Tag: corporate greed

Steal 15 trillion dollars?  No problem.  

Violate park rules?  Riot police will splatter your blood all over the street.

William Rivers Pitt . . .

Buffalo Springfield was wrong. There’s something happening here, and it is exactly clear. We are, at this moment, in a savagely perilous place.

There are plenty of people out there who will flap the idiots currently running for the GOP in your face in order to dragoon you into supporting President Obama come November, and that’s fine. That’s their job, that’s what they do, and there is no doubt that the comparison favors them…but it is a stone-sharpened fact that, nationally, we are at this moment hedging true fascism as sharply as we were back in the ‘Bad Old Days’ of George and the boys, if not more so.

Some would argue that we are closer now to a true fascist America than we were then, because people of good conscience who fought against George W. Bush’s militant, media-succored fascism tend nowadays to be inclined to let this current happy-faced fascism slide. After all, it’s an election year, “Obama is better than Bush.”

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette

Not just Corporate Greed but joining the scum War Profiteers to even a higher level than just holding the policies and garnering the interest rates from!

Just caught this little article as to what a Lawyer is saying about a client, Gold Star Mother, he’s representing. No names of the Fallen Soldier nor his Mother so couldn’t search out when he was killed nor in which theater of operation. But my guess is there will be more in the coming days. The article was just posted up about an hour ago at this writing.

In the wake of the BP disaster, we’ve heard powerful stories from fishermen whose livelihoods may have been destroyed for decades or longer. However long it takes for the Gulf’s fish, oyster and shrimp harvests to recover, those who’ve made their livelihoods harvesting them will need to create a powerful common voice if they’re not going to continue to be made expendable. A powerful model comes from Seattle and Alaska salmon fisherman Pete Knutson, who has spent thirty-five years engaging his community to take environmental responsibility, creating unexpected alliances to broaden the impact of their voice, and in the process defeating massive corporate interests.

“You’d have a hard time spawning, too, if you had a bulldozer in your bedroom,” Pete reminds us, explaining the destruction of once-rich salmon spawning grounds by commercial development and timber industry clearcutting. Pete could have simply accepted this degradation as inevitable, focusing on getting a maximum share of dwindling fish populations. Instead, he’s gradually built an alliance between fishermen, environmentalists, and Native American tribes, persuading them to work collectively to demand that habitat be preserved and restored and to use the example of the salmon runs to highlight larger issues like global climate change.

The cooperation Pete created didn’t come easily: Washington’s fishermen were historically individualistic and politically mistrustful, more inclined, in Pete’s judgment, “to grumble or blame the Indians than to act.” But together, with their new allies, they gradually began to push for cleaner spawning streams, rigorous enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, and an increased flow of water over major regional dams to help boost salmon runs. They framed their arguments as a question of jobs, ones that could be sustained for the indefinite future. But large industrial interests, such as the aluminum companies, feared that these measures would raise their electricity costs or restrict their opportunities for development. So they bankrolled a statewide initiative to regulate fishing nets in a way that would eliminate small family fishing operations.  

America gets everything it wants.   It wants oil, and for its sins, it’s getting oil.  70,000 barrels a day of it, coming ashore on the Gulf Coast with more on the way, flowing like black blood from that gaping wound in the earth, ripped a mile deep by the weapons of greed, held in the hands of stormtroopers of profit, nothing can stop it, no one can staunch it, that black blood will keep spilling all over our shores, through the loop current out into the Gulf Stream, up the East Coast and across the Atlantic, written on the waves like a message from Hell.    

Tell me no more of your plans to control this, tell me no more of your feeble response, the sea will not hear you, the tide will not heed you, the poison is spreading above and below. Our fate has been written in carbon emissions, in ozone depletion and polar cap melting, in black bloodstains of horror on the face of the deep.  

The devastation unleashed by BP/Transocean/Halliburton is already orders of magnitude worse than Katrina and there’s no end in sight.  A billion words have been written about this disaster, but the enormity of it is beyond words, only two words come even close to describing it . . .    

Corporate greed and political corruption have triggered this catastrophe in the Gulf, there is endless suffering ahead and no way to avoid it . . .

These are people used to surviving disaster.  It seemed there was nothing they couldn’t handle.  Until this spill.  Oysterman Buck Battle, who lost his house to Katrina, calls the oil spill “the monster of monsters.”

“I’ve never heard so much fear in people’s voices,” says Mike Tidwell, author of “Bayou Farewell,” which chronicled southern Louisiana’s long legacy of environmental problems. “A hurricane is an event with a beginning, a middle and an end.  This is more like a nuclear accident offshore and a radiation cloud is coming in.  There’s a sense of doom.”

I’m so stoked. John Cusack cross-posted my review of his movie War, Inc. from Progressive Blue to his MySpace blog after I sent him the link in a comment. Thanks, John. Just for that, I’m crossposting this like crazy.

Here’s the review:

This past week, the people of Ecuador voted to vest new constitutional “Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights” in their natural resources to elevate their legal status from property to “right-bearing entities.”  Now, natural resources have legal rights, just like other nonhumans, such as corporations and ships. Citizens are now authorized to file lawsuits against corporations to prevent the destruction of natural resources and to recover damages.

Ecuador’s new constitution is part of a larger movement in the US.  The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has been assisting local communities with drafting laws to provide legal rights to natural resources, stop corporations from raiding and destroying natural resources and protect the health and well-being of the community.