I’ll believe corporations are people when one is declined the chance to pay a fine instead of face criminal penalties. Imagine OJ Inc or Pistorius Inc or Bernie Madoff being able to pay off US marshalls instead of going to jail. Next question, who is the beneficiary Toyota’s $1.2 Billion payoff?
Much of US health care is really a form of corporate corruption and government welfare for corporate interests, and plain medical dysfunction. So it is certainly to be expected that Pentagon-occupied Afghanistan would face the very same MESS us Americans do, just on a more gargantuan basis. See Government cannot afford to run any of the 19 new foreign-funded facilities due to come online in the next two years. Americans, as well as Afghans, deserve to have a medical system free of constant corporate corruption pushed by corporate-run government.
A number of my friends want to OCCUPY CONGRESS. Jan 17 Opening Day. I suppose every day might be appropriate to read our representatives the riot act, but doesn’t such an action perpetuate the delusion that our legislators ever listen? Proponents, Dems typically, argue “well, it’s the only system we got.” They say that about elections, about incumbents, and about Capitalism. Well, ours are the only lives we have too. Why piss them away on old assumptions, which have delivered us from absolutely nothing? A corporate-trust, inherited-wealth hierarchy is designed to outpace ordinary lifespans. Occupy Congress? Who is that really keeping occupied?
Massey Energy is in “a standoff” with federal investigators trying to determine responsibility for the deaths of 29 Massey miners earlier this year. The mining company won’t comply with inspections of equipment defects which may have doomed the miners, and doesn’t the showdown highlight the corporate personhood fallacy? Imagine a serial murderer successfully disallowing police access to a 29-body crime scene. Would the media call that a standoff? Apparently now the mass-murdering Massey has been given an extension until Friday to comply. Can real-persons get some of that soft-on-crime-fighting? Aspiring Masons and Gacys, you must incorporate.
As oil industry crony Lisa Murkowski retains her Alaska senate seat, did she “make history” by being the first official in 50 years to succeed as a write-in candidate, or did she make history by demonstrating that incumbents can beat every last determined effort to throw them out? The otherwise incorrigibly-Republican Murkowsky was rejected in her own party’s primary, so she defied her constituents by running under the stealth Incumbent Party, DC’s most heavily funded lobby arm, representing corporate polluters, profiteers, pillagers and other profaners of Democracy, enlisting the help of even Alaska’s poorest spellers to ensure that nothing will dislodge America’s corrupt Mandarins.
The debate turns now to whether or not to rescue marine animals from the oil. Pelicans and gulls specifically, but there’s more.
Of course, animals that took millions of years to be what they are, should learn to mutate themselves a lot faster. Seagulls and turtles and manatees and sea-otters, fish, crustaceans, jellyfish, plankton, all need to mutate in a matter of days rather than eons.
True, it would be a LOT simpler for the HUMAN species to modify our behavior, not set our entire economic plan on one focus, like Fossil Fuels. The plan with a built in Self-Destruct button that gets armed and starts ticking away once we drill the first well. Of course that first well was “well” over a century ago, BUT there’s still time to ramp down the madness, get back to a point where we can actually turn off he Self Destruct switch.
Of course, it would take eliminating some of the things the Oil Industry advertising partners have been selling us as “essential to the American Lifestyle”. Things like easily available in large quantities “food” that our bodies don’t have the ability to process correctly, at least not in the concentrations which are being sold to us as a “normal” diet.
Thus diabetes, colon cancers, increased. Also increased are heart disease, respiratory, kidney, thyroid, liver, just every part of the Human Biotic System that depends on a certain chemical balance that the McDiet not only doesn’t provide but actively disrupts.
The private automobile, sure, if you could afford to drive it, but, really, the cost to The Rest Of Us to maintain YOUR “right” to a private car is long since out of control. Witness, for instance the Oil Spills. Witness the wars being fought to secure more Oil, publicly subsidized wars. If the person driving sole occupant in a car made for 8 actually had to Pay His Way he wouldn’t be able to do it. The ultimate Welfare Cadillac. We’re required to provide “cheap” oil to the Consumer or be called Terrorist and Traitor. A system where everybody in the entire world is required to chip in to make a really expensive activity “affordable”…. for a privileged few. People in nations where starvation is in the top 5 causes of death have to chip in for YOUR automotive pleasure. But things like Public Transportation and subsidizing better forms of energy harvesting and use, that the bad ol’ wicked “Socialism”.
Summary of that, Public support of the entire population, BAD.
The entire World Population support of an elite minority GOOD.
Public Support of Mega Corporations like McDonalds altering the agricultural economy, GOOD.
Public criticism of the fact that this impoverishes other PEOPLE in other nations, to the point of people who live on gigantic plantation style “food” factory farms starve…. that’s Bolshevism and BAD. The Oil Corporations have been for the past year putting out some very expensive publicity campaigns saying that actually requiring the Corporations (mainly) and the Consumers to PAY what isn’t anywhere near the Real Cost for oil to be a “burden on the Poor”.
The lying sacks of shit actually cut off three quarters of the earths Poor PEOPLE and then claim to be concerned for “The Poor”.
Just ask any TeaBagger, it’s “unconstitutional” to give a damn about Poor PEOPLE.
And the other non-human species that actually FEED us. Even the plants and animals that we don’t incorporate into our diet form the basis of our Food Pyramid. For the past century that’s been known, and widely. Our focus on cultivating and nurturing a few hundred species out of the 2 billion or so on the Planet (that’s probably a low number) and then simply harvesting others, like ocean fish, crustaceans, disrupting the environments that allow the “good” fish and crustaceans to survive and multiply, and of course FEED US…
“Dang, Le-roy, we used be able to get twenty fish a day out of this here creek, now all we’re getting is them fish we always threw back ’cause they ain’t ‘good eatin’. Wonder whut happent to all them thar good fish?”
Well, it’s like this… that’s the Enhanced Evolution, but it’s not an evolution of a single species, but of an ecosystem. Sure there’ll be an ecosystem in the future. Isn’t that what the Oil Company Smugs tell us? Life will go on. Of course the species we’ve unwittingly favored are ones like Anthrax, Salmonella, e-coli, cockroaches, rats, “weeds” of every sort, animal and vegetable, Republicans, other species of Pig, yeah that was gratuitous nastiness but gosh darn it, sometimes you have to slice off a big steaming chunk of Nasty and serve it up RAW.
The parasites that thrive in our bodies, like Malaria, tapeworms, pinworms, parasitic bacteria and amoeba and protozoans, they thrive because the parasites in Human Form took their native support system, called it food, and culled every species that was in competition with that Food.
The aquatic life forms which are being killed off most rapidly are those the Consumer Economy consider to be competition for the not-very-nutritious “food” resources. Just before the Big Spill, the Oil Company Attack Dogs at Fox News were ramping up a campaign to completely ignore the Endangered Species Act on behalf of people who would pay several thousand dollars to rent a boat for a day and catch a marlin or some other honkin’ big deep sea fish. Screaming loudly that the Department of the Interior should ONLY concentrate on stocking lakes and streams with Bass and Catfish and not stocking it with those things that the Bass and Catfish actually eat. More Pesticides, of course Petroleum or Coal based, to kill off not only the “pest” species of insects, but also the ones that are considered “good bugs” so that the Sport Fishermen (just one example) and hunters can buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment and march proudly into the woods and streams and pretend to be Third World Hunter Gatherers.
Never mind that such practices drive whole tribes of ACTUAL indigenous Hunter-Gatherers into extinction. And for what, validation of ones “manhood”? If you’re so much in doubt of your own manhood that you have to resort to that, bubba, ain’t no amount of guns and fishing rods and money spent going to make you stop doubting your manhood. Sure enough ain’t going to Prove yourself.
Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most outspoken “hunters” in U.S. history, is most famous for a scathing rebuke he made to the Logical End of such pursuits. Right here in Colorado in fact. (shameless plug for the motel, but he stayed at the Buffalo Lodge on El Paso Street in Manitou Springs… the people who own it are good folks, Polish Immigrants so I get to make a slam at those “American Owned Business” assholes as well) but the outfitters of a Bear Hunt he had signed on for, had a young bear tied to a tree that he was supposed to shoot.
In his lifetime, Passenger Pigeons went from having migrations where the flocks darkened the sky like clouds, where all you had to do was point your gun upwards and fire and get several birds… to extinction.American Bison, Elk, Grizzly Bears, wolves of several species, cougars, lynx, bobcats… gone from plentiful to almost extinct in his lifetime. At the time, there was a lot of flack coming from the Religious Corner that extinction couldn’t be possible. They were actually of the opinion that they would find mammoths in some remote valley, Jules Verne even wrote about the possibility of finding living dinosaurs.
It’s been modified now, not that “extinction is impossible because God ordained against it”, it’s gone over to “Extinction is just natural, we shouldn’t care about one species or another going extinct”.
Nice of them to volunteer the entire HUMAN species to go extinct.
Think of it as Enhanced Evolution.
I’ve noticed lately they’ve got signs up all around the stores saying “Our People Make The Difference” and similar themes, to the effect that they value the workers, really they (say they) do.
So why the continual Big Scary Hassle regarding any contract negotiations? I saw something on TV the other day about “How It’s Made — Awards” and the deal was about those plastic Award trophies that large corporations give out at the end of the year… instead of, you know, cash bonuses. I always prefer artwork, like small wallet sized engravings of Dead Presidents, just a personal note.
I mean seriously, you bust your balls to make money for The Corporation, and put thousands (or more) in extra profits, above and beyond your stated quota, into the pockets of the Shareholders and they give you a plastic globe with “You Go!” laser inscribed on it that cost The Corporation maybe $20. If you’re lucky they don’t misspell your name.
WalMart puts your picture on the wall. Oh My. That’s really an expensive memorial to your service. If you notice the Portrait Studio at the front of the store near the McDumbass “restaurant” where they sell portrait grade photographs for about a buck apiece for the big ones and maybe a nickel apiece for the wallet size… the ones they put on the wall… It could be downright depressing. Scott Adams had his Anti-Hero “Dilbert” lampoon the practice, his boss with the pointy hair put a piece of pocket lint on his shirt and called it a Warm Fuzzy, in recognition of his contributions to The Company.
The most telling and realistic memorial to how The Company feels about the Workforce is the maybe 8 open checkout lanes, out of 34 or so, at Wally World, no matter how many customers there are the number of closed lanes relative to open ones is like 2 to one at least.
And half the open lanes will be Self Checkout.
That and your job interview involves typing your information into a computer.
As in, the first named storm of the season. So far, 12 killed in Guatemala. Oh, and we were duly informed that the Top Kill maneuver failed. If it’s any consolation to us they didn’t wait two weeks to tell us that. A bit of further consolation, such as it is, this poisoning of the ocean has the potential to end America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. NATO as a whole, too, because the rest of the NATO countries are facing budget crisis and crises, the first shared and the second individual, country by country case by case. The core of it isn’t socialized medicine or public welfare programs. The core of it is NATO itself, with the NATO mission of buying more expensive equipment, hiring more soldiers and not fighting one single God-Damn war that isn’t strictly for the benefit of the Wealthiest individuals on the planet. No wars of Defense, no wars for Freedom, or Nation Building, all that is window dressing, sham, frosting on a cake that’s baked from the mortal remains of the Imperialist Manifesto. A manifesto that’s written in not one document, nor book… but the death records of hundreds of millions of people, civilian, military, or militant, the ones described in 1916 as “The Great Fallen”.
The Great Fallen was made a slogan to memorialize one particular battle, that was neither at the beginning nor the end of the Imperial Meat Grinder. It counts only those fallen by gunfire in pitched battle. Not those killed by the plagues unleashed, one after another, the famines, also known as “Recessions, Depressions” and (my personal favorite, that used by the richest themselves) “Bubbles and Adjustments.” Oh, the market is going through one of it’s periodic correction cycles.
That’s great news for those who have vast wealth, but for the people who put that vast wealth in their pockets, it’s a tragedy reduced to numbers and statistics.
Now, we come to a point in history where there’s a perfect storm. An economy that’s been kicked out from under the entire world, the ecology that underpinned it so mangled and twisted it would be unrecognizable to Audubon, the greedy quest for More Money has now trashed one of the last places on Earth that HAD a chance to be redeemed.
Those who 6 weeks ago were screaming that the new restrictions to try to save that very niche of the environment would “put an end to sport fishing in the gulf”… and condemning every member of the government who even dared to use the words Environmental or Ecology in policy statements, no similar level of vilification for Their Corporate Masters now that their Corporate Masters have blown off not just sport fishing, but Commercial Fishing, and in a not surprising outcome, might kill or alter the balance of algae in the ocean that produces oxygen. Oxygen which is an anti-greenhouse gas. People who breathe regularly might recognize the term Oxygen as well. Less Oxygen, perhaps more Methane from the decaying remains of life in what used to be a living segment of the ocean, just another “Adjustment”. More numbers to add to The Great Fallen.
And to add to the Perfect Storm, starting with one actual storm named Agatha.
So, leave aside the notion that male bears tend to eat their offspring. It’s a little too graphic for the anthropomorphists
But one of their new themes is Poppa Bear and Little Bear in a rowboat fishing. Little Bear gets impatient. Then has the bright idea to drop a piece of the Overpriced-and-not-any-better-than-any-other-brand of toilet paper into the water.Which is so absorbent that it dries up the whole lake. All the fish are gasping for water to breathe, flopping around in their death throes. Somehow, in the insane popularity contest that passes for “awww, wook at the cute animals” the fish aren’t given fake smiles, humanized eye placement and faces, and the other pond dwellers who are sometimes anthropomorphized, like the frogs, aren’t represented. BUT… That’s not the truly relevant part.
It’s part of the relevance though, that’s why I included it. The fact is, though, in our Throw-Away Society, where everything including Human Beings is disposable, paper products are among the worst offenders.
First they take out the native, healthy, sustained ecosystem forests and put in “better managed” forests where all the trees are planted at the same time, no underbrush to get in the way of the Organized, Efficient Harvesting of them when the Corporate Owners decide it’s their turn to die, and the Corporatists who will no doubt object to this analogy are going to say
“Why, oh why, can’t we get all “our” workers organized like that, where they’ll perform their jobs efficiently for our profit and then die off in an orderly manner, instead of being, you know, Human?”
Of course the planting of tree-farms where forests used to be not only allows for the Dehumanized Workers and their more-valuable-to-the-company machines to access the “product” for maintenance and harvest, it also hastens erosion and provides no nutrition for the animals, either the Cute and Fuzzy winners of the Insane Popularity Contest, like the deer and the bears and the rabbits (Did you know there’s actually been a recent extinction event, a species of RABBIT? It’s true… you might think to yourself “Self, how does a species that breeds like, well, Rabbits, go extinct?”) and the squirrels and chipmunks which are “good” animals, and the slugs, beetles, very large species of cockroach, vultures, rattlesnakes, worms, you know, the ones that are much harder to paint as Furry People, aren’t normally eaten directly by people and it takes more than a couple of very quick and short sentences using only one-and-two-syllable words, to describe how they fit into the “food chain” far less the enormously complex and beautifully orchestrated Ecosystem.
Then at the other end of the process (middle actually, the “profitable” output of it still has to be shipped, marketed and then “disposed of properly” whatever the hell THAT means) the process of shredding the once-living trees into pulp, instead of long fibers (remember, they’re not aiming for quality, they’re aiming for the Corporate Trifecta: Fast, Cheap and Disposable) then glued back together, pressed into paper and rolled out into sheets. All this uses a lot of water and releases a lot of chemicals that would tend to kill, say, FISH, and bears, and Humans, into the water flow. Which has already been altered by the way the Tree Farms and Logging Roads are organized.
Now, Children, wasn’t THAT a special story? Very “cute and fuzzy” yes?
The Corporatists probably won’t want you to hear that, not because it would give you nightmares of Bears and Children flopping around like fish with nothing to breathe and drowning in poison water. No, they don’t want you to hear that, kids, because then you wouldn’t be nearly as likely to buy their product.
ERROR? wtf? Since when, exactly, does a long string of bald-faced Lies work out as being mistakes? Saying something is orange when it’s actually red is a “mistake”. Losing count of how many beers you drank before getting behind the wheel is a “mistake”. Voting for Bush once would be a “mistake” and twice would be unspeakable stupidity, (or Complicity).
Underestimating the strength of the will of Human Beings to not be conquered, murdered and robbed might be a very large and stupid mistake, but once it’s been pointed out that it never works and has historically FAILED every damn time, then it becomes Sheer Arrogance to push on with it. Not a “mistake”. After being warned, calling everybody who warned you “Traitors, Idiots, Moonbats, Bleeding Hearts, Deluded, Crazy, Terrorist Sympathizers” and so forth, then having your collective nose rubbed in the big steaming pile of your own “mistake”… and then pushing on… that’s not a “mistake”. That’s, in the case of sending Americans to kill and die for your money and your arrogance, Treason. And Murder. Thousands of counts of Capital Murder just for the American Soldiers, made airtight Capital Murder by the Patriot Act and several Executive Orders that Karl Rove wrote.
Any one count of a serviceman murdered by their treasonous actions would get the entire Bush Administration including Rove and their Ministry of Propaganda Fox News HANGED. Much as I’m opposed to Capital Punishment, I believe I’d buy tickets to the event.
Then there are the murders of Iraqi and Afghan and Somali and Sudanese and Pakistani and Uighur and Filipino and the list goes on Civilians and Prisoners of War, Each one of them an act of Capital Murder by reason of it being Terrorism. And again, through the definitions provided by Rove and Jeb Bush and Condi Rice and their fellow PNAC Imperialists.
Which one would be a Mistake?
The US government has released a study done by the government itself, that declares that over 2/3 of both American and foreign corporations pay no taxes here. This is truly a robbing hood society where the working poor are forced to fund the government paid welfare that most corporations in the US feed off, and the corporate dictatorship running America gives its corporate patrons a free ride PLUS with taxes on top of getting its own welfare rip off payments from The State it controls. Most Companies In US Avoid Federal Income Taxes
Of course, you will not hear any complaints about this on the ‘news’ programs and Right Wing blabber mouth programs, as all you will hear is assholes ranting against the poor and racial minorities in poorly disguised manner. Plus, you will hear constant promotion of the incessant government military and Police State apparatuses. More welfare for the rich pigs, all the time, always is the blast of crap that is so constant these days. Just today our local Pig Paper, The Gazette, was complaining once again that so many folk want to fix the mess that is the corporate Health Lack-of-Medical Care Welfare gang the Insurance companies currently run against the American people.
Everywhere one looks, it is the corporations riding rough shod over human rights, democracy, and Social Justice. Everywhere it is the corporations destroying the ecology of Planet Earth. They pay little tax to the Corporate Dictatorship government to carry out their agenda against the American people. Instead they force their own victims to pay for this atrocity.
We need to get it together, People, and stop voting for these con artists that the corporate world gives us to ‘choose’ from. You know who they are… they are the Republican and Democratic Party politicians that foul up our national political life so thoroughly at present. It’s time to finally get fed up with these gangsters and ride them out of power for good!