Rebecca Solnit writes:

Do people still say a car was “sold for parts”? Because the US is being sold for parts or just handed over to the oligarchy. It’s a fire sale, a bankruptcy auction, it’s a planned dismantling of everything from its military to its institutions of higher education to its scientific research to its public lands.

And while the threat to sell off part of Yosemite National Park is about a quarter-mile parcel on the park’s edge, Yosemite is a crown jewel in the national park system and, arguably, the world’s first national park.

To let any bit of it be sold off for the benefit of a corporation’s planned development on the park’s western border would compromise the inviolability of national parks and sacrifice public good for the sake of private profit. This is of course the ongoing agenda of the Trump administration.

Public lands belong to all of us, a gift from the past because people worked hard to protect these forests, mountains, canyons, and a trust for the future, because the public should include everyone in this country alive now and everyone yet to come.

The Trump administration’s ruthless efforts to turn over public lands for mining and logging and fossil fuel exploitation while it also dismantles the Forest Service and Park Service is about turning longterm well-being for the many, human and more than human, into short term profit for an elite. [Continue reading…]