Even Moloch wasn’t so greedy for death
Want to see an example of why partisan politics is a poor approach when it comes to understanding how power in America works? Look no farther than Donald Trump’s first-day executive order targeting California’s already decimated river ecosystems. In it, he directs the federal government — which controls a big part of California’s massive terraforming-water system with multiple giant dams and thousands of miles of concrete aqueducts and pumping stations — to plunder as much water from rivers as possible without any care for what it does to the fish that even barely now cling on for survival. Trump wants this water to be sent to the suburbs and mega-farms in the southern half of California. Like California’s billionaire farmers have for several decades, he blames “radical environmentalism” for it. It’s “radical” to want your rivers to not be a lifeless paved-over concrete canal.
The dirty secret in California is that most of its rivers are lifeless already. They’re so broken up and there is so little water in them that they can’t sustain complex aquatic life…and the larger ecosystems that depend on them have long ago collapsed. California, like many places, has been in the grips of a mass extinction.
The biggest beneficiaries of this order are a small clique of powerful farmers that dominate the Central Valley, the agricultural heartland of California. The most powerful among them are Lynda and Stewart Resnick, who are big Democratic Party donors that bankrolled Kamala Harris’s campaign and the political career of Governor Gavin Newsom…just to name the youngest and most recent pols. California’s Dem establishment has done all it can to destroy CA’s rivers and pump as much water to the Resnicks and billionaire big farmers. Trump is just one-upping them by a small degree, destroying what’s left of California’s natural environment. Funny enough, the lifting of all restrictions on pumping is something the Resnicks have been trying to achieve for more than a decade and, in the past, had enlisted the help of both Republican and California politicians. So…they must be rejoicing now. The fires in LA have brought all sorts of negative attention to their water privatizing. But none of that matters. They still have their water and their…and, thanks to Trump, they’re going to get even more.
I’ve written about this a bit before…and we have a film out that looks at how this terraforming system has built modern California and destroyed one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
A still from Pistachio Wars. Look at these New Deal dam sirens! Come close and they’ll dam up every river you have and kill all natural life so that water can flow to farms and suburbs!
But on a bigger level, this order by Trump shows how much our elites, regardless of where they stand on the woke issue, all still very much believe in the same thing: the world is something to be plundered, to be fed into an industrial machine, ground up, and then spat out on the other side in the form of some sort of consumer item. And it doesn’t matter what this consumer item is as long as it makes someone lots of money.
It’s a death drive society. It can’t stop until everything is dead. Put everything in the wood-chipper. It doesn’t matter what comes out on the other end. Bitcoins, shitcoins, plastic bags, tortured chickens and dairy cows, pistachios, tasteful mansions in the Hollywood Hills that periodically burn — as long as someone can make money on it…hoard it…invest it in another industrial wood-chipper to grind up some more life or maybe invest in a giant machine that covers the entire world with plastic…Why not? That’s the ultimate religion of our day. As long as there is movement, as long as investments are circulating, as long raw life is being destroyed and turned into something inert and toxic and “profitable”…Let’s go!
If you think of our society as organized in terms of a religion rather than an ideology, our modern industrial civilization has a demonic vibe to it. Democracy? Totalitarianism? What? Lol. All that stuff doesn’t matter. We worship at the altar of a god who demands the constant sacrifice of everything that lives. Even Moloch wasn’t so greedy for death.