You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 123 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
How things have always been is killing the planet
This week’s topic is: PAY TO PLAY
Pay-to-Play is the American way
The rich pay almost nothing in taxes1, get better medical care2, have cleaner environments3, buy their way out of most problems, live longer, carve up the planet as they see fit4, lie and cheat and steal and are not stopped or punished, and literally get away with murder.5
But this is corruption! How do they not get caught?
They don’t “get caught” because the rich own the government; they won at Monopoly and own you all. Want access? You have to buy it. Want a business opened? You better pay off the right people. Want power? You better find rich sponsors. San Francisco is a pay-to-play city, and it’s only gotten worse.6, 7, 8, 9 This is the status quo.
And the status quo is killing the planet
The system described above, this oligarchy of the rich and ruthless not only degrades, sickens, traumatizes, trivializes, and brutalizes everything and everyone it can, this system is the cause of climate chaos10 and is plunging us into a mass extinction event.11
Who’s really paying for the playing you’re doing?
Not the rich. They aren’t using their own money, they’re stealing from the future. The future of mammals, amphibians, forests, the cryosphere, humans, the ocean — you name it, it’s in danger. The future of all life on this planet is up in the air because you’re doing the bidding of the rich who are paying you in the blood of the children. Unfortunately, repayment with interest has come due.
What does it take for you to stop enabling this ecocidal status quo?
Dear Editor,
Ongoing corruption scandals make it clear that San Francisco government is for the rich and connected. But who is footing the bill for this graft and corruption? Our children. Every rich developer who builds downtown in the flood zones of coming sea level rise is shoving off the costs of his scam onto the next generation, according to multiple state agencies. Every “compromise” allowing more CO2 to be pumped into the atmosphere is shortening our children’s lives, according to multiple articles from the New England Journal of Medicine. Every lawsuit where SF attacks the planet’s health for political gain damages the ecosystems our children need to survive, according to multiple environmental groups. Why are SF’s city leaders stealing from our children? Why are they accruing bad debt they never intend to pay off? Why are we letting them?
Don’t you understand yet?
We’re at “code red for humanity,12” or as the Daily Beast put it so elegantly, “UN Climate Experts to the World: We’re Already Fucked.”13 Your children are pleading for you to act.14
FOOTNOTES
1. Simon Jack. “US super-rich ‘pay almost no income tax’”. BBC. 9 June 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57383869.
2. Chris Tomlinson. “Wealthy get more health care than other Americans”. Houston Chronicle. 12 July 2016. https://pnhp.org/news/wealthy-get-more-health-care-than-other-americans/.
3. “Disparities in the Impact of Air Pollution”. American Lung Association. Accessed 31 August 2021. https://www.lung.org/clean-air/outdoors/who-is-at-risk/disparities.
4. Roger Harrabin. “Climate change: The rich are to blame, international study finds”. BBC. 16 March 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51906530. And reread the Strike letters on red zoning, trees, albedo, and environmental justice.
5. Jordana Weiss. “Affluenza: 10 Rich People Who Got Away With Horrible Crimes”. Flithy Rich. 15 January 2016. https://filthyrich.es/affluenza-10-rich-people-who-got-away-with-horrible-crimes/.
6. Joe Eskenazi. “The state of San Francisco corruption”. Mission Local. 15 March 2021. https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/san-francisco-corruption/.
7. Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez. “Corrupt SF Official Used Nonprofits to Funnel ‘Pay to Play’ Cash. KQED. 24 September 2020. https://www.kqed.org/news/11839531/report-corrupt-sf-official-directed-nonprofit-to-pay-60k-to-organizations-under-fbi-investigation.
8. Nicholas Iovino. “San Francisco Trash Collector Will Pay $100M for Pay-to-Play Overcharges”. Courthouse News Service. 4 March 2021. https://www.courthousenews.com/san-francisco-trash-collector-will-pay-100m-for-pay-to-play-overcharges/.
9. Monica Redwood. “Why San Francisco’s city government is so dysfunctional”. The Economist. 28 August 2021. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/08/28/why-san-franciscos-city-government-is-so-dysfunctional.
10. Benjamin Fong. “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid”. New York Times. 20 November 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/opinion/climate-capitalism-crisis.html.
11. Matthew Rozsa. “Humans are causing mass extinction at a rate not seen since the last major extinction event”. Salon. 1 June 2021. https://www.salon.com/2021/06/01/humans-destroying-life-on-earth-faster-than-the-extinction-event-that-killed-off-dinosaurs/.
12. UN Secretary-General António Guterres on the contents of the 6th IPCC Report.
13. Barbie Latza Nadeau. “UN Climate Experts to the World: We’re Already Fucked”. Daily Beast. 9 August 2021. https://www.thedailybeast.com/un-climate-experts-to-the-world-were-already-fucked.
14. David Wallace-Wells. “It’s Greta’s World But it’s still burning. The extraordinary rise of a 16-year-old, and her Hail Mary climate movement.” New York Magazine. 17 September 2019. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/greta-thunberg-climate-change-movement.html.