Senator No’s dilemma
Just about everyone knows U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn is known around Washington as “Senator No,” for the times he single-handedly has blocked what he considers wasteful federal spending and legislation funded by borrowing. In the clubby atmosphere of the Senate it’s an awkward roost — except that Coburn doesn’t care a whit about the institution’s you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours expectations.
Things get a little harrier when there’s an issue that attracts attention beyond the Beltway, such as legislation creating a health care package for 9/11 first responders. Coburn was opposed mostly because the spending wasn’t offset and because it bore the aroma of a new entitlement. Supporters easily morphed that position into attacks that Coburn didn’t care about first responders. Eventually, a compromise was worked out, but not before Coburn was portrayed as a heartless villain.
The issue illustrates one of Coburn’s main points about Washington: You can’t cut anything. Yes, we know the bill’s not paid for, it was said. But the first responders are sooo deserving. Guess what: The same can be said of just about every Washington program. Each has a deserving constituency. No one’s more consistent than Sen. Coburn in their opposition to that way of thinking. If it occasionally lands him in hot water from a PR standpoint, so be it. He doesn’t care much about PR, either.
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That, of course, would be the same Sen. Tom Coburn who voted for the 800 billion dollar bailout of Wall Street (TARP) that was unpaid for as proposed by George W. Bush but voted against medical help for 9/11 responders.
Just say “NO” to our Massive War spending.Study up on ecology.Go Green.Humanity’s fate is completely one with the natural world. Our genes and cells – like all other species’ – are part of the larger environment and ultimately the global ecological system – Earth System or Gaia, if you will. Earth is alive and her air, water, land and ocean ecosystems self-regulate this organism like our organs do for us. The human boom of clearing natural ecosystems for “development” – which has only been occurring for a few hundred years, an ecological blink of an eye – is destroying our shared ecosystem home. Unless humanity transitions to a social, political and economic state devoted to global ecological sustainability; our future is apocalyptic ecosystem collapse as Earth becomes uninhabitable.
The Earth system is being destroyed by industrial capitalism’s emphasis upon growth as the measurement of well-being. As always poor people are being given the shaft by the rich. Ecosystems are treated like candies to be gobbled. And the environment is stopping working. As ecosystems collapse, we are reaching or passing the point where carrying capacities (ability to support life) and their lag times are exceeded, and the ecological fabric of being frays to the point where the whole biosphere dies.
Coburn doesn’t care about anyone except the rich.