Tag Archives: environmentalism

Earth Day, Hour, Minute now Memory. KRCC’s Democracy Now, Then, Was.

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FrackedRemember Earth Day? It became Earth Hour, then I think Earth Minute. If there was an Earth Second you and I missed it. With every chance for commemorative environmental actions squeezed out by the newest condensed schedule, the Earth Moment became a void. Now for Earth Day we do nothing. We reflect in acquescence. It’s become another holiday, minus the time off, which is not ironic. Our uninterrupted industry on Earth Day is fitting. Earth Day is like Valentine’s Day. Happy Earth Day! 🙂

Earth Day
Who were those assholes who decided a whole day was too much for consumer culture to spare in reflection, potential enlightenment and transcendence? Those reformist subverted all hope of drawing popular support to the movement. They’re the same moderates who think people need warm cookies to be attracted to a revolution. They are the same Sunday schoolers who think protest must be made safe for picnic goers and their children.

These “innovations” appear well meaning, if naive, but sometimes outside-the-box thinking falls outside of all effectiveness. What passes for unschooled, so consistently, is very likely shepherded by handlers as clever as fox.

The function of subversives used to belong to the anti-establishment. The dark side is using them much more effectively. Rooting them out is depicted as fingerpointing by the Left, which initiates the circular firing squads. And we’re played for idiots.

So let me tell you about my Earth Day.

Democracy Now
My Earth Day featured a visit by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. She came to Colorado College to speak on behalf of her program and her most recent book which is a twenty year retrospective about the social movements she’s covered. Amy spoke in the tiniest of lecture halls which was full because it was tiny.

Because guess what? The public radio station on which the program used to appear didn’t promote the event. The community radio station which streams her for now isn’t on the air as yet. Word only spread through a student organization on campus. Thus the audience was kept small. Amy’s previous appearance filled a venue much larger, and the one before that filled the school’s largest. Someone shrunk Democracy Now’s local reach by a combination of destructive intent on the part of CC’s regents and a lack of vigilence on the part of her local station KRCC and its supporters.

Not only did the cretinous traitors at KRCC sabotage the potential of Amy’s personal appearance, the event was put into the hands of a strange new student association dedicated to the project of nuturing communication between two Colorado Springs campuses: Colorado College and the Fucking U.S. Air Force Academy. Because apparently the two vocational vectors have things to share with one another.

So two students, one from each school, introduced Amy and before they did they spoke about the importance of people going into civil life collaborating with those heading into military leadership. As if.

These two insipid dwarf-people introduced DEMOCRACY NOW, the flagship news program of the PACIFICA Radio Network, dedicated to a media independent of corporations who profit from war.

The two representatives were clueless, as were their faculty sponsors, and of course they were applauded by liberals who probably think that the educated liberal arts students will have a chance to infect or soften the warmonger mentality of the military academy.

Except it’s of course the reverse. This exchange normalizes the jerk-off war lovers by giving them a seat at the table of academia as if Air Force Academy professors and students have anything to do with university level education.

Amy of course was gracious and didn’t offend her oblivious hosts or their audience. One can only hope the audience was patronizing, but probably not. Instead we’re all thankful for what civic engagement and communty building there is, regardless if it’s subverted by the poisonous outreach of the military state.

Too many do-goodests among us haven’t a clue we are carrying water for the purveyors of contaminants. They fracked Earth Day right under our noses. Where our shouting mouths are supposed to be.

Have a Nice Earth Day! 🙂

Who obsconded with Pikes Peak Area Earth Day?

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Famed environmentalist Denis Hayes spoke at Colorado College last week, and it was very tempting to ask the creator of EARTH DAY what he thought about speaking to an audience which had eliminated theirs. Oh, we have Earth Month, and CC has Earth Week, to make room ostensibly for the growing plethora of environmentalist activities, to a thinning crowd unfortunately. Shrinking the party is a curious strategy, don’t you think? Obviously the Earth deserves more than a day’s commemoration, but the point of an Earth Day, is to concentrate popular attention toward building global community. Perhaps the new “Earth Hour” attempts to recapture that focus, you’d think there might be a happy medium, such as… Earth Day?! We’re content with holidays of a day duration. America’s uber-patriots would have expanded the 4th of July to Independence Month, if such a thing was really meant to be effective. We do not have Memorial Month, or Veteran’s Month, or Christmas or Easter Months either. Oddly, Pikes Peak environmentalists chose to expand their drinking hours to last a month, encompassing more eco-themed happy hours to please their members-only. Local common folks looking beyond the usual corporate media antagonist apathy on subjects environmental, find themselves on April 22 with no Earth Day.

Van Jones is Obama in Greenface, what our president did for race, Jones wants for the environment, New Jack Shit

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? He’s Black AND he’s Green, and like his former boss Obama, he’s a neo-eco corporatist pushing… Cap-N-Trade! In Al Gore Nobel Prize circles, Van Jones is the environmental darling who was too hot –we’re to infer principled– for Obama’s centrist administration. In post-Hope America, Jones turns out to have been the spoonful of Aspartame that helped environmentalists swallow just the next neoliberal pill, another pitchman for the bankers whose “Green Collar” remedy for our climate -and economic woes- is to trust in big business –let free trade and deregulated profits deliver mankind! No surprise then Colorado College is foisting the so-called upstart to dazzle the impressionable on Thursday March 3rd at Shove Chapel, 7:30pm. And the asshole (his word, not mine) compounds his offense by presuming to greenwash the few terms American workers have to grasp the real issue, class struggle. The blue and white collars differentiate who works and who keeps the profit, and by the way, who’s made the decisions that led the machine to environmental collapse and who pays the price. Green Collar doesn’t describe a shirt, it’s a leash. Oh but JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and the IMF don’t want to take you out for walkies. Their collar is a yoke of servitude, painted color of the day.

Dan Maes really really really doesn’t want to be Governor

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He speaking to a “crowd” of 50 supporters (doesn’t Denver Metro have a population of over a million? That’s a big difference…) told them that the Denver Mayor and City Council focusing on the Environment, carpooling, BUS SERVICE and Bicycling, was a commie plot to bring Denver into the clutches of the United Nations. No, really. It’s Insidious, and Nobody Knows About This Conspiracy, But He’ll Be Proven Right…wing…nut… Here’s my take on it. Maes gets such a low dose of voters’ support in the Gubernatorial, that he puts up a website alleging a United Nations Conspiracy to silence him, and asks for donations from the Wingnut community throughout America.

If he gets 1% of the people of America to send him the bread, tax deductible of course, at an average of $5, that would be a 15 MILLION consolation prize.

Which is more than he’d make as governor, other than some heavy duty bribe action.

So, I think he’s trying to Throw the race. In horse racing they’ll (but there’s a law against it and most important the Mafia gets involved) bet against their own horse, baseball team, basketball team, football team, greyhound etc… and then slip their star player or animal some kind of dope. With the greyhounds they feed the dog BEFORE the race instead of afterward, so the dog doesn’t feel the urge to chase the electric rabbit.

It’s why Pete Rose was banned from baseball.

Mr Maes is more in line with pissing off people who would more likely hit innocent bystanders than whoever they’re aiming at.

That’s only speculation, of course, maybe he’s actually crazy and not wanting to make money off it.

But bicycling as a Gateway To the N.W.O. Hell is kind of harder to explain logically. Maybe he got them drunk before saying it.

I’ve got to get a video done of me doing a dramatic interpretation of this speech the way I personally read it.

I mean, translated into English and written down, Hitler’s Nurnberg Rally speech was kind of …strange…

But thousands of otherwise rational people ate it up with a spoon and proclaimed it Ice Cream.

Maybe if we gave him a bigger audience, and got a few more of his comrades to comment on exactly how that would work, we could keep the Right Wing out of power for a generation. Not having to say a word about it ourselves.

Think of it as enhanced evolution, Un-natural selection, cull the gulls…

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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.

The Toilet Paper Bears – A Fitting Analogy for once.

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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.

Phony Sedon-y meet Social Ecology

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hikers-Boynton-Sedona
I mentioned in my last post that I’d had a visceral negative reaction to Sedona — undeniably one of the most beautiful places on earth — which surprised and dismayed me. I had a vague sense that I was offended by the opulence and pseudo-spiritualism of the place, but that didn’t completely explain my snarky attitude which, I’ve come to understand, usually masks a deeper response to perceived injustice or dashed hopes.

I found an answer in the form of a book I happened to pull from my brother’s bookshelf: An American Child Supreme — the education of a liberation ecologist, by John Nichols. It’s a memoir of sorts, and tries to decipher how any of us — born into a culture that very nearly ensures that we become bigots, greedy consumers, warmongers, and environmental parasites — develops a social conscience.

John Nichols tells of the life-changing — often seemingly innocuous — events, people and books that transformed him from a product of a privileged upbringing and Mayflower pedigree to a liberation ecologist (as opposed to naturalist or environmentalist), a more radical superstratum of social ecology.

I won’t go into any of that, although it was fascinating to me. I’ll just write the words that I scratched frantically into my little notebook so I’d not lose them or allow myself to forget them. I wasn’t sure how they related to Sedona, but somehow they did.

Myself, I do not have the courage or the fanaticism that motivated Diana Oughton (of the Weather Underground) to build bombs, but I cannot envision the changes we need without some sort of apocalyptic reaction against the current levels of violence generated by the daily economic activities of the multinationals that feed and clothe us.

Territorial shooting wars are only a small fraction of the greater (and more horrific) violence of a world market that levels forests, pollutes the oceans, impoverishes people and toxifies topsoil in order to bring us our hamburgers, polyester golf slacks, and Marlboro cigarettes. “The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret,” writes Eduard Galeano. “Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. This systemic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics.”

Environmental collapse is now universally caused by monopoly capital plundering earth’s biological and human resources for profit. The profit is generated by the labor of those underdogs, whose energy is thus co-opted to destroy the environment. This means that our most destructive environmental problems are tied to their inequality. . . . That inequality is causing a downward social spiral on earth and eco-devastation. Profit requires demolition. The racism that deforms our nation (and the globe) is a tool used by a capitalist society to maintain class divisions for profit-making reasons, so racism is also a main component of biosystem toxicity.

John Nichols sums up the philosophy of a liberation ecologist when he quotes Tom Athanasiou’s book Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, whose words are directed at environmentalists:

“The time for such political innocence is over. . . .it is past time for environmentalists to face their own history, in which they have too often stood not for justice and freedom, or even for realism, but merely for the comforts and aesthetics of affluent nature lovers. They have no choice. History will judge greens by whether they stand with the world’s poor.”

That must be it. I distrusted Sedona because it quite obviously doesn’t stand with the world’s poor, nor even the nation’s middle class. It is an enclave for affluent nature lovers whose social consciences are buried in crystals and energy forces, $4 iced teas and expensive gauzy skirts.

Sedona seems to care not a whit about social or economic justice nor — I’d wager a guess — about wreaking environmental havoc in Utah and New Mexico to keep its own little slice of Eden energized and enflowered. There is no need for Sedona to worry about the larger world, neither liberation for its people nor the sustainability of its global environment. Sedona exists unto itself and its wealthy denizens — to be owned, developed and distributed and enjoyed at their directive.

Sedona-Boynton-Canyon

Gore says 2009 is Turning Point in Environment Battle- Isn’t that a bunch of complete nonsense?

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al gore aglowThe DP liberals over at the Common Dreams website are out there pushing Al Gore dope off on us once again.

To the liberal ‘Peace’crat voter, somehow they have remade in their own minds Al Gore out to be the MAX ‘Green’, who is then made to stand alongside that MAX ‘Peacenic’, Jimmy ‘Peanut Butter’ Carter, always the two out under the spotlight as neo Democratic Party Saints!

Here it is then… Gore: 2009 Turning Point in Environment Battle …WTF? Not hardly, Al. Not even by a long shot! What a dope! And what a Democratic Party hack!

If you’re not on CD’s no fly shun list feel free to write them about pee GREEN Al. I did, and my comment is listed at #5 on the list of comments. I wonder if it will be removed? (I’m hoping that CD has gotten away from that sort of thing though???)

Just in case, here below are my remarks about Al Gore there.
—————————————————————————–
Gore, wasn’t he the ‘environmentalist’ who administered 8 years of economic war against the children of Iraq? YES! Now I remember him! He also began the fencing off and militarization of The Border between the US and Mexico, too. He is some sort of Green for sure! He and his Administration friends, Silvestre Reyes and Madelyn Albright.

Wait, something about oil in Colombia, too? And here’s Al in March this year…

‘I’m not a reflexive opponent of nuclear. I used to be enthusiastic about it, but I’m now sceptical about it.’

Well, YES, Al! My you’ve changed! Or have you really?

‘Yes, there is [more appetite for nuclear power now]. And because of the carbon crisis there will be more nuclear plants built and some of those being retired will be replaced by others. I think it will play a somewhat larger role, but it will not be the main option chosen.’

YES, such scepticism!

‘. People have said for years that there are now completely different [nuclear] technologies. OK, but if you have a team of scientists that can build a reactor, and you’re a dictator, you can make them work at night to build a nuclear weapon. That’s what’s happened in North Korea and Iran. And in Libya before they gave it up. So the idea of, say, Chad, Burma, and Sudan having lots of nuclear reactors is insane and it’s not going to happen.’

Let’s go to war, Gore! It’s the ‘green’ thing to do and now I see what a great environmentalist you are! You’re against nuclear power in Iran and Chad and Burma! Of course, but here it will be an option, but just maybe not ‘the major option’?

(Remarks taken from a Leo Hickman interview with Gore for the UK Guardian)
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And a final comment about Al Gore not put on CD just yet from The Tennessee Center for policy Research a comment titled

Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”
Gore’s home uses more than 20 times the national average

He says he’s fixed all that up though, using his own company, Generation Investment Management. He hopes to turn a nice profit in the eco- Business World while saving the planet for the Democratic Party!

Join the Clorox Club!

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Join the Clorox Club and bleach America Green! I wonder if this is now seen as a ‘Green investment’ nowadays? Some Clorox company products do now get the Sierra Club endorsement, that’s for sure. Sierra Club Launches Partnership with Clorox’s new Green Works Line

I’m looking for the Sierra Club to now partner with the National Rifle Association, Smith and Wesson, and the Pentagon to come up with a Child Safe GI Joe National Park Ranger with gun (to protect the park boundaries from rowdy visitors that want to harm Bambi). What about it, Carl Pope (long time head of Sierra Club)? Got a deal in the works yet with these Green friendly folk? Bang-bang.

Seriously though, is partnering with toxic producers really the way to go about trying to save the envionment? You get your Big Mac and your salad both!???

Actually the real result is that your ‘environmental organization’ begins to partner to block government regulation that would outlaw or heavily regulate the production of toxic products. That’s the result of having a Cloroxenvironment Club out there. Just stop sending money to the Sierra Club until it gets its act together? That might be never at this point? They’ve been bought out.