Family Values

Mike Enzi is the senior senator from Wyoming, a conservative Republican from a red state. How conservative? Enzi supports privatizing Social Security and opposes Medicare expansion. He favors drilling almost everywhere and abhors alternative energy. He loves fossil fuels, which doesn’t hurt in a state that mines 40% of America’s coal and ranks second in overall energy production. Enzi opposes all abortions, supports a border fence, thinks Guantanamo is just fine, and rejects gay marriage. He has a 100% rating from the National Right to Life Committee and an A+ from the NRA. He is also, they say, a nice man for a senator and takes constituent services seriously. A perfect fit for Wyoming, right? Apparently not, says Liz Cheney, who insists Wyoming needs a real conservative in the Senate. So she is running against Enzi from the right! It’s not easy to find daylight to the right of Mike Enzi, but it gets really complicated when your sister is married to someone named Heather Poe. Naturally, the Enzi campaign attacked, with a super-PAC-funded ad campaign blasting Cheney as soft on gay marriage, and (surprise!) it worked. A recent poll has Cheney losing by 52 points. So she publicly disavowed her sister’s lifestyle this week, and there are rumors of huge money ready to come into Wyoming on her behalf. The only thing missing from this campaign are issues. But Cheney will let neither that nor her sister stand in the way of her ambition. Is this what our politics have come to?

The Lost Generation

While analysts of last week’s elections focus on the fight for the soul of the Republican Party, they pay little attention to Democratic divisions. Yet, it would be hard to find two winners more different than Bill de Blasio, mayor-elect of New York, and Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s next governor. Pundits hold their noses when discussing McAuliffe, a smarmy backroom dealmaker who outspent his Republican opponent by $15 million. De Blasio is an unabashed liberal who makes no apologies for his support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and whose campaign focused less on the middle class than on the forgotten poor. McAuliffe’s first post-electoral act was to call up Republicans – to reach across the aisle. De Blasio plans to tax the richest New Yorkers to provide universal pre-school education. Yet only 4% of Virginia’s Republicans voted for McAuliffe, whereas, the Daily News noted, de Blasio “captured the majority of hearts and minds in New York, winning virtually every kind of resident – blacks, whites, rich, poor, Jews, Christians – in his sweeping victory.”

Both candidates won over 90% of the black vote, which is now critical to the Democratic Party. But centrist Democrats aren’t addressing the critical issue for the black community: the millions of young men, particularly in America’s big and troubled cities, who have dropped out of the system. They have become invisible to us, except as symbols of society’s “takers”. De Blasio seems intent on reaching them – and in doing so recapturing the soul of the Democratic Party.

Losers Win

As I read the smug headlines about “The Republican Collapse” and “The Republican Surrender”, I keep asking: why can’t you see that yesterday’s big winner was the Tea Party? How can that be? Didn’t they lose by 2-1 in the House and 4.5-1 in the Senate?

Yes, but they emerged from the disaster they themselves created with their “principles” unsullied and their standing in their districts enhanced. Moreover, they didn’t have to take the blame for – or even cope with – the consequences of a government default. They got to have their cake and eat it too. Preferring posturing to governing, they are the heroes of talk radio and the billionaires who bankroll the hard right. And with the sequester cuts intact, they established the new baseline for fiscal debate.

Like all absolutist movements – from Oliver Cromwell to Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler to Mao to Khomeini – Tea Party Republicans are now turning on their own, seeking to purge all traces of moderation from the party. And thanks to the roll call vote in both houses, they have a hit list in their hands. Having been bailed out by their colleagues, they now savage them.

“The surrender caucus is the whiner caucus,” Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) said of his colleagues who made the difficult choices – and who in his view are nothing more than spineless traitors. “It’s pretty hard when [Boehner] has a circle of 20 people that step up every day and say, ‘Can we surrender today, Mr. Speaker?’”

A Dark Tan in an Empty Suit

In a country where the people govern, the people stand helplessly by as those who govern in their name drive their country off a cliff. Yesterday the House Republican caucus opened its meeting by singing “Amazing Grace”. That was the high point for the band of self-congratulatory know-nothings who call themselves the Tea Party Caucus. We knew all three verses, Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said. “Isn’t that impressive?” Adding his bass voice to the chorus was John Boehner, the most inept Speaker in history, rivaled only by James Orr (1857-9), the South Carolina Democrat who used his post to promote slavery, support secession and open the way to Civil War.

Some express pity for Boehner, sympathizing with the difficulty of “herding cats” and trying to placate the hardline reactionaries in his party. And it’s clear that many Republicans are hiding behind the Speaker because they fear, above all, a primary challenge from their party’s fanatic fringe. This isn’t about principle; this is politics, pure, simple and in-your-face.

As Speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency, Boehner’s role is to lead his colleagues, not pander to them. “We’re trying to find a way forward in a bipartisan way that would continue to provide fairness to the American people under Obamacare,” he said yesterday, a statement both utterly meaningless and totally dishonest, since the ransom his caucus sought when it kidnapped the country was the destruction of Obamacare.

Why do I keep thinking of the last throes of the Weimar Republic?

One Good Gig

I may have mentioned on these pages that I ran for Congress in 1996. My opponent had spent 24 years in the Pennsylvania legislature, where the pay is good and the benefits are even better. I’ll pass over his dreadful politics, other than to say that he doesn’t much like government and he can’t stand the federal government. So he promised the voters he would serve 10 years in Congress and then come home. Seventeen years later he’s still in Washington, rising enthusiastically to every roll call to shut the government down. Government, he says, is bad for us. But it has certainly been good for him. Pennsylvania’s legislative salaries rank fourth in the country, exceeding 150% of the state’s median household income. And that’s just the beginning, what with per diems, allowances, lobbyists’ nightly parties, and of course the most comprehensive health care our money can buy. The legislators get it for life, along with their defined-benefit pensions, which the private sector has long considered unaffordable. These he brought to Washington where he found life even better – and unaffected by the recession, which he blames on . . . government.

Our mythology tells us that public service is a sacrifice made on behalf of the republic. But this is by far the best job he could ever get, and he has held it for 41 years. He is not alone (Ted Cruz spent one year in the private sector). We have created a professional class of government haters who live off the government.

The GOPs Must Be Crazy

Yesterday, John Boehner announced that the 2012 federal election will be held (again) next week. Still unable to distinguish between thinking they should have won last November and actually losing by 3.5 million votes – and buoyed by Obama’s poll numbers, which are falling nearly as fast as their own – House Republicans apparently believe they deserve a do-over. So in exchange for supporting a temporary increase in the debt ceiling to prevent America from defaulting on its current obligations and spurring a global economic crisis, they are demanding the immediate construction of the Keystone pipeline, increased energy drilling both offshore and on federal lands, an end to EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and coal production, Medicare cuts, and a delay to Obamacare (which they have voted 43 times in vain to defund). Having previously cut food stamps and extended the Bush tax inequities, Boehner has now produced a list of proposals that brought people like me to the polls last fall. And we won. Didn’t we?

“That’s why we’re paid the big bucks – right? – to figure these problems out,” said Blake Farenthold, an overfed Texas congressman who abhors food stamps, loves his health benefits and remains skeptical about the “legitimacy” of Obama’s presidency. Actually, Congressman, that’s why we have elections. In the meantime, this doesn’t seem like a very good time to shut down the government.

In other news, Ted Cruz voted in favor of the motion he had spent 21 hours trashing, which then passed the Senate, 100-0.

Go figure.

Big Money

I long believed that the two-party system was the backbone of America’s political stability because it pushed each party to seek coalitions rather than ideological purity. In times of national trauma, those coalitions fractured, as before the Civil War, or one party assembled an unbeatable coalition, as in the Great Depression. We are now in a time when the Republican demand for purity threatens the government, and the two-party system seems unable to cope with it. One reason is money. Legislators are beholden to those who have it, and the Supreme Court ended decades of efforts to regulate it with its abysmal 5-4 decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. “It’s a bad decision,” a friend who knows it well told me. “It denies the legislative process the ability to treat corporations and labor unions differently from individuals. It’s a raw case of the court’s exercise of political power.” But the court is not going to reverse itself, and there isn’t much stomach for reform among legislators who depend on the current system.

What can be done to break the closed loop of money and politics? One step is to make politics local again: Encourage unaffiliated candidates to run, reform ballot-access laws, curb gerrymandering. These are small things, but they might lead people to challenge the monopoly of the two-party system – which may be the only way to rescue our electoral process from the grasp of big money. We’d better hurry. The Koch Brothers are already working that territory hard.

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow me We are the stuffed me Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! T. S. Eliot

• Yesterday the Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted to cut $40 billion from food stamps and to kick 3.8 million people out of the program. This, in a nation with 46.5 million people in poverty.
• That same majority is bent on shutting down the government at a time when the long-sputtering economy is finally gathering steam.
• It is goading its wretched leadership to default on the national debt when over 11 million people remain unemployed and we are seeking negotiations with Syria and Iran.
• It has voted 41 times to defund Obamacare, treating it as a partisan bill, rather than the law of the land, passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that will ultimately insure 48 million people currently without insurance.
• It is eating its own young. The nation’s ten poorest states – Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma – have 44 Republicans in Congress and only 10 Democrats. In Mississippi, the country's poorest state, 40% of all children receive food stamps.
• It is destroying the safety net, which is the glue that holds communities together.
• It is unraveling the social contract, which is the foundation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that these “patriots” claim to revere.
• It is the meanest collection of bullies and hypocrites that have ever claimed to represent America.

Sayonara, Larry Summers

A friend who worked with Larry Summers once told me that he is not as smart as he thinks he is. To which I replied, how could he be? Thankfully, he was smart enough last Sunday to remove himself from consideration for chair of the Federal Reserve, a move that delighted the stock market, liberal senators and me. Summers has an impressive pedigree (both parents teach economics at Penn and two uncles, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, have Nobel Prizes in economics) and resume (World Bank Chief Economist, Treasury Secretary, Director of the National Economic Council, President of Harvard). Yet his career has been like the Peter Principle (in which people “rise to their level of incompetence”) on steroids. He has been wrong on almost every major issue he has touched. He advocated massive deregulation of the banking industry and vigorously opposed any oversight of derivatives. These policies, combined with the Bush doctrine of massive tax cuts for the rich and off-the-books military invasions, produced the worst financial disaster since 1929. Less well known is Summers’ hostility toward environmental regulations, especially for greenhouse gases, because of their perceived adverse impact on growth. Summers boasts that his policies pushed America into the 21^st century, but in a nation where 95% of all recent income gains have gone to 1% of the population, where income disparities are greater than they have been since the Gilded Age, and where global climate change is still scorned, he has actually helped usher us back into the 19^th.

Warning Shot

Two months have passed since George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin by pleading the Second Amendment. For how else can you interpret the jury’s refusal to convict a man who – in violation of explicit police instructions – pursued an unarmed man in a quiet neighborhood and shot him dead, except as the swagger that comes with carrying a gun? It’s less than a year since Adam Lanza killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a massacre that led to modest regulations in many states. But fear not, the NRA has risen to the challenge, and its efforts to snuff out any remnants of a national conscience are escalating across the country. Last week in Colorado, voters recalled two state senators who had voted in favor of Colorado’s rational gun laws. Similar efforts are under way in all 50 states. It’s easy to castigate the NRA and leave it at that, but the image of gun-toting yahoos doesn’t really describe what happened in Colorado. Democrats and Independents outnumbered Republicans at the polls, and gun-control advocates, led by Michael Bloomberg, outspent the NRA by 5-1. Colorado’s legislative branches, governor and U.S. Senators are all Democrats. The NRA didn’t just galvanize voters around a single issue; it appealed to a broader sense of alienation among people who feel disempowered. That feeling is not limited to two senatorial districts in Colorado, and those recall elections should awaken us all to the need to start listening, not just to ourselves, but to each other.

Three

My granddaughter, Calliope, and I play a game in which she sneaks into my chair and says, “Come sit in your chair, Poppy,” and I wander over, saying how tired I am, and sit down on Callie. And then I jump into the air, shouting my surprise, and she laughs and laughs. Sometimes I introduce a variation . . . I’ll lure her off the chair and then slip in by another way and get to the chair first. Usually, though, we play the same game over and over, because much of her pleasure derives from anticipating the outcome she knows in advance – and while I may tire of the game, she never does, and if I try to end it, she sometimes gets into a fuss. Callie is three. As it happens, the 2010 Congressional class is the same age. That was the year Republicans, many of them astonishingly right-wing, recaptured control of the House, and they have been playing childish games ever since. For example, they have voted to repeal Obamacare 40 times, even though they know the outcome in advance. Under the banner of “No,” they reflexively oppose initiatives, even from their own leadership, that might facilitate better governance, and their real goal seems to be to shut down the government itself. Their age-appropriate behavior, however, is missing a critical component. Calliope is forever asking, “Why?” She is curious, constantly on the edge of wonder, wanting to explore and understand the world. This Congress never seems to ask why? They just vote no.

Public Rights and Private Parts

Those who insist the Supreme Court did not eviscerate the Voting Rights Act last month, when it declared a key part of it unconstitutional, argue that the five-justice majority simply demanded that Congress update the data to reflect the realities of 2013 instead of 1965. They believe the South is being unfairly labeled as racist long after it has changed its ways. Maybe so, but much of what I read makes it clear that if you are poor and black, you do not want to live in the deep South – although it's pretty hard to get out. The latest case in point: a study of upward mobility, released by the Equality-of-Opportunity Project and analyzed by 24/7 Wall Street, found that the 10 cities in which the poor are most severely trapped in poverty are: Memphis, Tenn; Clarksdale, Miss; Greenville, Miss; Columbus, Ga; Auburn, Ala; Wilson, N.C; Montgomery, Ala; Albany, Ga; Spartanburg. S.C; and Atlanta, Ga. All 10 are in the old Confederacy and all have significant African-American populations. Does this prove they violate the Voting Rights Act? No. But it does help us understand why Congress left the old formula intact when it extended the act for 25 years in 2006. The increasingly activist court majority overturned that legislative decision in June. Meanwhile, we learn that Anthony Weiner, under the sobriquet of Carlos Danger, continued to text photos of his crotch to unsuspecting women while undergoing therapy for texting photos of his crotch to unsuspecting women. And while he is polling second in New York’s mayoral race, it’s not even fun to make fun of him anymore. He needs help, not attention.

Let Teachers Teach

I spent last week with a group of the hardest-working, most dedicated and most frustrated professionals I have ever met: New Jersey teachers. A measure of their commitment is that they voluntarily participated in a course that met for 12 hours a day in Union, N.J., where the temperature hit 105 on Thursday. They came because they loved learning and they loved kids. And they were frustrated because they believed that the state’s sole focus on improving test scores had elevated political and bureaucratic demands over educating students. New Jersey is not Afghanistan, where the per-student expenditure is $70 (versus $20,000) and girls are threatened with murder. But its importance to both our individual and collective futures cannot be overstated, and the 16 teachers with whom I spent last week have dedicated their lives to teaching children. They are professionals who feel unable to do the work they were trained to do because politicians and bureaucrats decided they knew how to do it better.

In his essay, “What is Education For?”, David Orr urges us to look at the world and rethink our ideas of education, including:

• Its goal is not mastery of subject matter, but of one's person.
• Knowledge carries the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.
• We cannot say we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities.

What I learned last week is that the best way to have children learn is to let teachers teach.

Health Attack

Before the increasingly unglued House Republicans vote – for the 38^th time – to repeal Obamacare, they might look a bit more closely at how Americans have fared under the old system. The Republicans claim that the new law – which, lest we forget, was supported by the American Medical Association, passed by both houses of Congress, signed into law by the president, and approved by the Supreme Court – will (1) bankrupt the country and (2) diminish and “ration” care. So how did we do in the old days? According to a 2010 study of health care and spending by developed countries by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (published by 24/7 Wall Street), the United States spent far more on health care than any other country and achieved worse results than most. We spent over $8,500 per person annually, including $1,000 on drugs, all of which added up to a staggering 17.7% of GDP – figures that put America in a league of its own. And the results? Off-the-charts obesity and a life expectancy that ranks America 9^th from last. And yet the United States remains almost the only developed nation not to provide universal coverage.

Meanwhile, in a further blow to America’s personal and political health, House Republicans unanimously passed a farm bill that (1) abandons food stamps, the 40-year-old program that provides critical nutrition to the nation’s poor, and (2) reaffirms their commitment to corporate welfare by rolling back food safety measures and providing billions to special interests who gleefully [pork] belly up to the public trough.

Note: I will not be posting for a while, as I am teaching a course this week that meets from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Talk with you next week.

Reign of Horror

With his announcement on Monday that he will not seek a fourth term as governor of Texas, Rick Perry signaled an end to 20 consecutive years of rule by two of the most frightful politicians of my lifetime: George W. Bush, who served as governor from Jan. 17, 1995 until he resigned in December 2000 to get ready to be president, and Perry, who succeeded Bush and will finish his third full term in 18 months. Obviously Texans must like these guys, and they’re welcome to them. It’s when they go national that bad things really start to happen. Bush, who was first elected president by a one-vote majority of the Supreme Court – and, Jeffrey Toobin told NPR’s Terry Gross, Sandra Day O’Connor now regrets the vote she cast that December day – spent the next eight years destroying pretty much everything he could get his hands on. He had just returned to Washington from the longest vacation in presidential history when the World Trade Towers went up in flames, and he responded by launching not one, but two, disastrous wars, which together produced 57,000 American casualties (and more than 130,000 civilian deaths), sent the federal deficit into orbit, poisoned the country’s relations with most of the world, created the country’s first private mercenaries since Allan Pinkerton, and sanctioned torture as a legitimate policy of the United States. Perry, whose 2012 presidential candidacy went from front-runner to embarrassment to history in barely five months, thanks largely to his stunning ineptitude, appears poised (sic) to try again. God save us.

The Mommy-and-Daddy State

The philosophical principle called Occam’s razor holds that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. That’s worth noting these days when hyperbole, contorted reasoning and convoluted language have become the coin of our political conversation. Take, for example, the [condensed] response of Heritage Foundation Fellow Ryan Anderson when a Times reporter asked if the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision “isn’t the ultimate conservative ruling because it [leaves] people’s lives to themselves:” “The reason the government is in the marriage business isn’t because it cares about the love lives of consenting adults. Government is in the marriage business because there is a certain type of union – the union between a man and a woman – that can produce new life. Government wants to make sure that new life has a mom and a dad; and upholding the institution of marriage is the least coercive way to ensure that. When this doesn’t happen, that is when we’ve seen government grow – the welfare state grows, crime increases, the prison population rises, child poverty increases, social mobility decreases. So, everything you care about, if you care about limited government and the poor, about liberty and social justice, is better served by a healthy marriage culture.”

If I understand this breathtaking – and unproven – assertion, we need government to enforce a particular view of the most intimate parts of our lives so that all the problems that require government solutions will disappear, and the state, as Engels wrote, will “wither away.” Good-bye, Nanny State. Hello, Mommy-and-Daddy State.

Google and Glenn Beck

As I drove outside our nation’s capital the last two days, I listened to C-Span-radio broadcasts that were at once mind-numbing and fascinating, if that’s possible. The first was a House Intelligence Committee hearing, in which members of both parties expressed support for NSA surveillance activities but fretted over privacy issues. One proposed remedy was to keep the “meta-data” in private hands unless and until the NSA needed specific information, which it would then request from the corporations that had it. Agency chief Keith Alexander said he was open to the idea, subject to “speed in crisis.” In other words, our own officials think it’s wiser to keep the massive amounts of personal information collected on all of us in the hands of Google, Facebook and Amazon.com instead of the government. Equally bizarre was a Tea Party rally on the Capitol steps, in which Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sen. Mike Lee and others spoke fervently about the movement to protect our civil rights from the godless totalitarianism of the Obama administration. Beck drew a straight line from the Tea Party to Martin Luther King, Jr., and he didn’t stop there, likening the protesters to Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist ex-slave whose bronze statue had earlier been unveiled on the Capitol steps.

I tried to picture Glenn Beck marching from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, just as I tried to imagine myself relieved that lots of information about me is owned and mined, without my consent, by corporate goliaths. I failed on both counts.

O Tempora! O Mores!

In one of America’s odder new political customs, yet another celebrity has blazed a path to a foreign dictator. Building on Denis Rodman’s bizarre February visit to North Korea, where the body-scarred basketball player became the first American to call Kim Jong Un “my friend,” Steven Seagal recently shepherded a congressional delegation, led by Dana Rohrbacher (R, CA), to Russia, where the action film star introduced the group to his friends, Vladimir Putin and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov The delegation, which was seeking clues to the Boston Marathon bombing, unearthed no new Obama scandal. Unfortunately, they were unable to carry their investigation into Chechnya, where Kadyrov rules with an iron (many say bloody) fist. Congressional rules prohibited them from flying on Seagal’s plane. (I am not making this up.)

At first blush, Rohrbacher and Seagal seem strange bedfellows. The actor is an environmentalist and animal-rights activist, whereas Rohrbacher received a 5% approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters. But Rohrbacher’s rationalization for Putin’s and Kadyrov’s crackdowns on dissent could have come straight from the mouth of a Seagal character: “yeah, guess what, there are people who overstep the bounds of legality.”

Rohrbacher was especially complimentary about the actor as tour guide compared to the American Embassy, which had arranged all his previous junkets. "You know what we got?” he asked. “We got the State Department controlling all the information that we heard. You think that's good for democracy? No way!"

The delegation also included an unusually quiet Michele Bachmann.

Tax Abuse

Never mind how, but a 2013 Membership Appeal of the Tea Party Patriots has found its way into my hands. The appeal asks for money and then outlines how it will use it:

1. Keep Obama and the Liberal Democrats from bankrupting the country, shackling our liberties and turning America into a second-rate state.
2. Keep John Boehner and the Republican leadership from betraying the party’s core principles.
3. Get legislation that will reduce spending and the debt, unshackle free markets and preserve liberty.

To accomplish this the Patriots are launching:

•  “A massive 2013 Congressional Accountability Project” to keep those folks in line.
• “A state-by-state ground game” to develop coalitions and activate voters.
• “A media Boot Camp” for party candidates and elected officials.
• “The public advancement of serious legislation”.
• “A nationwide TV and radio campaign”.

This is how democracy works: you advance your creepy program and I counter with mine. The problem with this letter is its stamp. It says “Nonprofit org”, which means it comes from one of those 501(c)(4) organizations that have gotten the IRS publicly toasted of late. Would you think the organization that sent this operates “exclusively for the promotion of social welfare”, as the law requires? Then why would an IRS employee? These Patriots are violating the spirit and the letter of the law, while taking advantage of the government they wish to dismantle.

PS The Patriots have launched a $500,000 campaign on Mark Levin’s radio show. If you've never listened to Mark, you should. He'll turn your stomach.

Theorem of Toxic Attraction

I'd like to introduce my Theorem of Toxic Attraction (ToTA), which states that toxic people, toxic activities and toxic places have an elective affinity that intensifies the damage they do. It’s not my entire theory for the existence of evil in the world, but it’s a start. Take, for example, the recent New York Times story headlined “A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste is Rising Over Detroit”, which describes a three-story pile of petroleum coke covering an entire city block along the Detroit River. When people talk about dirty tar sands oil, they mean petroleum coke, a waste byproduct the EPA no longer permits to be burned in the United States. Who owns the growing toxic black pile along the Detroit River? Koch Carbon, a company controlled by Charles and David Koch.

Cigarettes have been dubbed the perfect product: they cost a penny to make, they sell for a dollar, and they’re addictive. They also cause cancer. Think of this pile of cheap toxic waste as a cigarette millions will soon have to smoke. “It is,” said an expert, “the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth.”

So you have the Koch brothers pushing for the Keystone XL pipeline so that more cheap waste can be produced to sell at a huge profit to China and Mexico to burn as cheap fuel. And you have 501(c)(4) non-profits spending hundreds of millions of dollars given by anonymous donors to buy politicians who will get the government regulators off their backs.

Something stinks.