Dr. Vandana Shiva Has Filed Suit Against BP for Crimes Against Nature!

photograph of Vandana Shiva is from here

This is the most awesome legal news I've heard in a while. I found this notice *here* at ontheWILDERside.com. The news is also posted on her organisation's website, Navdanya, *here*.

Wish her well, please. And send her money too or support the effort in any ways you can.

@drvandanashiva
Dr. Vandana Shiva

Just filed a case in constitutional court of ecuadar on rights of nature and BPs crime against nature

November 26, 2010 9:59 am 

The Politics and Price of Water, and Human Life: Which do you think governments and corporations value more?

A woman pumps water from a borehole in Katine, in north-east Uganda. Photograph: Martin Godwin/Guardian

Water is a radical profeminist issue because it is women of color, poor women, and other women are responsible for making sure they and their loved ones stay alive by getting it from a preferably unpolluted source to the mouths of the thirsty--which often requires journeying for many miles.

The politics and corporate control of water is terribly serious feminist issue and I wish more men who claim to be feminists would take up this issue, as such.

The image and caption above and all that follows is cross-posted from the PovertyMattersBlog at The Guardian. Please click on the title below to link back.

Is the stage being set for new water wars in Africa?

The African Development Bank insists that the only way to tackle the water and sanitation crisis on the continent is through privatisation and making people pay. But putting a price on water has a contentious history in Africa

 

With diarrhoea the biggest killer of children in Africa, the urgency of the water and sanitation crisis on the continent is hard to question. But while some NGOs are calling on African governments to make water and sanitation integral parts of their national public health strategies, and fund them accordingly, the African Development Bank (AfDB) announced this week that closing the continent's multi-billion dollar infrastructure gap requires new investors and paying customers.

Leading a special session on "financing instruments in water for growth and development" at this year's Africa Water Week summit, the bank said that an estimated annual $45bn-$60bn (£28bn-38bn) is needed to improve Africa's water infrastructure – of which $11bn (£7bn) is flagged for the continent's drinking-water supply and sanitation needs.

"Financing from official development assistance [ODA] and national budgets is clearly not sufficient to close the financing gap in the water and sanitation sector," said the bank, which is urging governments and water sector professionals to make their countries and their programmes more attractive to other investors.

In the run up to the UN summit on the millennium development goals in New York in September, the UN estimated that the total amount of overseas aid to developing countries will fall by around $108bn (£68.5bn) in 2010.

What's more, the optimism that once accompanied ODA (the official term for aid) has faded fast in the years since the 2005 Gleneagles summit, when G8 members projected that aid to Africa would double by 2010.

"Africa will receive only about $11bn out of the $25bn increase envisaged at Gleneagles," said the UN.

To fill the shortfall, the AfDB believes money can be tapped from greater user contributions, savings from utility reforms, private sector investments and contributions from private foundations.

They also point to micro-finance as a possible mechanism for funding water services at a local level, along with climate adaptation funds.

Commercial finance, says the bank, can help to fill the gap between demand and the resources available from government budgets and aid, and is "perhaps the largest untapped source of finance for water".

Meeting with African governments, civil society organisations and representatives from the private sector in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this week, the bank released two new reports on water and sanitation on the continent.

The first – a hefty, two-volume, 178-page report on "Water sector governance in Africa" – signals weak governance as a main reason for poor water and sanitation services on the continent.

Its second report focuses on how to finance the water sector in both urban and rural areas, promoting user fees as the primary mechanism for recovering costs.

"Over 25 years have passed since the water decade and the truth remains that adequate cost recovery is still one of the major obstacles to maintenance and expansion of drinking water supply in developing countries," says the bank, adding that charging for water was the only way to make infrastructure and services financially sustainable.

Human right issue

In July this year, the UN general assembly declared that access to clean water and sanitation is a human right.

But the bank argues that it is a "misconception that rights entitle people to free water; instead, water and sanitation should be clean, accessible and affordable for all. People are expected to contribute financially or otherwise to the extent that they can do so".

The issue is getting the prices right, not about whether or not a price should be charged, it seems. Instead of subsidising water for the poor, service providers should offer cheaper options, such as public toilets and bathing houses.

The bank states that subsidising water supplies and services distorts a customer's understanding of the value of water and leads to waste.

But placing a price on water has a contentious history in Africa, as it has across the developing world.

Ten years ago, the World Bank-sponsored privatisation of the municipal water supply in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, prompted a series of mass demonstrations, later labelled the "Cochabamba water wars". After months of protests, the government declared a "state of siege" before promising the repeal of water privatisation legislation, while the then World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, insisted that the public subsidy of water services only leads to the waste of resources.

In her book, Earth Democracy, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva argues that it is a myth that people only value water once it is priced on the market.

"Women who walk 10 miles for water do not waste a drop, even though their water is not provided through market transactions."

Meanwhile, South Africa's experience with the privatisation of water services sparked widespread protests over the human cost of placing a price on clean water.

In 2000, a cholera epidemic broke out in South Africa's KwaZulu-Natal province, infecting some 120,000 people and claiming the lives of 265. Local authorities in the province had previously set up a system of prepaid water meters to collect user fees. But the institution of the meters and the fees meant that many went elsewhere in search of water, with tragic results.

"Those who cannot afford to pay for water in advance from communal meters or have been cut off from services for not paying rising water bills are forced to seek sources in polluted puddles, rivers and canals that carry disease," reported the New York Times in 2003.

"Privatisation is a new kind of apartheid," added Richard Maholo, leader of the South African Crisis Water Committee.

"Apartheid separated whites from blacks. Privatisation separates the rich from the poor."

According to WaterAid, 80% of African countries are off-track for the MDG target on sanitation. Half of the African continent is set to miss the target on drinking water. And every day 2,000 African children die from diarrhoea. It would be hard to deny that something needs to be done.

However, there will inevitably be concerns that the AfDB is using the urgency of the water and sanitation crisis in Africa to push through an agenda for the commodification of water and the privatisation of services. Is the stage being set for new water wars in Africa?

How the World Bank is Drying Up Your Water Supply

That "water" is a feminist/profeminist issue ought to go without much explanation. For women to have human rights, they must have their lives and to live one needs water, and clear water at that. But the World Bank and globalising corporations and governments of greed don't quite see it that way. What they see are dollar signs when they see bodies of water, not the rights of humans and non-human animals to have access to freely flowing water, or naturally gathered pools of it. What we know is that more and more water is being polluted and misused by corporations. What we know is that women travel farther and more frequently than men to gather water for survival for themselves and others.

What is needed is the de-privatisation of water resources, and a paradigmatic shift away from the racist and patriarchal attempt to "own" and "possess" and "control" and "dominate" everyone and everything, from people to animals to sea life to water to seeds to soil to land, so rich people can get richer while leaving the poor to struggle or die. What we know is that the Global South is more vulnerable than the Global North with regard to water resources, and the Original World (also known as the Third and Fourth World: countries where mostly poor people and people of color live; and places across the globe where Indigenous people live) is more vulnerable than the Last World (misnamed The First World).

The image that opens this post and all that follows is from *here*:

10 September 2010

Our water interests sold down the river

Kellie Tranter

Did you notice recent reports that one Richard Lourey is abroad hawking Australian water?

Yes, he's a water marketeer. Yes, he's selling Australian farm water to investors in Asia, Europe and North America. Yes, he's trying to flog water rights along the Murray Darling Basin! Surely you remember the Murray Darling Basin? Yes, that's the one: the major river system for the eastern half of our continent that may not have enough consistently running water to survive, let alone to satisfy the already rapacious demands of its human exploiters.

Yet he's trying to get overseas speculators in on a bit of wheeling and dealing in its precious flow? It shouldn't come as a surprise if you look at recent history.

World Bank
Dr Vandana Shiva, the recipient of the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize, pointed out in 2001 that "...The water privatisation policy of the World Bank was articulated in a 1992 paper entitled "Improving Water Resources Management." The Bank believes that water availability at low or no cost is uneconomic and inefficient. Even the poor should pay..."

In 2003 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists discovered that despite the World Bank's contentions that it does not force privatisation on the poor, research by ICIJ and the bank itself showed that privatisation is playing an ever-increasing role in bank lending policies. Using data available from the World Bank Web site, ICIJ analysed 276 loans labelled "water supply" awarded by the bank between 1990 and November 2002. In about one third of the projects, the World Bank required the country to privatise its water operations in some way before it received funds.

Here in good old New South Wales the free marketeers didn't need the helping hand of external "persuasion": water privatisation here seems to have been kicked off at the COAG meeting in February 1994 with the decision to establish an open water market as part of a national push towards a uniform system of tradeable water rights. The decision making occurred in blinkered ignorance - the National Land & Water Resources Audit 2002-08 Achievements and Challenges report highlights that Australia still does not have the necessary information to deal effectively with the pressing environmental and natural resource management issues it faces - but that didn't slow the push of the marketeers to open the trading!

This local philosophy was consistent with the World Bank's approach. An article 'Tradable Property Rights to Water How to improve water use and resolve water conflicts' that appeared in the World Bank's 'Public Policy for the Private Sector' February 1995 edition took the now familiar line that:

"...Tradable water rights can help shift water to high value uses in a way that is cheaper and fairer than some of the present alternatives....Under a tradable water rights system, the public sector's role in the construction, operation and maintenance of hydraulic infrastructure can be reduced to financing selected high-return activities with strong positive externalities or public goods characteristics. The market - not the government - will determine the allocation and pattern of water use and the prices charged for water rights..."

A great idea if they're creating a true market instead of a casino, and if the players and the regulators can be trusted with our most precious resource of all. But they weren't, and they can't.

Commoditisation of water in NSW
The Carr Govt introduced the Water Management Act in 2000. Its most significant change was that one did not have to own or occupy land to hold a water access licence. Permitting them to be held by anyone, including a passive investor, allegedly facilitated objectives such as maximising the social and economic benefits of water to the community while being consistent with the maintenance of long-term productivity of land. Unfortunately this kind of government propaganda, dubious economics and high fallutin' "public benefit" claptrap prevailed in the absence of any objective public benefit analysis or organised community opposition.

Important questions were posed but not answered: Who is the community? Who really benefits? Is a transfer of water rights to financial institutions and speculators something that is going to maximise the social and economic benefits to the rural community? Does gambling in water prices by water traders achieve this? Do the regulators care about the social or environmental effects of allowing water values to increase?

Ongoing concerns that have been raised about privatisation here include:

• It basically gifts massive amounts of water to irrigators who did not pay for this previously publicly owned "investment" in the first place.
• The whole plan lacks focus toward an end goal, with no distinction between water sold to supply overseas markets and water sold for domestic purposes, and no guarantee that water will go where it is most needed.
• Environmental risks associated with water markets.
• Last year Maude Barlow, Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the UN General Assembly said "...While trading is still supposed to be limited to rural communities, it is only a matter of time before it is going to be opened up both to cities and to private foreign investors anxious to find new sources of water in countries that still permit the foreign sale of this precious commodity. And who is to stop large water owners from deciding that their water is worth more on the open market than being used to grow food - the reason they were given these free allocations in the first place?..." She gave the example of Chile, where all water is a private commodity and local farmers have been put off the land by big agribusiness and mining interests. Her concerns apply equally here in Australia.
• The 'sleeper' water entitlements will awaken.

The ultimate question is whether or not the putative intention of the legislation has played out? You can bet it hasn't, and it won't.

Haven't we already seen farmers express concerns about Macquarie Agribusiness buying up water rights to secure water for its investments?

Privatisation
Not long before Carr took up his post with Macquarie Bank his government laid the ground work for a futures market in water rights. A NSW State Water media release from July 2005 reads:

A water index futures market would provide a reliant, or water exposed businesses with an opportunity to hedge their risks to future climatic factors, particularly water availability. An ability to hedge future risks leads to better informed investment decisions and in turn stimulates economic activity, creating jobs and more certain profits for businesses. The establishment of a futures market would enable financial service organisations to develop simple yet effective products for the rural community designed to reduce the impact of drought or flood.

Rubbish! 'Financial service organisations' exist to make profit and they will profit by selling water to miners or to farmers, who are ultimately the only other real market in rural Australia, at prices that guarantee their profits. The press release doesn't mention environmental concerns, or any limitations on the activities of overseas 'investors' or local speculators.

Essentially buying water now operates, it seems to me, like a bet on future scarcity but with a guaranteed "win" for those who have the money to play. In the driest inhabited continent on the planet, its drought conditions exacerbated by climate change, the only way for the price to go is up. It won't be long before only those who can afford to pay for the water will have the luxury of it. And domestic consumers are going to suffer as much as our surviving farmers.

Water Brokers
Now with such a wonderful, well thought out scheme to benefit all and sundry one would have thought that the NSW State Govt would have had an effective licensing regime in place when it introduced the Water Management Act 2000. After all, everyone else seems to be regulated nowadays.

Apparently not. The National Water Commission did commission The Allen Consulting Group to investigate national and jurisdictional governance arrangements for the conduct of market intermediaries and appropriate governance options, but a "minimalist intervention" approach was recommended.

So the wheelers and dealers are free to wheel and deal, substantially regulated only by the general law: for water brokers that are corporations the (Federal) ACCC has released a publication called 'Water brokers and exchanges - your fair trading obligations', and for those operating in partnership or as sole traders the equivalent State laws administered by the (NSW) Department of Fair Trading come into play.

If that arrangement is okay why was Waterfind, one of Australia's main water brokers, calling late last year for more regulation of water brokers (ie. the introduction of a licensing regime for water brokers; brokers to conduct all trading activities through an independently audited trust account which is protected from creditors; brokers to be precluded from buying or selling water for profit on their own behalf; and the requirement for brokers to retain professional indemnity insurance to protect their clients against any business negligence)?

To be a reputable water broker you apparently need to be associated with the Water Brokers Compensation Fund, a member of the Australian Water Brokers Association and follow the Australian Water Brokers Association Code of Ethics and Standards. Even so, there have been reports of water brokers double dipping on water trading commissions. But without a licensing regime the shonks can't exactly be struck off or prevented from operating as a water broker even if they are convicted criminals!

Our new federal government needs to urgently acknowledge that access to an adequate potable water supply is a basic human right, and that Australia's limited water resources need to be closely managed for the benefit of all Australians. Unless it does it will not be able to gather accurate information and formulate and implement policies which address the needs of Australia.

Within the framework of addressing the supply of potable water, the requirements of industry and agriculture have to be met in tandem with the needs of the general population. Private enterprise does not and will not distribute water equitably or in a way that promotes the national interest. It needs to be recognised that if the federal government does not voluntarily assume the role of conservator and distributor of water, acting without fear or favour to promote the national interest, sooner or later scarcity will force that role upon it. Corrupt and parochial state governments can have no part in such undertakings, and neither can cashed up private companies who grease the wheels of government for their own ends.

What Australia urgently needs, as former diplomat Bruce Haigh has recommended on several occasions, is a national regulatory authority with teeth, answering to the Federal Parliament, and managing, regulating and allocating water in the interests of the country as a whole.

Kellie Tranter is a lawyer and writer.

Guess Who's Making Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, a Much Wealthier Man? Yup, the U.S. Government's Defence Department

 All that follows if from The Washington Post *here*.

BP has steady sales at Defense Department despite U.S. scrutiny

Gallery

BP oil spill cleanup and containment

BP, the government and an army of volunteers are fighting to contain and clean the millions of gallons of oil spewing from the site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 5, 2010 

 

The Defense Department has kept up its immense purchases of aviation fuel and other petroleum products from BP even as the oil company comes under scrutiny for potential violations of federal and state laws related to Gulf of Mexico well explosion, according to U.S. and company officials.

President Obama said last month that the company's "recklessness" in the gulf contributed to the disaster, and he promised that BP will "pay for the damage." Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on June 2 that Justice Department lawyers were looking into possible violations of civil and criminal statutes. "If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be forceful in our response," he said.

BP, meanwhile, remains a heavy supplier of military fuel under contracts worth at least $980 million in the current fiscal year, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. In fiscal 2009, BP was the Pentagon's largest single supplier of fuel, providing 11.7 percent of the total purchased, and in 2010, its contracts amount to roughly the same percentage, according to DLA spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.

"BP is an active participant in multiple ongoing Defense Logistics Agency acquisition programs," Schirmacher said, without providing details. BP spokesman Robert Wine said he was aware of at least one "big contract" signed by the U.S. military after the oil rig explosion on April 20, involving the supply of multiple fuels for its operations in Europe.

So far, members of Congress have discussed barring BP from any new oil and gas drilling leases, not from fuel sales to the government. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who co-chairs the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, said last week that he would introduce legislation to shut BP out of such leases for the next seven years, as punishment for what he described as "serial" legal violations. But Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in a statement that "the U.S. government needs to look at all possible options when it comes to showing BP, or any corporate bad actor, that a continued culture of cost cutting and increased risk taking will absolutely not be tolerated."

Even before the gulf debacle, the Environmental Protection Agency had begun to explore cutting off BP from all federal contracts -- including those with the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC), which buys all fuel for the military services. The EPA plays the lead role in debarment proceedings related to the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, and its probe was sparked by BP's 2006 oil spill in Alaska and a 2005 explosion at a refinery in Texas.

The EPA's deliberations, however, are suspended until the gulf spill investigations conclude, according to an EPA spokeswoman. The agency may decide to shut off federal contracts with specific divisions within BP, or with the whole company "if it is in the public interest to do so," it said in May. Any such action would be meant to punish "environmental noncompliance or other misconduct," it said.

Jeanne Pascal, a former EPA lawyer who until recently oversaw the review of BP's possible debarment, has said she initially supported taking such action but held off after an official at the Defense Department warned her that the Pentagon depended heavily on BP fuel for its operations in the Middle East. "My contact at DESC, another attorney, told me that BP was supplying approximately 80 percent of the fuel being used to move U.S. forces" in the region, Pascal said. She added that "BP was very fortunate in that there is an exception when the U.S. is involved in a military action or a war."

Pascal then sought a settlement to allow contracting with BP while forcing the company to elevate an internal office dealing with health, safety and environmental issues within its corporate structure. She also demanded that the company keep an ombudsman, retired federal judge Stanley Sporkin, whom BP first hired after the Alaska spill but had sought to let go. BP resisted both demands, and the talks were stalemated when the Deepwater Horizon rig sank, Pascal said.

"At some point, debarment attorneys throughout the government need to look at BP's record," she said. "This is one of the wealthiest corporations in the world. . . . Do we want to do business with this foreign corporation, which has a horrendous record of chronically violating U.S. law? You have to look at the overall behavior pattern."

A spokeswoman for the Defense Department, Wendy L. Snyder, gave a different account of the internal debarment discussions. She said the Defense Logistics Agency "informed the EPA that there are adequate procedures and processes to protect the U.S. military missions should EPA determine that BP should be debarred." That claim was reinforced by Schirmacher, who said that "none of BP's current energy contracts are in direct support of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan" and that the department could meet its requirements without BP fuel. But she indicated that the Pentagon had no intention of taking such action in the absence of an EPA decision.

Wine, the BP spokesman, said that although he is not familiar with details of the company's negotiations with EPA, Sporkin's tenure was extended earlier this year until the middle of 2011. He did not challenge Pascal's claim that BP's health, safety and environmental unit had been moved lower on the corporate structure before the gulf spill, reporting to the head of a business unit instead of directly to the top executive. But, Wine said, "what difference does that make?"

"Safety comes through the organization through every root," he said, and remains "paramount in every part of the business."

Several federal agencies have continuing contracts with BP, although none worth as much as the Pentagon's. Since 2008, the Federal Aviation Administration has contracted to spend at least $2.26 million to station weather, communications and aerial surveillance devices on several BP platforms in the gulf, including the Atlantis oil production platform roughly 100 miles from Deepwater Horizon's former location. Critics, including a former BP contractor, have alleged that the Atlantis was built without proper safety controls, which BP denies.

FAA spokeswoman Laura J. Brown said that BP's environmental and legal record was not a consideration in her agency's contracts. The Atlantis platform was selected "based purely on how it would support air traffic," she said.

"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced." -- President Barack Obama, 15 June, 2010. Whose interests are served by this view?

[image is from here]

This post was revised in tone and some content on 19 June 2010 ECD. Thanks to a friend for the critique of the original version! (The criticism was that naming President Obama "a liar" participates in a racist/white conservative Republican narrative about the President.)

Last night U.S. President Obama proclaimed the following, opening his address to the U.S. Empire:

"Already, this oil spill is the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.  And unlike an earthquake or a hurricane, it’s not a single event that does its damage in a matter of minutes or days.  The millions of gallons of oil that have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico are more like an epidemic, one that we will be fighting for months and even years."

President Obama is presenting the version of history that accomplishes a white male supremacist conceit. The U.S. status quo depends and thrives on the denial of what this country does to people of color and land and water every day. Including to him and his family.

And I've written more about why I call this view of reality "bullshit" in a recent post, here. Invisibilising GENOCIDE and ECOCIDE against Indigenous people globally, on this blood-soaked and chemically poisoned soil--what soil is left, that is--is nothing new, didn't begin with President Obama and won't end with him. What anyone in high office in this country will do, out of political necessity, is proclaim contemporary problems as the worst ever, because it is imperative that we forget our past and deny most of our present. President Obama's proclamation isn't his, at its core. It is bound to and by the anti-historical view that this country stands on--one that has never served people of color or the land upon which they live. The sad truth is that a U.S. president cannot do anything but support the government designed to perpetuate and perpetrate the genocide against the descendants of West African slaves, and genocide and ecocide against American Indians.

From supporting chemical agribusiness, to grim factory farming, to gross and corrupt corporate waste, to advocating putting nuclear waste into the earth where American Indians live and struggle for economic, social, and environmental justice, there is a years-long environmental disaster that precedes by many decades and is centuries longer than what BP has done in the last two months. BP's actions were made entirely possible, and inevitable, because of the U.S. government not tracking their actions and not caring about the sea, the land, or the people who earn their living from each, by "relaxing" regulations of oil corporations, so that those companies can make more money for their CEOs and shareholders. How fucking corrupt and inhumane is all that? ALL of it, not just what has happened in the last two months.

This is a country which has, as Andrea Dworkin has written, "no memory and no mind". Nowhere is this more evident than in President Obama's opening remarks to the citizens of this greedy, bullying, rapist, delusional, sociopathic country that has never had an ethical center or moral soul since Columbus and other serial rapists and serial murderers set their deadly feet on this land.

The U.S government and its spokespeople have to pretend genocide and ecocide aren't standard practice for the U.S. government, including by planting our bombs and poisons in the lands where people of color live, virtually non-stop. This statement is backed up with plenty of evidence, below.


To the U.S. government: please stop ignoring the genocide you are is committing, barbarically, savagely, and callously, against the people and land of the First Nations of Turtle Island.

When you think "Terrorists" think White Christian Het Male Supremacists, and all those who ardently wave the U.S. flag to support and defend their crimes against humanity, non-human animals, and the Earth. President Obama won't oppose their agenda, primarily because he's not truly empowered by office to do so.

Accounts of off-shore terrorism in the form of racist and rapist military attacks that includes environmental destruction by the U.S. government, is detailed here.

Accounts of on-shore terrorism in the form of genocidally racist and rapist military attacks that includes environmental destruction is detailed here and here.

"I'd like my life back" says BP CEO Tony Hayward: does "BP" stand for Billionaire Prick?

[image of Tony Hayward is from here]

This is on Twitter: "BP CEO Tony Hayward says he wants his life back 6 minutes ago via web".

His greed has allowed him to "poke" the floor of the sea and there's an explosion, human deaths, and a massive (there aren't words...) oil leak, and entire ecosystems and local economies are ruined, people relying on their work at shore to earn their living, and that's it. Their lives have no income, no support. And let's not forget about the animals on land, in the sea, and the birds who are getting poisoned and are dying, which is impacting a breeding area for birds that go far north and far south at other times of the year.

He's done so much that is harmful and HE wants his life back?????? What about the lives of people who, once this oil leak finally ends, will NEVER get their lives back? In this latest "mistake" (CNN is using that term) we begin the body count with those lost to the explosion, now estimated at more like 18 than the originally reported 9--and he wants HIS life back. And the thousands of animals who will die because of this, and the people's lives he's ruined economically, many who are part of already populations--the poor, the working class, people of color, people who survived the GWBush/Katrina disaster and carry trauma from that and now this? But it's really all about how quickly this multi-millionaire (if not multi-billionaire), can get his life to return to normal. Let's be clear: a tiny fraction of the world's human population will never, ever, ever know what his normal life is like. To have everything he needs for every occasion, or the purchase power to get it. All health care anywhere in the world, homes and vacations anywhere in the world, the best education for his family, a will to ensure that his children's children's children will never have to work a day in their lives.

The man whose company earns BILLIONS a quarter--in three months--wants HIS LIFE BACK? Talk about out of touch and self-absorbed!! One wonders which if his homes he can't sleep in due to tossing and turning, and whether the food someone cooks for him is now not sitting well in his anxious stomach. Concern about HIS well-being ought to be last on our collective list of people to show compassion to. Let's show compassion for everyone around the world who is impacted negatively by greedy oil companies and their many disasters we never hear about, and those who are negatively impacted by Western white men's corporate greed, which has caused so many people to lose their homes in the U.S.

I'll put him on the list of people to show concern for just under the financial crooks and thieves on Wall Street.

Let him give the region he's impacted last quarter's earnings from BP. For a start. Then hand over his wealth, then rewrite his will to leave any property and that Swiss bank account to the victims and their families, to animal rescue personnel and environmental activist groups.

Let him get the life of a working class or poor person he's irreparably harmed, for the rest of his life. Let him live out the rest of his life in jail. We'll see how much he values "justice" and "fairness" when the time comes for him to make reparations.

I'll tell you this: whether or not the oil stops spilling out of the pipes, his life is already a lot more comfortable than practically anyone else's on Earth. He doesn't even need to "get back" the life he lived to live without worries about anything. Because it is unlikely the U.S. and UK corporate and legal communities will not insist he lose his extremely privileged quality of life.

Oil Companies Commit Not Only Ecocide, but Genocide

 [image is from here]

The news of the month in the U.S. dominant media is the massive destruction of ocean and its life, the wetlands and its life, and human communities including many people of color impacted economically due to the disaster. BP is a white British corporation which has shown gross disregard for ocean life, land life, and human rights. Below is one more example of what is horribly wrong with the oil extraction and gasoline production and distribution companies. Following this report is another from Democracy Now with some fairly concise discussion about the horror that is this oil company's massacre of life. A white man who has written about the ocean is a guest, Carl Safina. An excerpt from the article that comes first in this post is here:

Indigenous community leaders Guillermo Grefa (Kichwa) from Rumipamba, Ecuador and Emem Okon from Nigeria accused Chevron's operations of causing the extinction of indigenous peoples, while Debora Barros Fince (Organizacion Wayuu Munserrat, La Guajira, Colombia) added that Chevron supports the paramilitary operations of the current government in Colombia. Grefa asked, "When are you going to clean up what you have contaminated?

An excerpt from the video later in this post is here:

[T]he dispersant is a toxic pollutant that has been applied in the volume of millions of gallons and I think has greatly exacerbated the situation. I think the whole idea of using a dispersant is wrong, and I think it’s part of the whole pattern of BP trying to cover up and hide the body. They don’t want us to see how much oil, so they’ve taken this oil that was concentrated at the surface and dissolved it. But when you dissolve it, it’s still there, and it actually gets more toxic, because instead of being in big blobs, it’s now dissolved and can get across the gills, get into the mouths of animals. The water below the floating oil was water. Now it’s this toxic soup. 
...

And in fact, unfortunately, the Obama administration, I think, blew it on the high ground here. You know, there was Sarah Palin, "drill, baby, drill," right? So we don’t want that; we elect Obama. And then what happens is we get "drill, baby, drill." That’s what we got. -- Carl Safina

This is a cross post by Brenda at Censored News. Click on the title just below to link back. Thank you, Brenda.

Chevron Disrespects Indigenous Leaders Exposing True Cost of Chevron

http://www.truecostofchevron.com/
Contacts: Diana Pei Wu, dianapeiwu@gmail.com, 510-333-3889
Sangita Nayak, emailsangita@gmail.com, 414-412-4518

Chevron Disrespects Community Leaders Exposing True Cost of Chevron


Indigenous and global leaders ignored by Chevron decision-makers, expect showdown at shareholder meeting

Hi res, rights free photos available at http://rainforestactionnetwork.smugmug.com/Change-Chevron/True-Cost-of-Chevron-Press/12311033_j4CMA#878829788_Uw4tB

Update: Protesters arrested outside Chevron stockholder meeting on Wednesday

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7022962.html

HOUSTON -- After traveling from as far as Australia, Burma, Nigeria, Ecuador and Alaska, community leaders and authors of the newly released report "The True Cost of Chevron: An Alternative Annual Report" were rebuffed by Chevron CEO John Watson when they tried to deliver their report at the company's Houston office on Tuesday. The report details Chevron's human rights abuses and environmental destruction around the globe.

"Chevron refuses to face its own true cost. Community and Indigenous leaders came from around the world from the locations where Chevron operates, and they were left waiting in a lobby," said Antonia Juhasz, lead author and editor of the new report and director of the Chevron Program at Global Exchange, calling the Chevron actions "disrespectful." She and the rest of the Coalition await the shareholder meeting tomorrow, where a Chevron representative agreed to a "point by point rebuttal" to the new report.

Indigenous community leaders Guillermo Grefa (Kichwa) from Rumipamba, Ecuador and Emem Okon from Nigeria accused Chevron's operations of causing the extinction of indigenous peoples, while Debora Barros Fince (Organizacion Wayuu Munserrat, La Guajira, Colombia) added that Chevron supports the paramilitary operations of the current government in Colombia. Grefa asked, "When are you going to clean up what you have contaminated?"

Many of the leaders demanded that Chevron be held accountable for the deaths of their community members, such as Reverend Ken Davis, from Richmond California, who said, "Chevron takes out profits, and I have to see people to their graves." T.J. Buonomo, a former U.S. Army military intelligence officer and a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, challenged the Chevron representative on Chevron's practices lobbying the Iraq government and the U.S. government to allow oil extraction in Iraq while it is still under military occupation. He said, "You don't consider that inappropriate? You can't bring those lives back."

At the press conference preceding the confrontation with Chevron, Elias Isaac of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa in Angola said that "Chevron's CEO John Watson has said that he is "humbled" by BP's explosion in the U.S. Gulf, "instead, he should be ashamed of his own company's offshore operations which cause persistent, ongoing, daily abuses of the environment, our livelihoods, and public health." The devastation caused by Chevron's offshore operations was also the focus of remarks given by Tom Evans of Cook InletKeeper, Homer, Alaska and Emem Okon of Keebetkache Women Development and Resource Center in Nigeria.

The True Cost of Chevron network leaders, experts and supporters will be rallying outside the shareholder meeting, Wednesday, May 26, at 7 a.m., at 1500 Louisiana St in Houston, and over forty will be attending the shareholder meeting at 8 a.m.

They will also attend a Houston community-led toxic tour of Chevron's operations in the Houston Ship Channel immediately following the toxic tour.

Posted by brendanorrell

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Please click on the title just below to link back to this story at Democracy Now.

Renowned Marine Biologist Carl Safina on the BP Oil Spill’s Ecological Impact on the Gulf Coast and Worldwide

Transcript from the above video:

As we continue our discussion on the BP oil spill, we turn to its long-term ecological impact. Carl Safina, the founding president of Blue Ocean Institute, warns the ecological fallout from the spill may be felt across much of the world. [includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ: As we continue our discussion on the BP oil spill, we turn now to look at the long-term ecological impact of the spill. Our next guest testified before Congress last week and warned the fallout from the spill may be felt across much of the world. Joining us here in New York is Carl Safina, the founding president of Blue Ocean Institute. He’s author of many books about marine ecology and the ocean, including Song for the Blue Ocean.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

CARL SAFINA: Thanks for having me.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What message did you bring to Congress?

CARL SAFINA: Well, that this is not just a regional disaster, although it certainly is, but that the Gulf of Mexico is a tremendous engine of life and also a tremendous concentration zone, where animals from the whole open Atlantic Ocean funnel into the Gulf for breeding and millions of animals cross the Gulf and concentrate there on their northward migration and then fan out to populate much of North America and the Canadian Arctic, the East Coast, the Canadian Maritimes. So it’s a real hotspot, and it’s a terrible place to foul.

AMY GOODMAN: Tuna?

CARL SAFINA: The bluefin tuna that occupy most of the North Atlantic Ocean have two separate breeding populations. One breeds in the Mediterranean. The other breeds in the Gulf. So all the tuna that populate the East Coast, the Canadian Maritimes, the Gulfstream, even that go as far as the North Sea, many of those are from the western population and breed only in the Gulf of Mexico. This is their breeding season. They’ve just about finished now. And their eggs and larvae are drifting around in a toxic soup of oil and dispersant.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the dispersant Corexit.

CARL SAFINA: Well, the dispersant is a toxic pollutant that has been applied in the volume of millions of gallons and I think has greatly exacerbated the situation. I think the whole idea of using a dispersant is wrong, and I think it’s part of the whole pattern of BP trying to cover up and hide the body. They don’t want us to see how much oil, so they’ve taken this oil that was concentrated at the surface and dissolved it. But when you dissolve it, it’s still there, and it actually gets more toxic, because instead of being in big blobs, it’s now dissolved and can get across the gills, get into the mouths of animals. The water below the floating oil was water. Now it’s this toxic soup. So I think that in this whole pattern of BP trying to not let people know what’s going on, the idea of disperse the oil is a way of just hiding the body. But it actually makes the oil more toxic, and it adds this incredible amount of toxic pollutant in the dispersant itself.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the potential you were talking about, that this is the season when so much of the marine life and the bird life is creating their young, what is the effect on the birds, on those birds that are about to hatch or maybe are already in the process of hatching?

CARL SAFINA: Yeah, well, not only do you have birds there that are breeding, like the pelicans and some of the gulls and some of the terns, those birds will probably have a completely catastrophic breeding season, because it’s not just birds on the beach or birds in their nest. Their parents make a living diving into water. There’s no way around that. You can put booms that are twenty-feet high. They’re going to fly out to feed. And when I was there, we could see on the Chandeleur Islands quite a few of the terns were already lightly oiled, but they will just get progressively more and more oiled. And no amount of protecting the area where the nests are is going to change the fact that the parents are going to have a tremendous amount of trouble. And many of them will just get killed.

But also, there were sanderlings, ruddy turnstones, black belly plovers and a dozen other species that don’t stay there. They’re moving, and they’re migrating through. They come—they winter as far south as southern South America. They nest across the Canadian tundra and in the High Arctic. They’re some of the longest-distance migrants in the world. They cannot do that unless their fathers are working. And if their feathers are sticking together, they’re not going to be able to make it. They don’t have the energy to get to where they’re going to go. So they’re going to be dropping out along the way. The other thing is you have peregine falcons that are coming across from the Yucatan on their way to breeding grounds in the Arctic—excuse me—and as far away as Greenland. They will be selectively picking off these birds that are compromised. So they will be getting higher doses of oil. So this is just a horrible place to have something like this happening, because it’s such a concentration point for animals that move.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the question of bombing the actual—where the leak is coming from? Some say BP doesn’t want to do it, because then they would have to rebuild if they would ever get to offshore drill again. But what effect would that have?

CARL SAFINA: Oh, well, I’m not a—you know, I’m not a drilling technologist, and I don’t know if it would work. But actually, bombing part of the sea floor right there, I think, would have no real ecological effect other than the noise, which would affect marine mammals like dolphins and whales. But, you know, one or two blasts, I think, if it shut the oil off, would probably have been worth trying. But I don’t know if that would work.

AMY GOODMAN: Who do you think should be in charge of this operation, this cleanup operation?

CARL SAFINA: Well, BP had a lease to drill. They did not have a lease to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. They did not have a lease to blow oil into the environment. They did not have a lease to disperse the oil and try to hide the body. They don’t have a lease to clean up. They don’t have a lease to make the fishermen sick. They don’t have a lease to tell the United States, "We’ll keep using a dispersant that’s banned in Europe, even though you’re telling us to stop using it." They should have been shoved out of the way on day two. And there should have been a war council of all the other oil companies that know how to drill to focus on stopping the oil from coming out of the hole. And then BP’s responsibility—they are responsible, but they obviously don’t know what to do, and they can’t do it, and they’re not doing it. Their responsibility should be what they’re good at: pay money. Pay money to the United States. They’re on our property. They’re in our water. They’re making our people sick. They’re destroying our wildlife. Pay money and have the United States take over.

JUAN GONZALEZ: This whole issue of drilling in areas so deep that if there is an accident you cannot really get there to fix it, what is it—you know, to me, it’s almost like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. It’s like you never—you were guaranteeing people that it would never happen, but once it happens once, you realize the potential catastrophe that you are creating through this process. What is your sense of the future of ocean drilling, in terms of what this has told the rest of the people of the United States and the world?

CARL SAFINA: Right, well, there have been other blowouts, and there have been major oil spills. It’s different than Chernobyl because we know it happens. It happens. It’s happened before. It will happen again. And it’s happening right now. So, you know, and obviously they didn’t have any backup plan. It’s as if having poked 30,000 holes into the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico and have 5,000 rigs operating, it never occurred to them to say, "Oh, what if oil starts coming out of one of those holes, like it has in other places at other times?" They were completely unprepared. They don’t have the equipment. They don’t have booms that can work in open water. And what the obvious take-home message is, we don’t know how to do this. We can poke the hole. We don’t know how to deal with some things that we know happen, because they’ve happened. But people have not developed the technology or warehoused the tools or created booms that work in ocean swell conditions or any of that stuff. We’re trying to wring the last drops out of a depleting resource. And this really needs to be the pivotal moment where we say oil is declining, we need a national energy policy that looks past oil. You know, BP, at one time they said that their name meant "beyond petroleum." Now it’s "beyond pathetic." But we really need to get past oil.

AMY GOODMAN: What about "beyond prosecution"? Are they? And should they be held criminally liable?

CARL SAFINA: Of course they’re criminally responsible. They were trying to hurry up. When you have an argument on a rig about how fast to go and what to do, you don’t tell people, "Just hurry it up." I mean, this is absolutely criminal. And I think that—you know, we’re still asking, "Oh, can we go in? Can we use respirators?" This is insane.

AMY GOODMAN: The Atlantis, deepwater offshore drilling site, has that been shut down, which dwarfs the Horizon Deepwater?

CARL SAFINA: Actually, I don’t know if that’s still going on or has been shut down.

AMY GOODMAN: Has all offshore drilling been shut down? No?

CARL SAFINA: No, not at all. And in fact, unfortunately, the Obama administration, I think, blew it on the high ground here. You know, there was Sarah Palin, "drill, baby, drill," right? So we don’t want that; we elect Obama. And then what happens is we get "drill, baby, drill." That’s what we got. We got a stepped-up effort to eliminate the ban on offshore drilling that was, what, a couple of generations old. And now they’re stuck with that, because, of course, nobody wants to actually do the smart thing and say, "Oh, you know what? We made a mistake," because then, oh, they’ve lost face. So, oh, we can’t lose face. The obvious right thing is the drilling ban was the right thing to do. The drilling ban is the right thing to do. We don’t know how to take care of these problems. We need to stop it. We need to make this a pivotal moment and have a national energy policy for the first time that gets beyond this and phases out fossil fuels, which kill people, make people sick and detroy the environment.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, Carl Safina, founding president of the Blue Ocean Institute. He has written a number of books, including Song for the Blue Ocean.

The True Terrorists: How WHM's Economic Corruption is a key component of Corporate Racist Atrocious Patriarchy (CRAP)

[image of book cover is from here, where you can find his other books]

This post contains some biographical information and a recent piece of writing from John Perkins, corporate insider and whistle-blower about U.S. economic terrorism, genocide, and ecocide. All of it is atrocity and terrorism. All of it. And the damage to human beings and the Earth, including the U.S. citizens and "our" land, is far worse, more lethal, more destructive, than anything the entire Taliban could possibly do to this country. Why, then, isn't the U.S. government interested in stopping--STOPPING, ENDING--this horror and terrorism? Because it's being committed primarily by U.S. white, homophobic, publicly heterosexual, Christian men, that's why. Because our country must do this to make the richest white men happy (richer). So scapegoating the Taliban (let alone Mexican "illegal aliens") as "our primary enemy" is a despicable, cowardly, grievously dishonest and diversionary tactic, make no mistake about it. Because they've done NOTHING in comparison to what WE do to ourselves... if we're going to be so callous as to ignore the horrors we visit upon other parts of the world. 

Mexicans coming to this country work harder than most U.S. white Americans with none of the job or home security, so let's have the media and government cross that group off the list of people to be irrationally, racistly, misogynistically concerned about harassing, raping, and otherwise terrorising. And, to even pretend we're pro-democracy, we might stop covertly and overtly trying to control other nations' struggles for democracy and autonomy from us!

The terrible events of that day [11 September 2001] convinced John to drop the veil of secrecy around his life as an EHM, to ignore the threats and bribes, and to write Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He believed he had a responsibility to share his insider knowledge about the role the U.S. government, multinational “aid” organizations, and corporations have played in bringing the world to a place where such an event could occur. He wanted to expose the fact that EHM are more ubiquitous today than ever before. He felt he owed this to his country, to his daughter, to all the people around the world who suffer because of the work he and his peers have done, and to himself. In this book, he describes the dangerous path his country is taking as it moves away from the original ideals of the American republic and into a quest for global empire. [source: below]

"Fake Accounting, Greed and Oil"
While countries around the world continue to watch their economies collapse, and Goldman-Sachs leaders testify to Congress about how they manipulated both their shareholders and the American public, we are also faced with a tragic oil spill on our most fragile coastlines.

The sad truth is that oil, greed and fake accounting work hand in hand to empower those who have -- and significantly disempower those who do not.

In my book, HOODWINKED I talk about the 30,000 Ecuadorians who filed a lawsuit against Texaco (since purchased by Chevron). (See this link - http://tinyurl.com/34ovl2r ). The company destroyed vast sections of rain forest and the toxic wastes from its operations allegedly killed many people and made many more chronically sick.

It is often the indigenous people who are the ultimate losers in the greed wars. How can they with so little to start with take a stand against a huge oil company? Despite the challenges they faced, the Ecuadorians did do this and continue to battle.

Trudie Styler who visited the devastated Ecuadorian site and joined me at a public talk in Quito several years ago hosted a concert at Carnegie Hall on May 13, 2010. It featured her husband Sting, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, and Debbie Harry and was a fundraiser for the Rainforest Fund, founded by Trudie and Sting in 1989. Afterwards Trudie expressed to me feelings similar to those she often says publicly: "

You know (Trudie said) I love beaches and coastal environments. I love the ocean. I'm appalled by the terrible scenes of devastation that etched themselves forever into our consciousness after the Exxon Valdez disaster and now are haunting us once again along the Gulf Coast. I am dismayed by the continuing destruction of our delicate ecosystems -- of birds, fish, animals, and plants. This is absolutely unacceptable. We MUST protect or coastlines from such tragedies.

"However, I have also flown over thousands of miles of rain forests that have been destroyed by oil. I have been with mothers sitting at the bedsides of their children, as they lie in terrible agony, innocent victims of the most horrible deaths imaginable -- because oil drilling poisoned their water and their food sources. I have stood beside once-pristine lakes now turned into black tar. "So, I feel compelled to ask everyone to take into account the entire planet as we mourn for the Gulf Coast and seek ways to protect our beaches. Let us avoid the temptation to say "not in my back yard; take the pollution someplace else." Let us rather commit to freeing ourselves from the oil addiction that ultimately will destroy all of us."

Steve Donziger, a New York lawyer who has devoted more than a decade to the case, repeats every chance he gets, "And most of the consumers in the United States have no idea. They are oblivious to the true price of the oil they consume. And Big Oil wants to keep it that way."
These statements express a sad truth about so much of what is going on in the world today and the inadequacy of our accounting procedures to assign the true costs to products. Oil is a classic example of how those who sit on resources are inadequately compensated while those who consume them are charged prices that do not begin to cover the actual costs. In light of last week's oil spill, it seems we are seeing the same thing happen again with BP and the countless millions the oil spill will affect horribly for a decade.

Many costs are never taken into account when determining the price of the goods and services we consume. They are all too often considered "externalities." Those externalities include the social and environmental costs of the destruction of resources, the pollution, and the burdens on society of workers who become injured or ill and receive little or no health care; the indirect funding of companies that are permitted to market hazardous products, dump wastes into rivers or oceans, and pay employees less than a living wage, just to name a few.

All of these and more contribute to the current global economic crisis. Because so many resources are underpriced, they are wasted casually and depleted unnecessarily. Instead of recycling or using them more efficiently, we continue to drill, mine, extract, and manufacture with reckless abandon.

Is the "Age of Reckless Abandon" really what we want to be most remembered for in generations to come?

[source: here] About John Perkins:

John Perkins has lived four lives: as an economic hit man (EHM); as the CEO of a successful alternative energy company, who was rewarded for not disclosing his EHM past; as an expert on indigenous cultures and shamanism, a teacher and writer who used this expertise to promote ecology and sustainability while continuing to honor his vow of silence about his life as an EHM; and as a writer who, in telling the real-life story about his extraordinary dealings as an EHM, has exposed the world of international intrigue and corruption that is turning the American republic into a global empire despised by increasing numbers of people around the planet.

As an EHM, Johns job was to convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel. Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the U.S. government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able to control these economies and to ensure that oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building a global empire.

In his EHM capacity, John traveled all over the world—to Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—and was either a direct participant in or witness to some of the most dramatic events in modern history, including the Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the assassination of Panama’s President Omar Torrijos, the subsequent invasion of Panama, and events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 1980 Perkins founded Independent Power Systems, Inc (IPS), an alternative energy company. Under his leadership as CEO, IPS became an extremely successful firm in a high-risk business where most of his competitors failed. Many “coincidences” and favors from people in powerful positions helped make IPS an industry leader. John also served as a highly paid consultant to some of the corporations whose pockets he had previously helped to line—taking on this role partly in response to a series of not-so-veiled threats and lucrative payoffs.

After selling IPS in 1990, John became a champion for indigenous rights and environmental movements, working especially closely with Amazon tribes to help them preserve their rain forests. He wrote five books, published in many languages, about indigenous cultures, shamanism, ecology, and sustainability; taught at universities and learning centers on four continents; and founded and served on the board of directors of several leading nonprofit organizations.

One of the nonprofit organizations he founded and chaired, Dream Change Coalition (later simply Dream Change, or DC), became a model for inspiring people to attain their personal goals and, at the same time, to be more conscious of the impacts their lives have on others and on the planet, and for empowering them to transform their communities into more balanced and sustainable ones. DC has developed a following around the world and has empowered people to create organizations with similar missions in many countries.

During the 1990s and into the new millennium, John honored his vow of silence about his EHM life and continued to receive lucrative corporate consulting fees. He assuaged his guilt by applying much of the money he earned as a consultant to his nonprofit work. Arts & Entertainment television featured him in a special titled “Headhunters of the Amazon,” narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Italian Cosmopolitan ran a major article on his “Shapeshifting” workshops in Europe. TIME magazine selected Dream Change as one of the thirteen organizations in the world whose Web sites best reflected the ideals and goals of Earth Day.

Then came September 11, 2001. The terrible events of that day convinced John to drop the veil of secrecy around his life as an EHM, to ignore the threats and bribes, and to write Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He believed he had a responsibility to share his insider knowledge about the role the U.S. government, multinational “aid” organizations, and corporations have played in bringing the world to a place where such an event could occur. He wanted to expose the fact that EHM are more ubiquitous today than ever before. He felt he owed this to his country, to his daughter, to all the people around the world who suffer because of the work he and his peers have done, and to himself. In this book, he describes the dangerous path his country is taking as it moves away from the original ideals of the American republic and into a quest for global empire.

From The Oppressor's Handbook, for Dummies: The Rights of the Abused Must Never Exceed or Approximate the Rights of the Abuser

[image of book cover is from here]

The reason feminists are hated by men is because feminists tell the truth about them. The reason anarchists are hated by corporate thugs is because anarchists tell the truth about them. The reason whistle-blowers are sometimes killed, or paid to be silent before whistle reaches lips, is because whistle-blowers tell the truth.

Here are a couple of very simple premises, which I hope you will consider deeply: sexist and racist violence would end if there weren't so many laws protecting the white male supremacist perpetrators. And oppressive status quo society is set up so that when people with less status, privilege, entitlements, and institutionalised power speak out accurately against the abuses of those with more power and privileges, it will be assumed that the ones with less power are lying. Of course. Children lie after all. (And adults do not?) Women are vengeful after all. (And men are not?) People of color are not to be trusted. (And white folks are?) Muslims of color can be sooooo fundamentalist! (And white Christians cannot? TERRORISTICALLY and historically so? HORRIFICALLY and systematically so?)

Cue the anti-radical libertarians, the civil liberties fundamentalists, the defenders of some bullshit notion called "free speech" and the perpetrators the ACLU defends, as well as the ACLUnatics, to get all antsy and upset. Palms may, in fact, be sweating. This is the moment for the arrogant and egotistical, the privileged and the entitled perps of the world to wonder: Where is this guy going with this post, anyway?! He's not going to mention anything I'VE done, is he??

But even if you're upset and feeling defensive, please read on and reserve judgment until you're done reading this post.

The next very few lines only are the beginning of a blog post from The Curvature, by Cara. For the rest of her post, please visit *here*. The rest is me blathering on about a little something called governmental, social, and interpersonal "accountability" or lack thereof.

England and Wales Move to Grant Anonymity to Rape Defendants

by Cara on May 21, 2010

In England and Wales, there’s a plan underway to grant anonymity to those who are accused of rape but have not been convicted.

Yes, under this plan, the name of the alleged victim would not be the only one withheld from public knowledge for reasons of safety and privacy.

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The Oppressor's Handbook


It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that in a conservative to liberal white supremacist and misogynistic country that police-protects and militarily defends the rights of oppressors over and against the rights of the oppressed, "civil liberties" is an ineffective tool to bring about radical social change, and "libertarianism" functions to shield the oppressors from challenges to their rights to privacy to perpetrate abuse while strengthening their entitlements to do harm.

When a child names their incest perpetrating parent as their rapist, they are socially castigated and made into the classic Western "bad guy". Witness so many stories, too many to mention here, but I'll direct you to the case of Mackenzie Phillips, whose own perpetrator's ex-spouse rushed to defend his memory. The message from many who had far less emotional investment in the memory of John that does Michelle, was, to put it crudely, this: "Screw [over] Mackenzie." Again. "I don't want to believe her truth. Her truth is ugly." Well, no. Her truth is beautiful. The story is ugly. There's a difference and please note it. The public doesn't like its own dirty laundry aired out. For so much of what happened to Mackenzie is happening to so many girls and young women, but, really, we'd rather just all talk about Jesse James and what a bastard he was to Sandra Bullock. And isn't that oil spill awful?! This is the deal, the plan, the way speaking out honestly in ways that make one vulnerable is made into a criminal act, effectively if not also legally. And, like any good sadistic country, any sign of vulnerability will be vultured, turned, if possible, into carrion. Pick, pick, pick until all that remains are those immobile and mute bones. Mackenzie is a strong woman. You can't live through what she lived through, face it, write it out which means facing it much more deeply, then allow it to be in the public domain, and be both alive and not strong. G-d bless her honesty, integrity, and courage.

Whenever a raped person speaks out against their rapist or rapists, the victim is immediately cast into the role of the perpetrator while the rapist is immediately seen as the one who is defamed, "destroyed", and innocent until proven guilty. Let's be clear about one thing: if he raped her, he isn't innocent, regardless of what a white male supremacist courtroom concludes. And women, often enough, if allowed to be conscious during the act by the rapist, do know when they've been raped. And it is "a presumption of innocence" which the Liberal and quasi-Libertarian State grants perps, not "innocence". A rapist is not ever "innocent until proven guilty" folks. Got it?

Whatever else they were, the white very class-privileged male students from Duke who rented or purchased one or two women of color (preferring white women but oh well, they wanted their entertainment THAT NIGHT, and whitemalesky-god forbid any normal whiteboy doesn't get what he somewhat sociopathically believes his penis or testicles are telling him he must have right away). 

I was once part of a really fucked up pyramid scheme (no, not the one my ancestors were involved in making for the King of Egypt, although that was rather fucked up too). This one was didn't involve slavery, but it did involve unethical economics and was making the rounds in various working to middle class communities a couple of decades ago or so. After speaking to my feminist mentor at the time, welcoming her to join in, she told me she wasn't interested in doing so because the whole thing seemed, to her, to be based on an ungrounded vision of hopeful [and exploitive] prosperity rather than an ethic rooted in a vision and practice of economic justice. I was annoyed she was going to let a little thing like ethics and social responsibility get in the way of "this really great opportunity!" Ah well, that's integrity for you. She didn't buy in and almost all of us who did lost a lot of money. I'd put in money for myself and a female relative who needed a car to find employment. She never got that car.

As I pondered what my mentor said, and after seeing a local news report warning people of this "scheme" (BAH! What does the press know!!, I thought), I did some math calculations and figured out in how many weeks we would need approximately a million people to be part of our local economic plan to help each other do good. I brought these calculations to one of our weekly meetings, where it was assumed that "bad energy" would ruin our chances. This was a New Age version of schemes that have been going around and around like bowl water in a broken toilet. So my news was seen as "not feeding the good energy" we all needed for this to happen. I was chided: "Who will want to join with someone like you thinking this can't work?" Yes, well, that was rather the point of me speaking out. They didn't seem to appreciate that. What I saw was the middle class folks like me who got in early got their dough--well, I didn't actually as I got in a bit too late. And the more this rippled out, a more economically desperate class of people were being told about it and coerced into joining. I'm not one to intervene much when I'm the only one being harmed--this is the legacy of being a survivor of familial or non-group sexual abuse. But when people with less privilege than me are being exploited, I'm not one to stay silent for long. As, um, you might have gathered from one or two of my blog posts. ;)

I once worked in a place where there was administrative corruption. Which is another way of saying "in a place where people were over-worked that valued having a rigidly hierarchical structure". I reported the corruption and was fired, and was made to feel by administrators as if I'd done something horribly wrong.

I once tried to get an alcoholic woman's husband to wake up and smell the alcohol on her breath; she was a surrogate mom figure in my life and I loved her and feared a very negative health impact from her daily drinking to drunkenness. She was a deeply caring person, and felt everything so much, and I think the alcohol was being used to try to wash away some of her pain. But when drunk it caused others pain, and I'm sure on some level she knew this, and it only tortured her more. For doing so he immediately told her what I'd "accused her of being"--I had, for the record, only expressed concerns about how alcohol and some of her prescription medications might be having an adverse effect on her. What I'd "accused her of being" was "possibly in danger", not "definitively a drunk". The next thing that happened was that she, not he, promptly ended our relationship and forbade either her husband or anyone else in her family from having any contact with me. Never get between an addict an their drug of choice. (I've since gone to Al-Anon meetings and have learned a thing or twelve. I stopped going when I couldn't tolerate hearing people thank a "Him" for helping them. He clearly isn't paying attention to "Us" because millions of Us are dying dreadful deaths in poverty and extreme illness; do the prayers of the most poor and the most ill go unanswered because relatively comfortable white USers get priority treatment because English is the language He believes everyone should be speaking?)

I once outed someone who harmed other people in ways he denied was harmful, and for that the harmer was said to be me. There are no whistle-blower-protection laws in social spaces outside of some workplace environments, and even then retaliation against the messenger of bad news is commonplace, hence "witness protection programs". I was the one declared guilty of committing a grievous offense, yet was without the means (sufficient social support) to adequately confront the liar on his lies, cross-examine his acts of slander, or adequately hold him to account for his grievous "mistakes" and grossly improper conduct. (To be clear, it's "a mistake" if you're doing something wrong that you had no idea was wrong. Getting drunk the first time might be a mistake. The twentieth time: not a mistake. And if you've been told by people you know have integrity that what you're doing is fucked up and wrong and harmful--explained carefully to you in terms you fully understand, and you keep on doing it, you don't get to call your continuation of the behavior "a mistake".)

This is how male and white supremacy works:

If someone who is marginalised and destatused inside a  family or social system speaks out against those who are statused and empowered and entitled and protected, the burden of proof--too often beyond a shadow of a doubt--will fall on the shoulders of the accuser, because, to be clear, we live in a society that doesn't really want anything bad to happen to abusers. Let the abused accusers drop off the Earth ASAP, but let us take precious care of our perpetrators until they die with all the people they fucked over sitting around them weeping at their passing--because, I'm sure deep down, they really were a good person. Or, well, they had some good traits. Or, at least, they were, you know, "troubled".

Consider this: we go out of our way to demonstrate how the next-door rapists, pimps, and procurers (I mean "sex addicts") are "troubled" and in need of whatever care it takes to rehabilitate them so they can be contributing members to society, but the raped and battered, the pimped and procured--well, get over being such a victim, would you? That abuse happened, what?, ten years ago? Get a life!! Note the disparity of compassion.

What the status quo (read: dominant society and its apologists and protectors) wants and needs is for the abuses to continue. The systems require the abuses, you see. They aren't extraneous mishaps. The harm, quite horrifically, is indispensable. So doing all that are necessary for these systems of harm to operate relatively smoothly, if secretly, or off the major radar screens, is precisely what MUST happen. The U.S. has a rather willful if habituated propensity for engaging in covert military operations, claiming that if the public knew what they were doing we'd call them out on being fucking genocidalists we'd put U.S. security at risk. Indeed. It's not "the people" who matter. It's the collectors of military intelligence. If "security of the citizenry" was what this government cared about, how could it come to pass that so many people are without jobs and homes? The answer is that the intelligence being collected is to protect us from something "out there" (psssst: I don't want to say this out loud, but the "intelligence" is telling me it rhymes with ooslims and possibly north sporeans). Please don't look behind the curtain at the people who are infecting collecting the intelligence, ruining running the financial industry, or profiting off of  presiding over the multinationals. They've got important work to do--ignoring your suffering and insecurity.

In the U.S. those systems include gynocidal male supremacy, genocidal white supremacy, corporate capitalism, Western imperialism, rampant military terrorism, and the unfathomably callous and violent destruction of the Earth and its non-human animal inhabitants and non-white human residents.

BP will never be held to account for the harm it has done, nor will the U.S. government which basically paved the way for this environmental disaster to happen by dropping so many regulations on oil companies (and on mega-corporations generally) who have decided its environmentally sound to drill into sea floors and plumb up the oil. This was, to dredge up the ol' catch-phrase, a disaster waiting to happen. (And that's a big ol' Thank You, to Bill Clinton.) Once disasters happen--especially if the companies aren't ours, we get to see U.S. senators and Anderson Cooper rage against the white man-chinery of corporate greed, never quite being told what role the press and government have in ensuring these cycles of economic and environmental disaster don't end until The End.

A government CAN ensure that fucked up shit like this isn't inevitable. Really, it can. But it won't in a plutocracy or a kyriarchy (my two new favorite words, so get used to seeing them). A federal government such as the military and corporate-owned one in the U.S. cannot stop atrocity as long as rich white doods rule. And atrocities cannot be stopped in a country where corporations are given the status of an individual citizen, but with many more tax write-offs and considerably more permissions and incentives to be psychopathic. See the movie The Corporation for a grim tale of what this means for us all.

The U.S. government is to blame (I know "blame" is an unkind and "emotionally incorrect" word) for virtually all of the deaths following Hurricane Katrina, and had a steady hand in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Haitians following the earthquake centered a few miles west of Port au Prince earlier this year. Why "to blame"? Because they've had a hand in destroying the environments of both places, of ruining ecosystems designed to withstand and rebound from things like hurricanes and earthquakes. You don't get mudslides unless you strip hills and mountains of their trees. And you don't get flooded cities if you leave wetlands in place to absorb the flooding waters. And if you think U.S-driven corporate greed isn't behind all that, you're either sorely mistaken or have already perished.

But rather than own up, like big grown adult boys to what the U.S. government has done, did recently, and still does that is inevitably and repeatedly catastrophic for humans, animals, plants, and other life, the mass media and its government will pretend these things are "terribly unfortunate natural disasters" or "flukes" or anything other than something they made sure COULD AND WOULD happen.

So the next time you hear a report about protecting the rights of the accused, be assured those laws aren't doing shit to help out the raped and are most certainly not ever intended to. And also be assured that harming a harmer is evil, but being harmed by a harmer is your own tough fucking luck. Oh, and shut up if you're thinking of speaking out. The corporate, militarised WHM supremacist status quo is deeply invested in not knowing what you have to say.

But you can talk about how AWFUL those "natural disasters" are. All day long and into the night. And how UNFORTUNATE it was that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time (like at home alone in her bed sleeping soundly when the "troubled" rapist climbed in through her unlocked window--you see, it really was her fault for wanting some of that predatory fresh air while she slept). Or how she's "to blame" for her own unconsciousness because she was in a bar and went to pee and came back and drank and danced and doesn't remember what happened next.

The questions I'll leave you with are these:
What if we stopped blaming the people who are preyed upon and systemically harmed? What if we didn't try and silence or discredit those who also speak out against injustice and atrocity? What if we stopped telling the oppressed folks who speak with anger and rage "to say it nicely next time and maybe they'll listen"? What if we stopped calling the whistle-blowers traitors and troublemakers, and stopped shooting the messengers? What would happen then?