This isn’t a whoopsie, it’s a crime

The trucks blocking the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario are still in Michigan and Canadian news. Today’s newscasts talked about getting injunctions from a judge and declarations of emergency by various government officials. I also heard of plans to airlift parts from Canadian to American factories. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos, in an article posted today, wrote:

As BBC News reports, officials in the province of Ontario have had enough. A state of emergency has been declared, making blocking critical infrastructure subject to arrest, a fine of up to $100,000, and the possibility of a year in jail. Trucks used to blockade access to bridges, airports, and border crossings can be seized, held, and sold at auction. "There will be consequences, and they will be severe," said Ontario Premier Doug Ford. “To those who have attempted to disrupt our way of life by targeting our lifeline for food, fuel, and goods across our borders, to those trying to force a political agenda through disruption, intimidation, and chaos, my message to you is this: Your right to make a political statement does not outweigh the right of hundreds of thousands of workers to earn their living." The cost of the blockades so far has been estimated at $300 million a day.

The mandates they are protesting have been imposed at the provincial level, not national. Many of them are being lifted, though protesters and their US supporters are pretending otherwise. Sumner also reported that the number of trucks blocking roads is rather small – around a hundred or two, not the “50,000 trucks” breathlessly reported by conservative media. The number of people involved is small. The amount of economic damage they can do is quite large. That’s what makes this scary. Our transportation system, both here and in Canada, focuses on highways. Passengers share routes with freight. A small number of vehicles can shut down a major route. Protesters have long known they can raise the profile of an event by inconveniencing travelers.

But what’s happening with the “convoy” is a particularly 2022-oriented event, one that recognizes the vulnerability of the supply chain and the difficulty of policing such events in an environment where many people are frustrated by the lingering pandemic. It’s also an event that gleefully celebrates the one thing that the right has become so well-versed in over years and decades: hurting people. Thanks to a stream of attention and funding funneled in to those few trucks, they’re able to sustain this action over a long period and to spark copycats in other areas, including the United States. It’s like the highways are a 1,000-mile-long lever with which just a few jackasses can hold the economy hostage. It’s very much like that. ... To generate damage that runs into the millions of dollars an hour, all it takes is a handful of people spread out across the lanes of a busy interstate and moving very slowly. ... In this case, that damage is augmented by a right-wing media that’s making international heroes of those causing disruption, and helping to see that causing damage is a profitable occupation. Where the first $1 million of funds dispersed to those involved in the Canadian protest went isn’t clear, but considering the size of the actual protest, some of those involved are likely getting a much larger payday for protesting than working.

Sumner also talked about a convoy leaving California ready to cause chaos in Washington, DC at the time of the State of the Union address. He also notes that “caravans” are what migrants form on their way to the US and are scary. “Convoys” evoke songs of truckers outsmarting Smokey and are good. Also, Black Lives Matter protesters took to the highways knowing they would be arrested. No sign yet whether the truckers will be. Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

The convoy in Canada is funded by wealthy donors who are relentlessly attacking democracy. It isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon, and its actions aren’t just randomly disrupting a capital and shipping routes. I can’t believe there are people who still don’t get this.

Sumner discussed the nasty guy’s habit of tearing up documents rather than turning them over to the National Archives as required by law. The latest bit of this story is that in some cases the nasty guy flushed torn up documents down a toilet (sometimes clogging it) and in some cases he ate them. Sumner then discussed the way the news media is treating this story compared to the way they treated Hillary Clinton’s emails.

What almost every media outlet seems to be ignoring is that this isn’t a whoopsie, it’s a crime. Every time Donald Trump ripped up a document, that was a crime. Every time he tried to flush one down the sadly not gold White House crapper, that was a crime. Everything he boxed up and carted off to Mar-a-Lago, that was a crime. In the “statement” on Thursday morning—the one where Trump is still raging about Hillary Clinton “acid-washing” her emails—Trump claims that there are “two legal standards, one for Republicans and one for Democrats.” Trump is absolutely right. Both the Department of Justice and the major media treated Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails as if they were major crimes. They greeted even the possibility that she had mishandled a classified document as if it were a disqualifying action. Hillary Clinton would have been president of the United States had not both the FBI and The New York Times spent the last days before the 2016 election hammering the idea that there might—might—be a mishandled email from Clinton on a laptop they had already examined. There wasn’t. But Trump … sure, he shredded documents in violation of the law. They treated that as a laughable habit. ... But hey, it’s not like he actually handled his email according to the instructions from the previous secretary of state, testified about it at length, and cooperated with every possible investigation into how those emails had been handled. Oh, no, he didn’t do anything that heinous.

Since the nasty guy claims he took documents to Mar-a-Lago because they may someday be displayed at his presidential library. Which prompted commenters to debate whether there would be such a library because no one would fund it – knowing most of the money would go straight into the nasty guy’s pockets. Sumner then took the New York Times to task because their staff knew about the nasty guy’s document destruction and didn’t tell its readers. Sumner knows they knew it because one of their writers is putting that detail into a book. Sumner also included a tweet by Matt McDermott what shows several NYT front pages with stories of Clinton’s emails. But the story of the nasty guy destroying documents – that’s on page A15. Laura Clawson of Kos discussed a new Pew Research Center Poll that shows Republican politics is all about white grievance. The poll found that 55% of white Republican agree with the statement that white people face a lot of discrimination. Back in 2015 only 38% agreed. A Cato Institute researcher found that 73% of nasty guy supporters believe that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks. This at a time when black households have just 12.7% of the wealth of white households.

What do you even say to that? To that deep a level of victim mentality, in which the mere prospect of seeing centuries of political and economic and institutional advantage seized through violence be redistributed ever so slightly leads to the conviction that you, a member of the group that has been and remains on top, are being discriminated against? Barack Obama was elected president, and then he was reelected president, and white Republicans just could not take it. And then here came Donald Trump to tell them that they were right to feel that way, that even a small handful of Black people succeeding was a significant danger to all white people, and Republicans have run with that. ... In their focus on education, older Republicans are trying to recreate their own sense of grievance in another generation of white people. If they succeed at completely centering white people in U.S. history, erasing Black people and Indigenous people and other people of color from that history and simultaneously denying the nation’s voluminous history of violent racism, then when that next generation, the kids who are being taught this literally whitewashed history, is confronted with reality, they too will feel that they are losing, that something that is theirs is being stolen.

Commenter GrafZeppelin127 added:

Never in history have so many people drawn so much pleasure and satisfaction from feeling victimized without actually being victimized.

That discrimination they’re feeling is society frowning at them for discriminating against others. The nasty guy said that if he regained the White House he would pardon the participants of the January 6th Capitol attack. That has caused a split within the Republican Party with Sen. Lindsay Graham, of all people, saying the idea is inappropriate. Politico/Morning Consult did a poll and 68% of registered voters say they do not believe attackers should be pardoned. Strong nasty guy supporters like the idea of pardons. A strong majority of the rest of the country do not. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late light commentary.

According to a new book, the White House engineer—who's kind of like the plumber, I guess—would frequently be called in to unclog the president's toilet because he had a habit of flushing papers down it. What do you think about the fact that Trump had to come out and, in writing, deny he clogged up the toilet in the White House? It's a conversation you have with your three-year-old. —Jimmy Kimmel Turns out Trump couldn't drain the swamp because the pipes were clogged with classified documents. —Trevor Noah Canada's police are fining the truckers for "excessive honking," and yet Canada geese continue their lawless mayhem. —Stephen Colbert

Rikki Held is one of sixteen youth suing the state of Montana saying the state government has violated her constitutional right to a “healthful environment.” Held suffered heat exhaustion and headaches from wildfires while working on the family ranch. One of the claims is that Montana’s fossil fuel consumption wreaks havoc on public trust resources that are explicitly protected. Some parts of the case were dismissed last August. The rest will be in court about a year from now. This case is the first. Others have already been filed and are waiting to see how this one turns out. The January issue of The Hightower Lowdown, written by Jim Hightower discusses the Rights of Nature.

It’s a simple idea: Rather than continuing to rely on the corporate- controlled, business-as-usual model of environmental regulation, why not grant self-protective rights of law to our invaluable natural systems?

One big change this idea would cause is to shift the debate from whether humans are harmed by an action to whether the ecosystem – the animals, fish, and other organisms – is harmed. An ecosystem, with lawyers arguing on their behalf, could sue for its own preservation. Of course, as this idea is spreading the corporate world is screeching. Rights belong to people, they say, not to artifacts within an environment. Giving rights to the land means no farming, no new roads or buildings, no cutting grass, or swatting mosquitoes. This from the same people who have created the grand fiction that corporations are people and have the rights of people.

The Rights of Nature movement is ascending now specifically because the existing system–which regularly allows corporate lobbyists, politicians, and big donors to undermine, evade, and mock environmental laws and regs–simply doesn’t work.

This idea that an ecosystem has rights – and that we humans are a part of it – has been practiced by indigenous communities for a long time. And they are also taking matters to courts. Three years ago the Objibwe of Minnesota filed a case naming wild rice as a plaintiff. Wild rice is grown in Objibwe territorial waters, but that water is affected by industry and contaminants in water on adjacent lands. An ecosystem is not bound by property lines. In addition to indigenous people, three dozen US communities have enacted Rights of Nature provisions. Tamaqua Pennsylvania did it to end toxic dumping that had caused an outbreak of cancer. These are communities not waiting for politicians. Infrastructure Porn is a cute name for a Twitter account. What little Twitter allowed me to see showed photos of complex highway interchanges and railroad bridges. They also show cool ideas, such as this one:

Solar panels being installed over canals in India. It prevents water evaporation, doesn't use extra land and keeps solar panels cooler.

As I’ve mentioned before another good place to put solar panels is over parking lots of big box stores and sports stadiums. This has been done at the Lincoln Financial Field parking lot in Philadelphia where the panels keep the sun, rain, and snow off cars and is prime territory for tailgate parties.