Dear Editor:

As the corrosive and cascading effects of income inequality and climate change multiply, the current occupant of the White House is accelerating the feedback loops that will destabilize our nation and our planet.

The “blue-collar billionaire” who promised to “drain the swamp” of corruption in Washington, D.C. has spun such tight webs of secrecy to conceal the ethics violations of his family, his businesses, his plutocratic cabinet, and his shadow-network of advisers and patrons that no watchdog agency can keep up with the task of monitoring them. The legislative agenda of these tycoons, previewed in the health-care overhaul fiasco, will widen the gap between the “have-mores” and the rest of us.

Growing financial disparities between elites and lower classes increase a nation’s risk of economic and political collapse. The Gini coefficient of income inequality shows that the United States’ score has been rising (as in golf, high is bad) since the 1980s and is now on a par with such kleptocracies as Russia, Turkmenistan, and the Philippines — three states ruled by personality-cult autocrats and their families.

As evidence of global warming mounts, the Executive Branch of our national government has become openly hostile to science and to scientifically-based policies to mitigate climate change. A former CEO of ExxonMobil is our secretary of state; a former board member of the oil pipeline company QS Energy is our secretary of the interior; a former attorney general of Oklahoma who eliminated the Environmental Protection Unit of that office is our head of the E.P.A.; and a former governor of Texas who believes in intelligent design and once held a prayer rally in a football stadium to end a drought is our secretary of energy.

Headed by a president who gets his information from Fox News and the twitterverse, will this club advance or undermine American efforts to respond to the challenges posed by ocean acidification, sea-level rise, greenhouse gas accumulation, and the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals (now 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than the background rate)?

Resist!

Bill Hammond

Trevett