How Many Billions will the Koch Brother’s Home State Cost Taxpayers While the Oil Billionaires Wreak Havoc on the Climate?

Devastation of Moore, Oklahoma

The total devastation of Moore, Oklahoma, the suburb of Oklahoma City, begins the spring and summer tornado season.  Every year, the super storms grow larger, more violent, and more frequent. With each and every occurrence mainstream media and the cable news networks go into frenzy mode about the loss of life and property. Politicians make grand statements of support for recovery, while partisan arguments break out over the amount of that support, or if the government should provide support at all. Then a new story breaks, and the latest storm tragedy is forgotten, with the people left to pick through the rubble of their destroyed lives. And no meaningful policy changes geared toward reducing the rising climate temperature that is causing these dangerously escalating super storms are discussed, let alone enacted.

With mainstream media owned by five corporate entities, whose owners are in lock-step with policy-making think tanks such as Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute (funded by Koch Brothers) there has been a growing use of propagandized falsehood to divide Americans and to promote the interests of those who have captured control not only of information but of our political and economic systems. The result of this consolidation of power is the undermining of the common purpose of our culture and community and the destruction of our representative democracy, not to mention the destruction of our water, air, food, and soil and the very climate that sustains us.

There are many very big issues threatening the survival of our country of freedom and opportunity that most of us would like to hand on to our children and grandchildren. But without a doubt, the overarching threat to any future we face nationally and globally is climate change and the destruction of our environment. Science tells us that we really are on the brink of annihilation due to climate change, and yes, that we humans are causing it.[1]  Yet, due to think tank funded deception and falsehoods we, as a nation, remain oblivious; we live in denial. Though the evidence is all around us, and though the rest of the developed world knows this truth and is acting on it, for the masses in America, this factual reality remains obfuscated in propagandized chatter and misinformation. Oklahomans are encouraged to pride themselves on being ‘strong and resilient.’ They are programmed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and rebuild—rebuild in the same tornado corridor that has experienced five such storms in fourteen years! They are duped into voting for Congressional representation that is paid off by the oil/carbon industry lobby to reject the scientific facts of climate change that just destroyed everything they had.

With all of the documented and fact-based evidence, one asks, “how can this be?” The answer is complex, and yet, simple. The patriarchal power elite raking in astounding profits by extraction, exploitation, and poisoning without accountability have a pseudo-scientist or two on their payroll to counter with false talking points those 99.99999 percent of scientists who are in agreement on how close to the climate cliff’s edge we are teetering. Corporate owned and controlled media, if they mention it at all, give equal credence to both the .000001 percent of paid prostitutes and the objective body of science, thus have been remarkably successful in diffusing and dissembling the facts—the truth. The result: mankind marches blindly to the precipice, following the pied piper of fossil fuel consumption like frogs who willingly jump into the water, not realizing their destiny is to be the staple in frog-leg stew. Like the frogs, humankind swims about in leisure and comfort because the water is heating slowly.  By the time it’s too hot for comfort, the human (frogs) are too disoriented and disabled to jump out of the pot. As a species, we’re there. We’re adjusting to the unseasonal wildfires eating up our forests, grasslands, and neighborhoods. We’ve begun to accept the massive droughts that wipe out our food supply. When climate change super storms erupt  in volcanic bubbles in the burbling stew, roiling cities and states under cataclysmic floods, snow storms, tornadoes, or hurricanes, our state and federal leaders and mainstream media and cable news networks put 24/7 emphasis on pulling the frogs back to the surface to keep as many from drowning as possible.  But they talk little about turning down the temperature, let alone standing up to the power elite bullies whose government lobbyist fists are controlling the valve.

But the truth: humans, along with the whole of life on Earth, are in the pot and the water is getting hot.