We’re Number One!

It’s official! The Swiss research firm Covalence has released its annual ranking of the ethical performance of multinational corporations and Monsanto is now the most unethical company in the world! The same company that brought you those crazy chemical concoctions like Agent Orange, PCBs and DDT is now in control of your food supply. From cows treated with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone who get sick but produce more milk to suing farmers for having Monsanto patented seeds that blew into their fields, Monsanto food has become the norm in America.

The thing that really freaks me out about it is that this is so Damien: Omen II. Thorn Industries was going to use food to control the world and Monsanto seems to be following in their footsteps. It’s kind of like a story I wrote for a fiction class in college where a P.E. Teacher is fired for being overweight. At the time, that was a crazy idea but now we have a U.S. Surgeon General candidate, Regina Benjamin, who is being challenged for exactly that reason. Maybe she’s fat for the same reason that most of her fellow citizens are, the factory-farmed and mass produced food stuff we’re offered in stores is full of fat and salt and sugar.

I'm not asking farmers to break the corn habit overnight but if the government would quit subsidizing particular crops we might be able to set up a farming community that doesn't depend on chemicals and fertilizer to make a profit.People have to make a decision. Either you want fresh food that costs extra and takes a little more preparation time or you'll settle for some genetically-modified, factory-farmed mound of food stuff. Somehow I think Monsanto's combo of convenience and carcinogens will win over the public every time.

The Death of Hope

This is it. I give up. I will never see a president who represents me in my lifetime. I’m back to the hopelessness I felt during my high school/college years at the height of the Reagan revolution. I was a little late hopping on the Obama train because, believe it or not, I bought John Edwards’ populist bullshit about being there for the little guy. Jesus, we dodged a bullet on that one. After the expose in the National Enquirer, the 21st century’s go-to spot for investigative journalism, it looks like the Edwards campaign probably would have imploded well before they got their hour of hope. Nobody in their right mind is going to make excuses for a raging narcissist who’s fucking around on his dying wife, although they will for a sitting president whose wife is a little too capable for some people’s taste.

I was guardedly optimistic when the man from Hope, Arkansas entered the White House but he quickly devolved into just another Democrat in name only after bringing the country such fine legislation as don’t ask, don’t tell, NAFTA, the welfare reform act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Obama knows how to speak convincingly because every time I tell myself that I’m through listening, he always seems to reel me back in. But after the health care fiasco, I’m through. If I don’t see some concrete actions to show me that he’s looking out for something besides corporate interests, I’m giving up on both political parties in this country.

We’ve had Ross Perot and now the Tea Party activists are making their bid to be the next third party but what I want to know is when we’re going to have a viable progressive candidate who wants to fight for our citizens, not the corporations who run things now. Okay, I know Ralph Nader ran for president but I think he’s an egotistical asshole who’s only out for himself so that doesn’t really count. A big part of the backlash against Obama is because he promised change and so far it’s pretty much been business as usual with a little feel good rhetoric for the people who actually elected him. The thing that really scares me about this country is how quickly people are willing to endorse the vicious, hate-filled ideas of the radical right just so they can see some kind of change, no matter how hurtful it is to the poor and middle class.

Running With The Devil

After Pat Robertson announced that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by a pact the Haitians made with the devil to win their independence from the French, I decided to do a little Google search on the reverend. I remembered a few of his totally bat shit statements but Jesus Christ! He’s one of the sleaziest, most evil dickheads hiding behind the cloak of Christianity that this country has ever produced. Here’s just a sampling of Robertson at his most offensive: blaming 9/11 on America’s tolerance of abortion and homosexuality, saying the Supreme Court was a greater threat to the U.S. than Al Qaeda, describing feminism as a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians and publicly calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Can you believe that three million people actually signed a petition supporting this dumbass for the Republican presidential nomination back in the late eighties?!? Even more disturbing are some of Robertson’s former business associates. In his diamond enterprise they included such fine upstanding people as Zaire's dictator, Mobuto Sese Seko and the good Baptist, Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor. He also agreed to an out of court settlement in a 2001 case where ten black female employees of his Christian Coalition sued him for discrimination. One of the allegations was that they had to use the back door and eat their lunches in a racially segregated area. Sounds like the Jim Crow south?

It’s not surprising since his father, who was a U.S. Congressman and Senator from 1933 to 1967, spent his career trying to keep these discriminatory laws on the books. It looks like Pat Robertson still yearns for the white, upper-class society that he knew as a child. If he was just your run of the mill crook using Christianity to fatten his bank account it wouldn’t be so scary but he actually thinks he’s the mouthpiece for God. The fact that his asinine predictions of the world’s end in 1982 or major terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2007 never came to pass doesn’t seem to put a dent in this man’s belief in his own infallibility. Hmmm, if I was betting my money on who actually made a pact with the devil who would I pick? The Haitians who fought to free themselves from the yoke of slavery or the Christian Right’s answer to Sylvia Browne?

Peace Warriors

Photo credit: pschubert from morguefile.com
A friend on Facebook posted something about global warming the other day and since it piqued my interest, I did a little internet research and happened to stumble across something called The Earth Charter (http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/The-Earth-Charter.html). It’s basically a little touchy-feely document that says we as a world should strive to promote respect for all life, social and economic justice, democracy and peace. I was ready to start swaying and singing Kumbaya by the time I finished reading the charter. It was endorsed by the 2001 U.S. Conference of Mayors, various youth organizations, the Unitarians, and even some Catholic groups for God‘s sake! Who could object to that?

A lot of people as it turns out. Evidently there’s some kind of crazy-ass theory that it’s all a conspiracy by groups like the United Nations and the Bilderburg Group to form an evil one-world government. There are conservative Christians who consider it some kind of pagan mumbo-jumbo religion that will persecute them once they gain control. Relax, anyone who’s out for peace and respect is probably not going to nail you to the cross. I’d be more worried about the people right here in America who approved torture, extraordinary rendition and the Patriot Act. The thing that really makes my head explode though, is the fact that some of the same Christians who buy into these theories also rave about the teachings of Ayn Rand, an atheist in an open marriage who had a long-term affair with a much younger man.

I read Atlas Shrugged years ago and I’m sorry but damn, she was one selfish old bitch. In the book all the elite thinkers stage a strike and the world basically collapses. She neglects to mention that if all the peons staged a strike it would have the same outcome. Everybody’s needed to make a society work. I’ve read the Bible and her theory of Objectivism seems about as far away from the teachings of Jesus as you can get. It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And saying fuck you, I don’t care if you’ve run into a bad stretch in your life, it’s every man for himself, is not the way I see a true Christian thinking.

Just Take A Little Off The Top

My first job out of college was as an Environmental Investigator for the Natural Resources Cabinet Department of Law Surface Mining Division. It sounds like an important position but we were really only hired because the federal government had sued the state of Kentucky to force them to put forth at least a minimal effort in collecting fines owed for coal mining violations. Within the first week I realized that any ideas I had about protecting the environment were only pipe dreams.

The department’s policy was to prosecute the person who signed the permit package. This was usually some poor worker the coal company suckered into signing in exchange for a $12 an hour job as a heavy equipment operator. $12 an hour might not sound like much to a lot of people but back in 1989, in one of the poorest areas of the country, that was damn good money. It was a hell of a lot more than I was making. My job was to go out to the county courthouses and find all the assets these people had hidden away so they could pay off their $150,000 fine for polluting the water and scarring the landscape. After the first couple of months my running joke was that I didn’t even need to travel to the courthouses anymore, I already knew what I would find, a doublewide, some financed furniture and a 75 Chevy pickup.

The damage surface mining can do is bad enough but mountain top removal was just getting geared up when I left the department in 91. I remember driving by a few mountain top removal sites back then and they are hideous. It’s kind of like that woman on Oprah who was attacked by the monkey or the lady whose dog chewed her face off. It’s that disfiguring. That’s not even including the polluted water and cracked house foundations and millions of pounds of explosives going off 24 hours a day that the poor people who live there have to deal with. Every time there’s a hard rain they have to worry whether or not that will be the day they lose their home altogether because the coal companies have removed everything that used to block the water’s path.

From my experience with Kentucky state government, I think it’s a given that they’ll side with the coal companies every time but Obama has shown that he is at least open to the possibility of stopping the rape of the mountains that’s going on now. I’ve been hiking and camping in the Appalachian Mountains and it’s one of the most beautiful areas on earth. Even though I’m not religious, some of my most spiritual experiences have happened in those very mountains. It just really chaps my ass that no one would even consider suggesting that we lop off the tops of the Rocky Mountains but somehow the Appalachians are fair game. If you want to find out more about how destructive this practice really is, check out this video at http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2198