Thanks for a polite reply!
But the window for new candidates was long closed before Bloomberg even started his campaign.
By the rules of the DNC, Bloomberg would have had to have registered months before to be eligible.
The DNC simply suspended that rule as a one-off. Their explanation was that they are a private company that is not responsible to anyone else - i.e. no explanation.
It's too late now. Trump must go. I’d very happily vote Vermin Supreme if it could stop Trump.
4 years. We did not need someone controversial, we need someone who can help us get back to some semblance of normal, and can help us to heal.
But "normal" for America is an endless series of foreign wars of choice, wars which have killed literally millions of innocent people in my lifetime and consumed $20 trillion dollars - that is, $20 million million dollars. And the US has lost almost every one.
"Normal" for America is that every decade there's a new financial meltdown where huge banks are revealed to be committing thousands of felonies, and yet the industry is bailed out with taxpayer money.
"Normal" is an endless obsession with growth for growth's sake. It's a bipartisan desire to put the needs of the fossil fuel industry over everything else.
"Normal" is the richest country in the world with the most expensive healthcare and some of the worst outcomes. "Normal" is a country where people regularly die on the street from exposure, or die from being unable to afford what would be routine medical care in other country. Both of these happened to Americans I personally knew.
"Normal" is a country where police officers can slowly and fiendishly kill immobilized individuals who offer no threat whatsoever, do it while knowingly on camera!, and face little or no consequences. Of course, you don't expect the Republicans to be any good, but Obama did nothing about this at all and Bill Clinton *caused* many of these problems with his tough-on-crime policies and Welfare "reform".
I have to be blunt here. Every single part of your "normal" life is dependent on burning vast quantities of cheap fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate. Your "normal" life is actually nothing of the sort, if you look at either history or our future.
Look at this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/energy
See those tiny little thin lines at the top? Those are our energy sources that do not emit CO2 - that tiny sliver.
But every ounce of CO2 we pump into the air will cause the planet to heat a little more - and that CO2 will linger in the atmosphere for generations.
And Americans aren't giving it up. Obama's beloved fracking gave us a few more decades of oil, at the cost of fouling some of our drinking water for the next thousand years.
Unless we make an unprecedented great effort and all work together to lower our consumption and our waste, in about twenty-five years we'll be out of accessible oil, and much of society will grind to a stand-still.
We'll start burning coal then, and the climate will continue to get hotter and hotter and the CO2 levels higher and higher until it becomes actually hard to think - probably in a century.
At some point, we melt the permafrost, which would more than double the CO2 into the atmosphere.
If you're a normal Westerner, each year you go through about ten years' worth of your share of the world's natural resources, and the cost is borne by the natural world.
In my lifetime alone, we've killed about half of all the wild creatures; half the wild mammals, half the aquatic creatures bigger than about 10 pounds, more than half the birds, and more than half the flying insects.
This isn't normal. Only a tiny fraction of history can people have a life where they see half of all wild things killed, because if you do that for more than a few lives in a row, there isn't anything left.
Nothing about American life is or was "normal". These few generations around today, from 1950 to 2030, will be distinguished over all time because of our tremendous affluence.
Past generations lived in terrible want because they had not figured out how to extract and exploit resources;
Future generations will live in want and suffering till the end of time because our few generations since 1950 used industrial capitalism to extract and exploit all the resources, and left our descendents with a blighted biosphere and a million species dead.
The wheels came right off the car. The idea that you can just pop them back on and everything will be OK is sadly false.
Our past and future "normal" is a frugal, modest life which consumes very little of the world's resources.
The American idea of "normal", this unending orgy of mass consumption and exponential growth, is a temporary aberration which in a very real sense is a massive theft from our descendents.
If there is to be any hope for future generations at all, we need a brand-new normal. The old normal was completely broken and there is no way to fix it. Any solution that does not eliminate permanent exponential growth is literally a bandaid on cancer.
Thanks for reading!, and good day.
