Not content with mere deforestation and the vast destruction of biodiversity on land, Man has now expanded to destroy the oceans through overfishing, ocean acidification from CO2 emissions, agricultural runoff, flushing pharmaceuticals down the drain and unleashing crude oil directly into the ocean waters. It almost seems as if mankind were somehow bent on destroying itself by first destroying everything else on the planet just to see what happens.
Human beings, by any honest accounting, are repeat offenders engaged in crimes against nature. This article, by the way, isn't some clever way to try to push us all toward a U.N.-controlled world government where every human action is regulated by environmental cops; it's merely an observation of what's really happening right now on our planet. I'm a Constitutionalist and remain strongly opposed to UN control as much as any properly-informed American. In no way do I support suppressing our individual freedoms or liberties. In fact, the problems here are not with the People but rather with the corporations.
It is the corporations, in essence, that are the criminals who are now destroying the very world around us, and if We the People continue to let these corporations engage in such actions, it won't be long before we wake up and find ourselves enslaved in a Corporatocracy that has stolen from us the very world in which we had hoped to raise our children.
What is abundantly clear now is that corporations will do anything to make money, from the cruel and inhumane factory farming of cows to dumping millions of gallons of toxic chemicals in the ocean to try to sink the dead sea animals in the Gulf. Corporations would set fire to the entire planet if that act could somehow boost profits by 50% next quarter.
The unbridled greed that drives these corporations is simply incompatible with sustainable life on our planet. Through their careless, greed-driven actions, corporations are threatening YOUR life and the lives of your children.
I say enough is enough.
It is becoming increasingly clear that any action to hold these corporations accountable for their actions must come from the People -- most likely in the form of a dedicated revolt, or perhaps even an armed "mass citizens' arrest" of the corporate criminals.
Imagine ten thousand armed, angry citizens from Texas, Louisiana and Florida converging on the BP headquarters in Houston, led by a local Sheriff, marching in and arresting all the top CEOs of British Petroleum. That's the kind of action that needs to start taking place if any justice is ever to be found in our modern world of corporate corruption and government collusion.
When it comes to corporate crimes, the justice system has utterly failed. The corporations that commit crimes are almost never held responsible. Consider the aftermath of the Goldman Sachs fiasco in 2008 - 2009, when Wall Street banksters ripped off the American people to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and then got bailed out by the U.S. government with trillions of dollars in gift money. How is that justice?
Similarly, after drug giant Pfizer was found to have committed massive marketing fraud that violated federal law, the company was deemed "too big to fail" and was simply given a free pass by the government to stay in business, defrauding customers, states and nations. Pfizer set up a shell company to take the fall for its crimes, then went right back to business as usual. Read the story on CNN if you want to learn more: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/0...
As CNN reports: Imagine being charged with a crime, but an imaginary friend takes the rap for you. That is essentially what happened when Pfizer, the world's largest pharmaceutical company, was caught illegally marketing Bextra, a painkiller that was taken off the market in 2005 because of safety concerns. When the criminal case was announced last fall, federal officials touted their prosecution as a model for tough, effective enforcement. "It sends a clear message" to the pharmaceutical industry, said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division. But beyond the fanfare, a CNN Special Investigation found another story, one that officials downplayed when they declared victory. It's a story about the power major pharmaceutical companies have even when they break the laws intended to protect patients..."
Whether it's Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Food or Big Agriculture, every large and powerful corporations gets away with murder because laws are never properly applied to them. BP is destroying an entire ocean -- and the livelihoods of millions of people -- and will probably get off with a large fine and a slap on the wrist. In two years, it will all be back to business as usual, polluting the oceans, destroying life and ignoring safety rules and regulations once again while the American people suffer.
The real terrorists, it turns out, have "Inc." after their name. And if we really want to go after the terrorists who present a clear and present danger to our health and lives, we must rise up against the corporate machine that now controls our media, our food, our sick-care system, our patents, our elected officials and our energy. We must gather our forces to make legally-justified citizens' arrests of those at the top who are responsible for these atrocities against nature and the People. We must unite out of a common desire for survival against the corporate criminals who are destroying our very futures as we speak.
We must seek the aid of the local Sheriffs, Constables and community law enforcement officials who would join us in making these arrests, and then we must march on the corporate headquarters of these criminal corporations, right through their front doors and into their corporate offices where arrests will be made at gunpoint.
And why gunpoint? Because corporations do not respect law, nor ethics, nor morality, nor compassion towards others. They only respect one thing: force. So we must reluctantly use force -- backed by the common sense of common law -- to make these corporations stop destroying our planet and our livelihoods. I'm not saying we march in there and shoot them; I'm saying we march in and arrest them and bring them to trial in local courts, with local jurors who can make local commonsense decisions about what to do with these criminal corporate executives.
The feds cannot be trusted on this. We must deal with these corporations on a local level, with the widespread support of the everyday people whose lives are being destroyed by these corporations.
If the world's powerful corporations are allowed to continue operating as they have done, they will destroy our world and cause the collapse of human civilization. We cannot survive when suffocated under a cloud of chemical toxicity, financial fraud, genetically-modified seeds and widespread environmental destruction. Corporations are incapable of acting within the guidelines of long-term sustainable living. Their power and reach are now so great that they have the capacity to destroy modern civilization (which is quite fragile already).
Rising up against the corporations now means fighting for our very survival. What BP has made as clear as day is that we must now make a choice: We can choose to appease powerful corporations and exempt them from any real enforcement of rules, regulations or common sense; or we can take a stand against them, arrest their top executives, shut down their operations, revoke their corporate charters and set course in a new world without the destructive influence of endless greed backed by incessant profit-taking.
The worship of profit has become a scourge on human civilization. Unbridled greed is now our curse. "Economic activity", taken as a lone figure without the context in which it was generated, holds no measure of real value, and it should never been pursued for its own sake.
We must now shift our consciousness to a new era of the protection of life. We must value quality of life, not imaginary numbers in a bank account, and quality of life is a complex, interdependent equation that necessarily involves the sustaining of all the diverse ecosystems that now remain on our planet. For humans to live sustainably, happily and abundantly, we must stop destroying nature and start protecting it. We must be its steward, not its exploiter. And those corporations engaged in the mass destruction or poisoning of living ecosystems must be courageously arrested as criminals and prosecuted for their crimes against both the People and the planet.
There is no other way that we will survive the next century. Poisoning our planet on such a massive scale in an inexcusable act. We the People will either rise up against it, or we shall be destroyed by it.
I, for one, am willing to fight for our survival. Because I don't want human civilization to just be a sorry footnote in the history of life on planet Earth.