Thom Hartmann: Trump’s destruction of America started with Ronald Reagan // Tom Engelhardt: Our ‘firenado’ of a president

By Dilip - Sunday, September 20, 2020

Donald Trump and his billionaire buddies are letting America die. The billionaires who make their money from fossil fuels have bought off Trump and Republicans so that they're denying climate change while a dozen states in the West burn and the Gulf Coast is repeatedly ravaged by hurricanes. Firefighters are using dogs to identify the remains of homes where people died by the smell of burnt human flesh. The billionaires who make their money screwing American students with almost $2 trillion in student loans bribed politicians in 2005 to make it illegal to declare bankruptcy on those loans. Across America, students are experiencing depression, despair, and suicide.

The billionaires who own millions of rental properties across the country are actively ignoring both legal requirements and morality-based requests, depending on the state, to prevent evictions and are today throwing people out of their homes in the middle of a pandemic. The billionaires who own Fox News and some of our largest radio networks are facilitating lies about climate change and the coronavirus, both of which are killing people, while these billionaires live in their protected bubbles. They are also stoking racial violence by repeatedly portraying protesters calling for Black equality under the law as terrorists….

https://www.salon.com/2020/09/19/trumps-destruction-of-america-started-with-ronald-reagan_partner/

Tom Engelhardt: Our ‘firenado’ of a president

There’s no question that, at the beck and call of the fossil-fuel industry, Donald Trump and his demonic crew have worked without qualms or remorse to ensure that this would be a fiery and furious America. Freeing that industry of restrictions of every sort, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, opening up yet more areas for oil drilling, wiping out environmental safeguards, and even (at the very moment when the West was burning) appointing a climate-science denier to a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the president and his crew proved themselves to be pyromaniacs of the first order.

Of course, the heating of this planet has been intensifying for decades now. (Don’t forget, for instance, that Barack Obama presided over a U.S. fracking boom that left people referring to us as “Saudi America.”) Still, this president and his top officials have put remarkable energy (so to speak) into releasing yet more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. And here’s the strange thing: they made it deep into the present apocalyptic moment in the West without — Greta Thunberg and climate change protesters aside — being held faintly accountable for their urge to fuel the greatest danger humanity faces other than nuclear weapons. In fact, as is increasingly obvious from the torching of the West, what we’re beginning to experience is a slow-motion version of the nuclear apocalypse that Trump once threatened to loose on North Korea…

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/our-firenado-of-a-president/

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