other side with his “poetic” political statement about the economics of the Steel City.
This writer laughed outrageously last fall when he saw a Trump Campaign advertisement from a local TV station, broadcast from a former steel town, and could not believe that one of Trump’s economic priorities seemed to be bringing back the integrated steel mill to America’s economic and physical landscapes. At the time, this writer was still trying to understand Trumpensteinian politics and economics. Yes, and I found it ludicrous that Trump actually believed that he could pull off bringing back these smoke- and fire-breathing goliaths, which would cost tens of billions of dollars to build just one such state-of-the-art, modern, integrated still mill. Not to mention where is the iron ore going to come from? How’s about the coal? Hell, where are they going to ship all that slag from? Nebraska? New Jersey? California?
Yes, you Consummate Con-Man, like Mayor Peduto and other Pittsburgh leaders are going to start rebuilding those choking, smoking, integrated steel mills. Yes, we all still believe in the Easter Rabbit and the Christmas Chicken, too, Donald Trump. Oh, and all those recent grads from the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, and Robert Morris College are going to quit their high-paying professional jobs in those beautiful office buildings in downtown, near the Three Rivers, and they’re all going to start shoveling iron ore brought in from overseas barges and coal shipped there from some faraway and destitute land, too.
Overhead in a diner in Cranberry Township, a Pittsburgh environ: “Yeah, Herb, Junior just resigned his position at that law firm downtown to shovel slag into those old furnaces down at the steel mill that just started up. He was doing well as an associate attorney, but he enjoys using a bucket shovel a lot more. He says he likes to work with his hands.”
And where are you going to find investors to rebuild those fire breathing dragons, President Trump, these are very expensive industrial monsters, costlier than even the glitziest and most tawdry of all casinos, after all, a veritable billionaire’s fortune just to create one state-of-the-art, integrated, steel mill? Are you going to require the billionaires in your cabinet swamp to each invest in at least one integrated steel mill or else, face being forced out of your insane political con game? Are you going to lead by example, sell off some of your real estate, casinos, golf courses, and perhaps, even Trump Tower, to finance the building of such a money pit?
Anyhow Peduto told CNN affiliate
WPXI he was "outraged" at Trump's line. "Pittsburgh is the example,"
Peduto said in the CNN article. "We were that city that China is like today where the smoke was so, filled the air so much, that the streetlights would stay on 24 hours."
And yesterday, Mayor Peduto issued an executive order Friday pledging Pittsburgh would follow through on carbon reduction goals. The Order describes the long history of the City’s commitment to climate change initiatives, and lays out more work Pittsburgh will be doing through 2030, according to CNN Politics.
According to Mayor Bill Peduto’s own website, this order will see that Pittsburgh’s officials will be —
- Working with the National Climate Action Agenda and 81 other cities to undertake additional actions to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius target.
- Continue working on 2030 climate objectives, including achieving 100 Percent Renewable Electricity Consumption for Municipal Operations; a citywide Zero Waste Initiative to divert 100 percent of materials from landfills; fifty percent energy consumption reduction city wide; Development of a fossil fuel free fleet.
- The continued commitment to quantifying the impact of the City’s work in reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions and building a more sustainable City, through the completion of the Pittsburgh Climate Action Plan 3.0
- Advancing Carbon Neutrality objectives within the City; adopting energy efficiency standards for buildings; electrifying transportation system with renewable energy sources; supporting weatherization and maintenance of Pittsburgh housing stock to help elderly and vulnerable populations; and protecting and regenerating of our natural environment through land conservation, park preservation and urban agriculture.
“For decades Pittsburgh has been rebuilding its economy based on hopes for our people and our future, not on outdated fantasies about our past. The City and its many partners will continue to do the same, despite the President’s imprudent announcements yesterday,” Mayor Peduto said in the CNN article.
“It's up to cities -- not the federal government -- to ensure carbon emission guidelines are being followed, according to the mayor. `In cities across America, you'll see mayors standing up and saying, we got this, Peduto said on AC 360. When host Anderson Cooper asked him whether he has a message for the President, the Steel City’s mayor said: "What you did was not only bad for the economy of this country, but also weakened America in this world,"
*****
Meantime, Youngstown, Ohio, Mayor John A. McNally said on CNN he was “a little bit confused” why President Donald Trump mentioned Youngstown when explaining his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement,
according to The Vindicator, Youngstown and the Mahoning Valley’s major daily newspaper.
“The U.S. withdrawal from the agreement is not going to create more jobs in the Youngstown area,” McNally said Friday during a four-minute interview.
“It’s not going to create jobs in Mahoning County. So we would certainly urge the President to reconsider his decision. But at the same time we will take whatever help he can provide to us,” McNally said, as quoted in The Vindicator.
Youngstown has dwindled from being a rather large city to a small city, with a population of just under 67,000. Coal’s discovery in nearby southern Ohio Appalachia, West Virginia, and lower western Pennsylvania in the early 19th century made Youngstown a shoe-in for the network of the famed Erie Canal. The city became a melting pot of diversity, and families immigrated from throughout Europe to work in its many humungous integrated steel mills, which all closed during the late 1970’s and early 80’s. At its peak population, Youngstown’s had about 170,000 residents, and with its multitude of environs included, the Greater Youngstown Area was dynamic on the state and even national scale.
Latinos also immigrated here, along with southern Blacks who migrated from a land experiencing very tough economic times. Even American Indians, who partook at the time in a program designed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to get Native peoples off reservations and into cities, where they were provided good-paying heavy industrial jobs, came to Youngstown so the men in the family could work in the city’s steel mills.
But Big Steel’s heydays of the 1930’s and 1940’s dwindled and later decades have proved much less prosperous, with suffering, depravity, and social and economic doom prevailing. “In 1959, the media dubbed Youngstown Steel's Sick City, as the economy slowed and a national steel strike paralyzed the industry. By 1960, after several decades of African American migration into the city, Youngstown had become more segregated than ever. The west side of the city, which was almost entirely white due to redlining, became known as west side white. Meanwhile, disastrous urban renewal and highway programs bulldozed black neighborhoods and created ghettoes. At no time during the urban renewal campaign did African Americans make up more than a quarter of the city's population; yet, 75 percent of those forcibly relocated were black. The growth of ghettoes and neighborhood racial turnover accelerated after the urban riots on Youngstown's South Side during 1968, and on the south and east sides in 1969,” according to “America's Fastest Shrinking City: The Story of Youngstown, Ohio,” as published by The Hampton Institute in a June, 2013. article on its homepage.
“Only a few weeks ago, the U.S. Census Bureau released its findings on cities that have lost the most population since the 2010 decennial census. At the top of the list, the beleaguered City of Youngstown, Ohio, the only city to lose more than two percent of its population in two years. Less than two years before that, the Brookings Institute revealed that out of the top 100 metropolitan areas in the country, Youngstown registered the highest percentage of its citizens living in concentrated poverty. Youngstown, along with cities like Camden, New Jersey and Gary, Indiana, is often the poster child for the horrible ravages of deindustrialization. When traveling to the poorest areas in the country as part of book project, radical journalist Chris Hedges described the city he saw in 2010: "Youngstown, like many postindustrial pockets in America, is a deserted wreck plagued by crime and the attendant psychological and criminal problems that come when communities physically break down," the Hampton Institute article adds.
But let’s see if Trump can rebuild and recreate those gargantuan integrated steel mills which once ran for miles along the Mahoning River, employing tens of thousands of men. The work was hard, tough, dirty, and demanding but people enjoyed what they considered a high quality of life. Of course, just like Pittsburgh, the skies were always gray with pollution and the air smelled like the Sulphur of rotten eggs all the time.
So go ahead, Great Orange One, let’s see you and your rebirth of the Industrial Revolution in the USA. Like everything you’ve done so far, your economic and political backing of this isolationist and protectionist heavy-industrial economic backbone make about as much sense as a Monty Python skit. But that’s you, Donald Trump, and that’s why your supporters love you so much and as for the rest of us, well just look around at all that “fake news” you constantly are barking about.