FRIENDS, THE TIME FOR SERIOUS ACTION IS NOW
The bad news – and to be honest, what else is there when people in the know gather to discuss the environment - is that while millions of us have been working hard to reduce our carbon footprint, eat healthy, and lead environmentally sustainable lives, there are many times our amount, both here in our country and around the world, who feel that it is their god-given right to squander, hog and plunder the planet’s finite supply of clean air, potable drinking water and toxin free food. Many times our amount for whom the fears of environmentalists that planet earth is each day creeping closer to an environmental day of reckoning is just another distraction forced upon them by elitists to keep them from getting what is rightly theirs.
Fueling this stupidity, though it is hard to argue with those who feel that they have been passed over at the trough, are the so-called people of science – their term, not mine - who continue, sprouting mountains of scientific sounding mumbo jumbo to dispute the existence of Global Warming, and to minimize the part that man and his corporate doppelganger, the corporatocracy, have played and continue to play in is worsening.
One can only wonder what it will take to convince the nonbelievers, many of them sincere individuals, that the life that they ascribe to, or have recently, as in the case of many of the citizens of China and India, recently attained, is destructive to us all. What it will take for these same folks to acknowledge that no one, no corporation or country, has the right to bring about another’s demise, much less the end of life, as we know it, which is certainly a description of what will happen if what remains of the polar ice disappears as it is projected to do in the next decade?
There is no denying that mankind and the planet that we occupy are already a good ways down the path to destruction. For proof, one needs only to look to the devastation created both here and abroad by recent weather phenomena so severe as to leave death and destruction of untold proportions in its wake. Still unsure, then consider for a moment the extreme severity of Hurricane Katrina, a hurricane, which destroyed one of our better known cities, and cost hundreds of lives, though the exact number remains unknown.
But while these events are dramatic, far more dangerous is the recent unsettling news that all three major greenhouse gasses, that’s carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane for those keeping score, all of these substances, which had been on the decline in recent years, are now, once again, accumulating in our air in record amounts, and even more terrifying, there is zero indication that this situation will reverse itself anytime soon.
Sadly, this institutionalized shortsightedness does not end with the pollution of our air. Elevated toxicity levels have also been observed in our waterways, as corporate arrogance and political corruption have allowed many of our precious oceans, rivers and streams to be used as de facto dumping grounds for raw, unfiltered sewage.
This has, of course, not only had a devastating effect on many of the plant and animal species that depend on clean air and water for their survival, but has started to affect our health, as well.
But this is all old news and is definitely not a surprise to regular readers of this page. So this time we are going to do things a little bit differently. This time it is not enough to point out things that are amiss and leave it up to you, the reader, to decide the best course of action in any given situation. This time, I am going to climb up on my soap box and offer want I feel are some concrete suggestions, in the hope that by fueling a discussion with you the reader, we may be able drive home the information that the environment is more than the just the latest fashion trend to be observed.
So sit down, pull up a chair, crack that collar or belt and relax. The time has come to talk the future - all of our futures.
But before we can accurately hope to do this, we need to spend a few minutes looking at the politics of our present. This will allow for a better understanding into what is preventing our society from moving toward a more environmentally sustainable way of life.
FIXING WHAT’S WRONG IN AMERICA
The answer in a nutshell is money, or more accurately the greed that is exhibited when one is in wanton pursuit of money. But the problem goes so much deeper than just the desire for the Benjamin’s. Specifically, it goes to how our corporations are structured and what powers and privileges that they have been accorded by generations of bought and paid for political sycophants in Washington and in similar seats of government around the world.
Corporations, at least the multinationals, are all about making money. Your life, your livelihood and everything else come second. Spending money, however, this is a different matter. Generous corporate disbursements are nowadays usually only sanctioned when the money in question is earmarked for dividends for shareholders, compensation for corporate officers, or to smooth the corporation’s passage past one regulatory hurdle or another. Money to comply with reducing a company’s environmental footprint, sadly, is not one of these priorities.
Nor apparently a priority anymore for many US based companies is the research and development of new products. Much of this is on account of laziness as it is easier to let others do the time consuming product development and then either copy the finished product, license it, or, as Microsoft is famous for doing, buying the developing company and the developer, outright.
This long-term shortsightedness is one of the principle reasons why forward thinking Japanese automakers, Toyota and Honda, lead the world in alternative fuel vehicles and their European and American counterparts are just now struggling to catch up.
But then, why should corporations fund such a boring costly process as research and development when there are far too many governments willing to use the people’s money to underwrite such expenses? Case in point, Ronald Reagan’s, Star Wars fiasco, where the old cow puke gave billions of the people’s dollars to his friends in aerospace to develop a product that twenty years later still does not exist.
This nursing at the corporate teat has the corporatocracy spoiled. To insure that the handouts keep on coming, these captains of industry have been forced to spend freely buying the loyalty of generation after generation of ethically challenged politicians, despots and dictators. Moreover, they have been forced to underwrite the Beltway’s notorious network of lobbyists, who when they are not writing legislation for the Bush administration, function to move the cash between the parties in these slightly south of legal transactions.
But then, what are a few slightly bent laws when one is rewarding the loyalty of friends, particularly friends who come to the table bearing gifts that keep on giving.
Several of these gifts, specifically those with seemingly innocuous sounding names such as NAFTA, CAFTA, and GATT, are gifts that keep on giving as they threw open our borders, eased import restrictions and taken in Toto, have led the charge to devastate the American middle class in ways that the robber barons of the early twentieth century could only dreamed have dreamed of doing.
The tendency, particularly among liberals, is to blame the Republicans for this, as most attacks against the middle class usually are their doing. After all it was Republican patron saint, Ronald Reagan, who first moved against the unions while his vice president and successor, George H.W. Bush, pushed for and obtained fast track authority for the President in matters of trade. Not to be outdone, his slacker son, George W. handed over to corporate leaders and their lobbyist alter egos, responsibility for the drafting of legislation, which his Republican allies in Congress merely rubber stamped into law.
The younger Bush, it seems has never met a corporation who could not stand a handout of a few billion bucks, which is why in this the era of record oil company profits, many of these same companies are still receiving aid stipends to help with their search to find new sources of fossil fuels, rather than for the same money to be invested into the development of wind, water and solar power, as would be the conscious thing to do. But then, these guys are not what I would call conscious people.
But it was the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, no slouches themselves when it came to rewarding corporate loyalists, who dismantled the previously referenced trade regulations, as anyone who has lost a manufacturing job to a third world country in the last decade or so can attest.
This opening of our markets removed any impetus to manufacture in this country, let alone to deal with those nagging little annoyances such as labor unions, pensions, and health care. Overseas labor was not only cheaper, but factories are for the most part unregulated, both as to safety issues for employees and for the integrity of the products manufactured.
The downside of this is that little if anything is manufactured in this country anymore. If you do not believe me, take a trip to Wal-mart or any of other big box store and count the products that still say ‘Made in the USA’.
What a frustrating experience this will be. But then frustrating isn’t the half of it when one considers the poor quality of much of the ‘outsourced products’, or the fact that many of these same items have been proven to make their end users sick. In an attempt to cut costs, many of these offshore companies substitute substances long ago banned from the manufacturing process in this country. For this reason, we have dog food, Vitamins, toothpaste and other personal care products from China containing the same active ingredient as is used to make antifreeze, and led paint and miniature magnets being used in the manufacture of children’s toys.
But sadly, we do not need to find an outsourced product to be concerned about quality and safety. Food and water, once constants for purity and consistency here in the lower forty-eight, too often today are neither.
For this we can thank George W. Bush who in his zeal to eliminate all federal oversight has decimated the ranks of our nation’s food inspectors, leaving in his wake many unhappy people and thousands of cases of e-coli and other food borne illnesses. But what are a million instances of food poisoning as long as the corporations are happy and keep expressing that happiness with their generous contributions?
Ludicrous thought isn’t it, satisfying the corporations at the expense of those that they were created to serve?
Well regardless of how much the cynic in me enjoys a good laugh, we as a nation can no longer allow this to continue. Contrary to what they would like you to believe, corporations have no rights in this country, only privileges, chief among them the privilege to be allowed to incorporate and conduct business for profit. But like all privileges these come with responsibilities as well, most importantly, to respect those who they were created to serve. And that is ‘We the People’, not their stockholders or their corporate hierarchy, in spite of what they would like you to believe.
ACTION PLAN
In fact we need to rethink all of the ways, which we deal with the corporations starting with the subsidies, which for some reason, even in the best of times, they think that they deserve.
The best way to do this is to eliminate all corporate subsidies, unless the corporation in question is engaged in the development of environmentally friendly technologies.
This means financially cutting off the energy companies, the airlines, the insurance companies, the drug companies and virtually every other unnecessary drain on our economy that has managed to find its way onto the Government tab since President Ronald Reagan first declared war on the American people.
With the money gone, we then need to examine more closely the ways that these same corporations conduct business. The best way to do this would be to create a corporate tsar and charge this man or woman with the means of taking these companies to task for violations against the American people. This means charges, with the leaders of the companies held legally liable for their actions in the corporate suite. Perhaps if we slap a few of these SOB’s in prison for their actions, it would go a long way toward cleaning up how the multinationals do business, at least in this country.
Next we need to rescind NAFTA, CAFTA and GATT and reinstate our market protections. If it became more expensive to manufacture in India or China products for the American market, we would see the return of that sector to this country.
Such initial changes, when combined with the repeal of this country’s usurious personal bankruptcy laws, the end of the ill fated ‘War for Oil’ and the permanent rescission of the Republican Party’s tax breaks for the wealthy, would in the short term, give the USA the financial wherewithal to put its economic position ad would eventually return our land to a place that rewards creativity and welcomes bold new ideas, no matter their source.
A more long term course correction would be to require that any new technologies developed, or made better by research paid for by ‘We the people’, a significant portion of these would become the property of the commons, and those wishing to build products or services using these discoveries as underlying material, would have to obtain a license and pay royalties to do so.
It is unethical, not to mention immoral, for technologies developed with the people’s money to inure exclusively to the benefit of any entity other than ‘We the people’. Corporations are most certainly entitled to participate in that which they develop but that’s participation, not ownership.
But these changes that I have outlined above will not happen without a significant change of leadership on Pennsylvania Avenue and in both houses of Congress. For too long the American people have not had an advocate in the White House. He has been corporate America’s man, bought and paid for and charged to do their bidding and not ours. The result is we have a climate that puts the interests of a few over the many.
Correcting this is going to take time and more than a few new laws, including those governing the way politicians approach their jobs. Currently the system rewards political hacks who do the corporations bidding. This needs to change.
For the USA to reverse its present tailspin, we need to know that our elected officials, regardless of their ideology, are doing the public’s bidding. So first we need laws that would make it easier to punish politicians who betray the public trust. Right now, the impeachment laws on the books are too unwieldy to be much good to anyone. These need to be simplified, with civil and criminal penalties established.
We also need to stop talking and finally do something about campaign finance reform, which would not only decide how campaigns are financed but would also take the power away from the lobbyists by making it a serious crime for any elected official to take any gratuity, no matter how small, to influence the passing of legislation.
But our job does not end with just cleaning up the financial and political mess here in this country. As one of the world’s largest and most powerful economy’s, we need to start using our impressive financial muscle to pressure our global neighbors to be more responsive to environmental matters, particularly when their ill conceived actions threaten those outside their own borders.
But before we can do so, we need to make change happen at home. Hillary Clinton will not make these tough changes. Neither will John McCain. Obama is the only presidential candidate with the stomach to oversee such change.
For this reason he needs to be our President.
LIB
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THE WWF’s (World Wildlife Fund) Living Planet Index tracks over 4,000 species of birds, fish, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. For the thirty plus years between 1970 and 2007 their stats reveal that land-based species fell by 25 percent, marine species by 28 percent, and freshwater species by 29 percent. Additionally, WWF tells us that marine bird species have fallen 30 percent since the mid-1990s.
