The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

That’s horse——. This is a frontal assault on chronic inequality. Folks are trying to hold climate policy hostage to single-payer health care and jobs guarantees and slavery reparations and police reform and other forms of social policy while our planet collapses. It’s all backward. They’re trying to put Band-Aids on a gunshot wound before we go in and get the bullet out. That’s the climate crisis. Folks keep touting these reparations proposals that are deficit-financed conscience-laundering for affluent white liberals, and it pisses me off when those same people scoff at the tax-and-dividend plan. We are literally taking money from rich polluters and putting it in the pockets of working people as a foundational piece of a reparative project. It doesn’t just offer the fiction of “Hey, here’s a few bucks so you can build generational wealth, even though yours is the last generation to enjoy a functioning atmosphere.” That would be a funny joke by white people, I guess.