Cognitive Dissonance At NYT

How can the Times run this and this at the same time? Temperatures are higher everywhere by larger deltas than most climate models have predicted and yet we must double down on the exact policies and prescriptions that have caused this incipient disaster. Something has to change and something big, not in 4 to 8 to 16 years, but now. And the one candidate who is proposing this kind of change is "unrealistic". This is suicidal delusion.

Krugman lists his allies in defending the left flank of the NeoLiberal consensus in criticizing the "unrealistic" proposals by Sanders focusing on the demographics of an aging American work force.  Each of them is part of the New Democrat consensus that justified dismanteling the New Deal under an earlier Clinton who think that somehow the middle class will magically heal if we continue the policies that have destroyed it along with the environment.

With regard to the demographic argument on which Very Serious Paul focuses, I'm getting close to being one of those over 65ers. The position that old people won't be in the labor force from a man who supports politicians who think Social Security benefits should be pushed out beyond 65 is just more cognitive dissonance: our 401s have been shredded to feed Wall Street, our homes used to "foam the runways" for fraudsters Paul's friends at the Fed backstopped, our incomes reduced and our SS benefits inflated away so I bloody well hope there is a strong job market for geezers like me when I get over 65 because I'm disinclined to move into the toxic sacrifice zones my "pension" will afford me.

There is a profound misunderstanding of the scope and nature of the problems our society faces that are simply invisible from the coddled lives of people like Very Serious Paul. They equally misunderstand the reality of resource availability to fix such problems. A society that can afford 29 trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street while fighting multiple overseas wars can feed, educate, house and look after the health of its people. To the extent that it does not, to the extent that it locks them up, drugs them, under educates and under employs them, it is dismantling its own capacity to support its future. This is what we are up against, we have become ouroborous, consuming our own body.