It's the 75 Year Anniversary of McCarthyism

A few weeks ago there was a fighting strategy unleashed by the new administration in Washington (the "bro-li-garchy," as Brooke Harrington calls them), and this has been effective. This strategy is to claim that anything that the administration wants to eliminate is a criminal enterprise.

As asked on the Feb. 8 Political Scene podcast, by columnist Susan Glasser: "How can you have a rational policy discussion when this is the opening gambit?"

Senator Joseph McCarthy, with help from then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, used this same strategy in the 1950's to demonize government employees, figures from the entertainment industry, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists. This chapter in U.S. history ("McCarthyism") began on February 9, 1950 — seventy-five years ago, today — at a Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia. McCarthy waved a piece of paper in the air, which he claimed contained a list of communists working for the State Department.

Four years later, on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute."

Will it take that long to push back the Broligarchy?

We know the Trump administration is in the process of suspending the funding and support that the Biden administration provided to clean energy and to green businesses. We know that Elon Musk's view of climate change and what effective action looks like does not extend to environmentalism.

Let's Get Specific

With the story propagated that they were "a criminal organization," USAid saw its funding frozen and its programming suspended this last week. USAid, with the CDC, had been fighting an outbreak of the Marburg virus in Rwanda.

Record of that effort has been expunged from the USAid website, a disturbing development. But not as disturbing as the Marburg virus itself. Marburg haemorrhagic fever is a severe, often fatal illness in humans. The average MVD case fatality rate is around 50%.

Tactically, as well as to save lives, it's worth asking: How will Americans respond if they find out that Elon Musk, as part of the newly-formed DOGE task force, ended our efforts to eliminate the Marburg virus?

I am drawing a line from this reckless program suspension to the Trump administration's gutting of programs intended to address climate change and environmental impacts. Grants through the Inflation Reduction Act to multiple sectors of the Green Economy will not be seen again during Trump's time in Washington.

It may seem a rhetorical leap to compare the climate crisis to a global pandemic. Is it?

One of the government agencies under attack at the moment is the National Institute of Health. Oddly, coincidentally, I did not know this when I started my article, but they made exactly this analogy — from pandemic to climate crisis — in a July 2022 article. At the moment it is still accessible on the NIH website:

The repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change – two major current global crises – are far-reaching, the parallels between the two are striking, and their influence on one another are significant. Based on the wealth of evidence that has emerged from the scientific literature during the first two years of the pandemic, this study argues that these two global crises require holistic multisectoral mitigation strategies. Despite being different in nature, neither crisis can be effectively mitigated without considering their interdependencies.

As of January 20, 2025, there is no hand on the tiller, environmentally, that might steer us to calmer waters and to thriving ecosystems. The impacts we are looking at in coming decades from Climate Change are staggering if we choose to ignore what is asked of us, and especially if the movement to discredit climate change gains traction.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us many climate risks are more severe than previously believed, especially as regards damage from storms, heatwaves and droughts.

And worst-case climate scenarios are the ones we tend to look away from, just as we don't really want to contemplate what will happen if Marburg finds its way onto an airplane and lands in America, where we are in the process of defunding and discrediting the CDC.

The Living Planet Index (LPI) report on freshwater migratory fishes (May, 2024) reveals a staggering 81% collapse in monitored population sizes on average between 1970 to 2020, including catastrophic declines of 91% in Latin America and the Caribbean and 75% in Europe. Marine species populations declined 36 per cent during this period. Burning fossil fuels will be privileged rather than phased out.

On this issue, government needs to step up, not to be walked back. We use federal funds to help America pivot toward new ways of producing power for the grid, and also to develop new ways to feed the planet. Small business loans and grants from the Employment Development Department help launch new businesses.

NOAA is an example of a Federal Agency that not only helps us with accurate weather forecasts, but loans research vessels to Blue Tech startups, and has been making loans to Accelerators to boost the Blue Economy.

The Blue Economy Wins

While we wait to see where funding cuts will next occur, and what propaganda will next be unleashed, there are rays of sunshine. The Blue Economy has outstripped US economic growth, overall, in recent years. The growth of solar, wind, and new battery technology reveal these to be lucrative and revenue-producing, as well as of service to a cleaner, more sustainable planetary future.

Can an administration that claims to be all about jobs and the economy afford to fight prosperity and burgeoning lines of business? We will see.

#technology, #entrepreneurship, #planet