It's the Aliens!

"The aliens, "joked my daughter, "have hidden Pleasant Valley so they can make it arid and dead. Then humans won't live there." The sign to Pleasant Valley directed to two other cities, but it went unmentioned.

"Are they behind global warming," I asked?

It's as good an explanation as any for why the corporate owners and billionaires fund disinformation campaigns against the existence of climate change and its human causes.

Yes, disinformation campaigns. Fox News and on-the-one-side, on-the-other-side remainder of the brain-dead media, are spreading false information, knowingly, about global climate change and its causes. By acting as if as many knowledgeable people deny its existence as those who warn against it, the US media is, in effect, providing false information. That's why nearly a majority of Americans believe climate change is an elitist conspiracy by corrupt liberal scientists, and that its existence and causes haven't been sufficiently proven. So, no action is necessary.

But since most of the real elite, the billionaires, etc., are well-educated and well-informed, they probably know that climate change is not only happening but accelerating. So, why do they spend so much money to persuade others that it's not? Maybe they really are aliens. After all, unless they are aliens, why would they think they, or their children and grandchildren would be immune to the huge environmental damage their profits promote?

"Aliens," my daughter offered, "will be better off when climate change drives off the humans."

"Is Mitt Romney an alien?"

"Only half," she told me. "The other half is a robot."

"I always thought Romney was a 'bot."

Perhaps all the aliens are billionaires and most billionaires and multimillionaires are aliens. That would explain why they appear to have so little empathy for people poorer than they. While raising their taxes would hurt them far less than current taxes or program cuts affect those with significantly less income, still, the right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers and the Adelsons are actively campaigning, through millions of dollars, to get their taxes reduced, and to cut programs benefiting poor people.

Seriously, there appears to be a disconnect between these people who are willing to spend hundreds of millions to make millions miserable and any rational thought about what good that will do--for them, or anyone else.

Ideology, and provably false ideas, make these people into aliens, even if they didn't come from outer space.

Some facts: climate change is accelerating, and human causes are to blame, and could be correctable. Lower taxes for the wealthy, and the greater inequality resulting, makes everyone poorer: societies that are more egalitarian grow more rapidly, as in the 1950's US. Extreme class differences a la fifth century Rome lead to spreading poverty and economic stagnation. Finally: austerity creates greater deficits and greater poverty, when an economy is in a recession. Austerity politics drove the Roman imperium into bankruptcy in 476, after centuries of depression.