Crippling Political Debate By Design

As we see daily, the terms and phraseology that is used to "debate" issues is often more important than the content of the arguments. I have written a length about such legislative schemes before, but several examples have come and gone over the years that bear repeating. One of the first that I noticed was the Clean Water Act, which despite having a great name only codified levels of pollution that were acceptable or permissible. Even though we know that toxic and carcinogenic materials are still flowing into the nation's waters, virtually nothing is being done to stem the flow. The public was all for regulations and the wealthy elites that controlled the means of production of goods and services, our legislatures and the media were intransigent. They were adamant that any limits on their effluent would cripple their ability to fatten their wallets and have us pay for it with poisoned water. They were comfortable abusing us, so why would they want to change? The same scenario took place during debate on the Clean Air Act. Think of the wily child (industry) faced with his/her first roadblock to unbridled behavior (public opinion). Of course they would not want to have to do anything differently. Some remain obstinate, even though it has been shown that economic benefits can accrue from running a tighter ship that loses less toxic compounds to the environment, leading to increased profitability.  I understand that there was some resistance to having their freedom to pollute curtailed, but the tactics that were used assured that little progress would be made in the foreseeable future and that every opportunity for avoiding regulation would be tried, from re-defining the terms of the debate to outright refusal to comply. The lawyers had a heyday and the news was all too willing to play the part of mouthpiece for industry. It was plain to see on TV that the majority of those calling for an end to using the air and water as garbage dumps for industry were naive, idealistic hippies and yippies, ne'er do wells and those with too much time on their hands. I remember quite clearly because I was accused of being all sorts of vehemently spat out derogatory words. A favorite of mine was "do-gooder", as if that was a bad thing.

This says nothing about the scientifically proven hazardous products that remain on the market simply because the corporate elites that run our nation claim that said products are fun or necessary or "our right" to "enjoy". Coca-Cola comes to mind immediately.It isn't bad enough that pure, clear water, produced by the fine people at corporate headquarters is priced higher than their sugar-laden poison swill, but when the negative health affects of their drink are pointed out, there is always a new multi-million dollar advertizing campaign in the works to tell us how we cannot live without it. Every time the public gets an inkling to invest in shutting them down, and stock prices tumble, millions of investors turn tail and flee, leaving more shares available at bargain basement prices for our wealthy overlords to swoop in and pick up the pieces after our nervous desperation. In the stock market, unlike poker, our opponents don't even need a "tell", they see right through the rhetoric of public opinion, because many times they have manufactured it.

During the fights for clean air and water, regulators were left, like toothless dogs, nipping at the heels of industrialists. In the end, as often happens, the simplest and easiest (read cheapest) things were done to mask the deeper problems of toxic chemical contamination and we still have not addressed them in any meaningful way. What all of the insults, degradation and rhetoric are designed to do is make those who believe in the right to clean air and water (world class education for our children, healthcare or whatever the public wants) out to be socialists, communists or whatever colloquial term stands in for "people who do not matter". I remember, I was part of those other fights too.

When listing the hundreds of pieces of legislation that have come down the pike, not including the budgets laden with pork and add on rules that fly in the face of good sense, it is hard not to see the machinations of billionaires at work behind the scenes, the echoes and traces of capital guiding the debate, as well as the votes and pens of our "representatives" is in evidence. Wisconsin's Governor and legislature has gone as far as letting a minor player in the mining industry, one with a list of ecological atrocities as long as your arm, write the legislation that will guide state regulators who, try as they might, will no longer be able to reign in the assaults of toxic contamination wrought by that industry. In addition, frack-sand mining is completely un-regulated and requires no remediation because sand is not considered a mineral under Wisconsin's regulatory scheme. Anyone who has seen the scars left behind when removing subsoil knows that it will take hundreds of years to heal those kinds of wounds to the ecosystem.

The Patriot Act was one of these poor excuses for a law that we have become accustomed to. While undermining our freedoms, stripping away rights and spending billions that could never do anyone any good, or create anything worth having, our ruling elite assured that our lives would be thoroughly constrained and that nothing would/could be done about it. The stories we hear about terror plots being foiled from time to time, upon closer inspection, are most often entrapment schemes in which Federal Agents offer to provide a tiny slice of the lunatic fringe not only resources that were unavailable to them, or critical planning expertise so that pipe dreams seem to be coming to fruition. Then, the agents and their cohort of "law enforcement" friends swarm in and protect us from what? Some big talkers who had no resources, or even the hope of a plan, before the government's inside man started offering them explosives and expertise? It is a ruse of the highest caliber. Patriots would never have stood for exempting the federal government from so many checks and balances. The people who fought and died in battle to supposedly "save" America from all foes domestic and foreign would roll over in their graves if they saw what we have allowed our government to do to us.

I have written at length about No Child Left Behind, the laws that impose more testing (which never taught anyone anything) on an already staggering educational system. After the sustained assault of regulators on our educational system, the crippling effects of thirty years of meddling, it is amazing that any students learn anything. Now we have voucher schools in which teachers do not even have to have a degree to teach, yet we are willing to fund them just like public schools. With your tax dollars! The same public schools which are constrained in every respect by laws that have been passed over the years that dictate and mandate everything from how teachers are required to teach, how much of their time should be spent babysitting for the worst actors and what they need to do if they suspect any number of crimes have been committed by or against their students. Anyone who has followed the last thirty years of educational history in America has seen the slow erosion of quality that has come directly from teachers being overburdened with more and more requirements and regulations. The charter school subsidization has been both imagined and conjured up by well-heeled interests who still believe that separate is equal and that their children do not need to be mainstreamed with "those people". That is why the teaches had to be demonized, ridiculed and stripped of their rights to organize.

People who have enjoyed every sort of privilege have always sought to maintain their status, but in these times we have seen this become pathological. It is not that the tools of oppression, that have existed for generations, are not as lucrative as they once were.  The appetite for cash and power that comes with it is insatiable. In our system, the whims and desires of the 1% have never been sated by having enough. The uberwealthy have believed for years, and perhaps they will continue to believe, that the rest of us are sub-human and deserve their exploitation and the rhetoric that they control proves the fallacy. Recent work to bring the wealthy to heel has met rhetoric that labels the wealthiest corporate welfare whores as "makers" and the rest of us as "takers". The elderly, crippled, handicapped, destitute, disenfranchised and children, yeah, they are just out to bankrupt the bastions of industry, banking and information. WAKE THE FUCK UP! The richest people, worldwide, are the ones siphoning off potential earnings that could go to those people who slave their entire lives away making it possible for the wealthy to live in luxury.

Do I have to point out the fact that without the maids, the wait staff, the dry cleaners, the auto detailers and flight attendants, without the maintenance staff, the grocers and cops, without the teachers and military services to defend their wealth, these top dogs would have to get their own bones, clean up after themselves and make their own beds in the morning. We are the real makers and all the uber-wealthy seem to know how to do is take and guide the discussion away from how they might pay their fair share.

New Yorkers are finally getting behind a true patriot that is standing up to the uber-wealthy, asking for them to pay their fair share and it is making waves across the nation. I only hope that, in time, we will come to realize that giving them everything they want, all the time is just as bad for us as it is for them. Anyone who has raised a child knows that giving in always has unintended consequences. No one deserves to be ruled by a demanding child and that is exactly what the 1% have become. It is time to force them to grow up and develop a bit of compassion for the rest of us.

Happy Earthday!

A recent poll found that fully one quarter of us believe that the environmental improvements that we have made since the first Earthday have been inadequate. We still have tens of thousands of people dying prematurely from environmental contamination such as fly ash from coal burning, photochemical smog and clouds of toxic dust and fumes from foundries, asphalt and even fumes from commercial products and their packaging. The first tier of environmental protection revolved around the lowest hanging fruit as it were. If we could put another layer of filtration, or perhaps something as minor as a finer screen on the point sources that abounded a few decades ago, we could claim that we were doing all that we could to clean up our mess. In fact, the most hazardous contaminants often are small enough that our immune systems are unable to detect them and therefore, unable to clear them from our bodies. Some poisonous compounds are integrated into our bodies in such a way as to cause their damage over the long term, some actually skipping a generation before causing harm to our children.

The long list of people who said that they wanted a cleaner environment has been dwarfed by the billions of dollars that have been spent by those who wish to continue polluting for the profit that it means to them. How this can be justified as a "responsibility to stockholders", I may never know, but even today, I saw a commercial that was touting fracking as "less polluting" than other methods of energy production. Conoco Phillips, the company that implied, through this morning's commercial, that our children would have jobs if we continue to extract oil at higher and higher cost, wasting vast amounts of energy to pump high pressure steam far below the surface to extract the last residues of natural gas from rock that has locked it away for millennea, completely neglected to posit that there are other, less damaging ways to meet our needs through conservation, efficiency improvements and rethinking our dependence on fossil fuel. I know that it is their business to bring to the market oil and natural gas, but they should not be allowed to use public airwaves to lie to millions of people for the purpose of fattening their wallets. Those who have had the freedom to risk the lives of others for profit will not relinquish that right without a fight. Just as the child who is used to getting their way, the corporations and businesses that have been spoiled in this way will throw tantrums each and every time that they are urged to clean up their act. These corporate giants do not care who they hurt, they have proven that by their actions.

The economic terrorism that corporate business leaders employ in each and every case, is treason. Their commitment to inaction, and willingness to pay fines rather than do the right thing show that they are happy to operate outside existing law because they can. There has never been a study proving that effective environmental regulation leads to reduction of jobs, wages, profits or economic activity. In fact, when government regulations have reduced environmental hazards, it has increased jobs, created even higher profits (through waste reduction), created more higher skill jobs and bolstered economic activity. Then, why the morass between what we know is necessary and what industry is willing to do? The common knowledge that most parents come to find is operating on an international level with corporations, virtually worldwide. The more you bend and sacrifice to "get along" with a tyrant, the more often and more violently they will protest conventions of civility. Spoiled brat is a term that has come to be known because we all have seen them. It is completely possible to stop bad behavior, but yet, many parents think that by giving in, "peace" will be arrived at sooner and at lower "cost". What stops this tragic cycle is when a parent, or in this case the government, (which is, after all, the people) stops ameliorating the spoiled brat and makes them tow the line with regard to socially acceptable behavior, developing awareness of the rights of others and in the most tragic cases, developing the listening skills required to understand the needs of others, rather than only attending to their own.

The din that has erupted from the general public has been toned down, padded if you will, through the inaction of decades, leniency on the part of regulators, an extremely well-funded opposition to real and meaningful change and the contempt that polluting industries continue to have for our right to clean soil,  air and water. I continue to encourage my readers to check out the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). This is a national network that requires polluters to self report their emissions and document them with the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). This tool allows the average citizen to type in their zip code or location and find out who is pumping what into the air around where they live. It was an eye opener for me and I assume others will be equally interested in who the corporate outlaws are in their neighborhoods. We humans often have to carry an inter-generational legacy that we are ashamed of. In the case of how we treat our environment, we have the power to set things right for the generations that follow, but it will require taking measures that have not been used yet. We can no longer afford to sit idly by, waiting for the world to change. We need to turn our voices and wallets to the task of changing the world from the grass roots up. If the government refuses to protect us from foes who are killing off the population from within, then we have to step outside the realm of their influence and change things without their help.

Dollars seem to be the only language that corporations understand. When you get wind of who the sources of toxic compounds in your community are, use your voice to educate others about the real and despicable actions of those bad neighbors. If there were a pedophile living next door to a local single mother of two, who worked dawn to dusk every day to keep her family off welfare, you would let her know, right? The same holds true for the devilish money-grubbers who seek to make their profits by sacrificing our health and our welfare. We need to let others know, through social media, heart-felt discussions with our loved-ones and even with people we don't know that well. This behavior is wrong and must not be tolerated. With the spoiled child, a mere look might be enough to stop their bad behavior. Corporations only have eyes for cash, so as their profits fall and eventually dry up, the vast pools of money that they have used to convince us that we cannot get along without their bad behavior will dry up as well. This Earthday, make it your business to know who is operating in your community, recognize the spreaders of poison for what they are. There was a time when we were not even treated as well as slaves. Those who profit from our pain and the premature loss of our loved ones need to bow out. We are the only ones with the power to change what we spend our dollars on. Do not treat your decisions lightly, every dollar spent or invested supports a cascading series of events that allows each and every thing we use to be made and come to us. This goes for energy, products, foods and even our sources of entertainment. Learn as much as you can about this complex world and act according to your conscience, this will improve the environment more than government regulations. It will help more than you can measure, perhaps more than you can imagine. It may help just enough to save your life, the life of someone you love, or maybe even the life of a stranger. We are well past the point of cleaning up trash and telling one another that this is enough, or all we can hope for. Now is the time to remove the bad actors, stand up for our right to clean soil, air and water, and to invest our own time in making lifestyles that keep our hard-earned dollars out of the hands of rogues and scallywags.