Why Do Protesters Against Egregious Environmental and Financial Misconduct Get Arrested, But Not Corporate Perpetrators?

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By Mark Karlin / Truth-Out

By Mark Karlin / Truth-Out

It’s sadly what we’ve come to expect: advocates for saving the planet — and present and future lives with it — and those who protest financial crimes and improprieties get arrested, charged, and often serve jail time, but those responsible among the corporate and financial elite go free.

In this case, the headline on mlive.com (as in Michigan) that came to our attention reads, “Four protesters arrested at Enbridge pipeline construction site charged with felony.” 

Enbridge is a massive intertnational oil and gas pipeline company (based in Canada) that, as noted in a study by the Polaris Institute, fesses up to large scale environmental damage:

Thousands of litres of dangerous fluids are released from the company ’s pipelines and holding tanks into the environment each year.

According to Enbridge’s own data, between 1999 and 2010 , across all of the company’s operations there were 804 spills that released 161,475 barrels of hydrocarbons into the environment.

This amounts to approximately half of the oil that spilled from the oil tanker the Exxon Valdez after it struck a rock in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1988.

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Peace Talks: New Chapter, Old Book

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By Robert Jensen / Counterpunch

By Robert Jensen / Counterpunch

New negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians may begin next week, with much talk of a “new chapter” in the seemingly intractable conflict. A new chapter, perhaps, but who is writing the book?

Any public discussion about the “peace process” is tense, in part because there is no widely shared understanding of the history and politics of — even an appropriate terminology for — the conflict. That’s as true in the United States as in Palestine and Israel.

I never gave much thought to the question until I was 30 years old, in the late 1980s. Before that, I had a typical view of the conflict for an apolitical American: It was confusing, and everyone involved seemed a bit crazy. With no understanding of the history of the region and no framework for analyzing U.S. policy in the Middle East, it was all a muddle, and so I ignored it. That’s one of the privileges of being in the comfortable classes in the United States — you can remain comfortably ignorant.

But as a frustrated journalist with a newfound freedom to examine the politics of news media in graduate school, I began studying law and human rights, in the domestic and international arenas. I also started digging into the issues I had been avoiding. In the case of Palestine/Israel, I began reading about the roots of the conflict, how the United States was involved, and how U.S. journalists were presenting the issues.

I came to this inquiry with no firm allegiance to either side. As a white U.S. citizen from a centrist Protestant background but with no religious commitments, I felt no cultural or spiritual connection to either national group. I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and I had never traveled to the Middle East. I had no personal relationships that predisposed me to favor one group over the other. Like any human, I was not free of bias, of course. As a relatively unreflective white man rooted in a predominantly Christian culture, I was raised with some level of anti-Semitism and anti-Arab racism, for example, and no doubt that affected my perceptions. But based solely on my personal profile, I didn’t have a dog in that fight, or so I thought.

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China’s Bad Earth

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By Josh Chin and Brian Spegele / The Wall Street Journal

In Dapu, a rain-drenched rural outpost in the heart of China’s grain basket, a farmer grows crops that she wouldn’t dare to eat.

A state-backed chemicals factory next to her farm dumps wastewater directly into the local irrigation pond, she says, and turns it a florescent blue reminiscent of antifreeze. After walking around in the rice paddies, some farmers here have developed unexplained blisters on their feet.

“Nothing comes from these plants,” says the farmer, pointing past the irrigation pond to a handful of stunted rice shoots. She grows the rice, which can’t be sold because of its low quality, only in order to qualify for payments made by the factory owners to compensate for polluting the area. But the amount is only a fraction of what she used to earn when the land was healthy, she says. The plants look alive, “but they’re actually dead inside.”

The experiences of these farmers in Dapu, in central China’s Hunan province, highlight an emerging and critical front in China’s intensifying battle with pollution. For years, public attention has focused on the choking air and contaminated water that plague China’s ever-expanding cities. But a series of recent cases have highlighted the spread of pollution outside of urban areas, now encompassing vast swaths of countryside, including the agricultural heartland.

Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8% and 20% of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals. A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking China below the “red line” of 296 million acres of arable land that are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country’s 1.35 billion people.

Rural China’s toxic turn is largely a consequence of two trends, say environmental researchers: the expansion of polluting industries into remote areas a safe distance from population centers, and heavy use of chemical fertilizers to meet the country’s mounting food needs. Both changes have been driven by the rapid pace of urbanization in a country that in 2012, for the first time in its long history, had more people living in cities than outside of them.

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Guidelines for Male Allies

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Developed by the Deep Green Resistance Male-Ally group, with guidance from the Women’s Caucus.

Introduction

As a class, men have developed an entrenched system of power called patriarchy in order to naturalize exploitation of women’s bodies, labor, time, children, and so on. Patriarchy consists of an interlocking system of social, economic, political, legal, and cultural structures designed to oppress women for the benefit of men. This system provides men with privileges in every aspect of our lives; we are the direct beneficiaries. As men, we often mistake these privileges for natural rights.

It is not enough for us to be “good guys”. It is not enough to personally refrain from exploiting women. It is not enough for us to be personally conscientious and respectful to women. It is not enough to maintain equality in our own relationships with women. While all of those things are important, abstaining personally from outright oppressive behavior doesn’t challenge patriarchy as a system of power. Basic decency commands that we work alongside women to uproot and dismantle this entire patriarchal system– within ourselves, within our groups and communities, and within institutions and the culture at large.

The following guidelines are to encourage male activists in DGR to change their behavior and to better ally themselves with women. As male activists we have been socialized into a culture of domination, and are just as liable to carry, practice, and reproduce patriarchy.

Remember: being an ally is an ongoing process rather than a title one earns; it must always be defined by women, who will determine by the daily actions and behaviors of a man how much of an ally he really is.

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Beautiful Justice: An Open Letter to Liberals

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By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin

By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin

Do you believe in a better world? Do you believe in one without the torture of poverty and slavery; without hierarchies based on dominance; without a dying planet? If you do believe in this world, what are you willing to do to help bring it about?

I know many who yearn for justice, but far fewer with any kind of plan for achieving it. There’s no lack of morality in this equation, just of strategy and, perhaps, courage.

Every movement for social change has understood that when a system of law is corrupt, we must turn instead to the laws of the universe: human rights, the living land, justice. These movements are always deemed radical—and that’s because they are. Hope and prayers do not alone work to change the world. We’re going to have to fight for it.

All your heroes of the past knew this. Those who won civil rights knew it. Those who won women’s suffrage knew it. Those who abolished slavery knew it. Those who freed India from colonial rule knew it.

Martin Luther King, Jr. clearly understood this. He said, “Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there, and he never voluntarily gives it up. And that is where the strong resistance comes. We’ve got to keep on keeping on, in order to gain freedom. It is not done voluntarily, but it is done through the pressure that comes about from people who are oppressed. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.”

All movements striking at the roots of social problems were—and still are—radical by default.

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Time is Short: Resistance Rewritten, Part I

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By Lexy Garza and Rachel Ivey / Deep Green Resistance

By Lexy Garza and Rachel Ivey / Deep Green Resistance

View video of the event at the Deep Green Resistance Youtube channel

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

This quote by Spanish writer and philosopher George Santayana was posted on the wall in my high school history classroom. The idea, as my history teacher explained, it is that learning about history is vitally important because by knowing and understanding past events, we can actively shape the future.  According to my teacher’s view, at least the view he shared with his students, the history in our textbooks is objective, time-tested truth, and nothing more nor less.

Some time after that class ended, I read another George Santayana quote, which is somewhat less often quoted, “history is a pack of lies about things that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

Taken at face value, this statement goes to the other extreme and completely writes off the history we’re taught as lies, as intentionally untrue.  I think that both these views let us off too easy, because the stories we call history, and the process by which some stories become the dominant stories, the ones we teach to our children, is more complex than the dichotomy of truth vs. lie.

Another often repeated idea about history is that it’s “written by the victors.”  This gets closer to a nuanced look at what history means and what it does.

For instance, in 1890 the US army massacred 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee, burying them in a mass grave.  Twenty US soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for this atrocity, just one of the many perpetrated by European colonizers who called genocide their manifest destiny.  The vast majority of “historical” accounts throughout the decades don’t call Wounded Knee a massacre; they lend it a false legitimacy by calling it a battle. The same goes for the Washita massacre carried out by Custer in 1868.  So-called historical accounts refer to this event as the Battle of the Washita.  As it’s been said, “When a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre.”

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Against Forgetting

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By Derrick Jensen / Orion

By Derrick Jensen / Orion

This essay was originally printed in the July/August 2013 issue of Orion. Request a free trial issue of Orion here.

Last night a host of nonhuman neighbors paid me a visit. First, two gray foxes sauntered up, including an older female who lost her tail to a leghold trap six or seven years ago. They trotted back into a thicker part of the forest, and a few minutes later a raccoon ambled forward. After he left I saw the two foxes again. Later, they went around the right side of a redwood tree as a black bear approached around the left. He sat on the porch for a while, and then walked off into the night. Then the foxes returned, hung out, and, when I looked away for a moment then looked back, they were gone. It wasn’t too long before the bear returned to lie on the porch. After a brief nap, he went away. The raccoon came back and brought two friends. When they left the foxes returned, and after the foxes came the bear. The evening was like a French farce: As one character exited stage left, another entered stage right.

Although I see some of these nonhuman neighbors daily, I was entranced and delighted to see so many of them over the span of just one evening. I remained delighted until sometime the next day, when I remembered reading that, prior to conquest by the Europeans, people in this region could expect to see a grizzly bear every 15 minutes.

This phenomenon is something we all encounter daily, even if some of us rarely notice it. It happens often enough to have a name: declining baselines. The phrase describes the process of becoming accustomed to and accepting as normal worsening conditions. Along with normalization can come a forgetting that things were not always this way. And this can lead to further acceptance and further normalization, which leads to further amnesia, and so on. Meanwhile the world is killed, species by species, biome by biome. And we are happy when we see the ever-dwindling number of survivors.

I’ve gone on the salmon-spawning tours that local environmentalists give, and I’m not the only person who by the end is openly weeping. If we’re lucky, we see 15 fish. Prior to conquest there were so many fish the rivers were described as “black and roiling.” And it’s not just salmon. Only five years ago, whenever I’d pick up a piece of firewood, I’d have to take off a half-dozen sowbugs. It’s taken me all winter this year to see as many. And I used to go on spider patrol before I took a shower, in order to remove them to safety before the deluge. I still go on spider patrol, but now it’s mostly pro forma. The spiders are gone. My mother used to put up five hummingbird feeders, and the birds would fight over those. Now she puts up two, and as often as not the sugar ferments before anyone eats it. I used to routinely see bats in the summer. Last year I saw one.

You can transpose this story to wherever you live and whatever members of the nonhuman community live there with you. I was horrified a few years ago to read that many songbird populations on the Atlantic Seaboard have collapsed by up to 80 percent over the last 40 years. But, and this is precisely the point, I was even more horrified when I realized that Silent Spring came out more than 40 years ago, so this 80 percent decline followed an already huge decline caused by pesticides, which followed another undoubtedly huge decline caused by the deforestation, conversion to agriculture, and urbanization that followed conquest.

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Peak oil lives, but will kill the economy

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By Nafeez Ahmed / The Guardian

Last Monday’s BBC News at Ten broadcast a report by science editor David Shukman arguing that concerns “about oil supplies running dry are receding.” Shukman interviewed a range of industry experts talking up the idea that a “peak” in oil production has been “moved to the backburner” – but he obfuscated compelling evidence in his own report contradicting this view.

“There’s still plenty of oil – we just haven’t got all of it out of the ground yet. There’s not a real danger of there being no fossil fuel,” one oil company executive told the BBC. “There’s enough oil in this country for another 100 years with our present technology and there’s more around the world to be found yet.”

Following a chorus of industry hype on the wonders of shale gas and fracking, Shukman finally referred in passing to a new scientific paper published by Eos, Transactions – the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union – saying that the paper “supports the assertion that a peak in oil production is ‘a myth’ but argues that the rising cost of extraction could itself provide a limit, and may act as a brake on economic growth.” He then closed his report with the following quote from a leading industry figure: “The era of cheap oil is over, but we’re a long way from peak oil – costs will go up but the technology will respond.”

The thrust of the message was that peak oil is a myth because we’re not running out of oil. Even if costs go up, this will automatically spur the technological innovation that will make continued extraction of expensive oil viable.

But Shukman’s characterisation of the new Eos paper is a combination of falsehood and half-truth. Far from describing peak oil as a myth, the paper’s conclusions are far more nuanced, and point to an overwhelming body of evidence contradicting the industry hype that the rest of his report parrots uncritically.

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Sabotage of Nuclear Train in France

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By Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News

By Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News

An unknown anti-nuclear group has taken credit for a July 12 act of sabotage that derailed a train transporting nuclear waste in the French city of Limoges.  French police are currently conducting an investigation.

According to the regional newspaper Le Populaire du Centre, an email claiming responsibility also explained that a steel plate, also known as a fishplate, was unbolted from the tracks, the track was lifted and the rail crossings were dislodged.

The derailment took place in the morning on a stretch of track used exclusively by nuclear giant Areva to transport nuclear waste.

The Areva train shot off the rails more than 200 ft. Neither of the two rail-workers aboard were injured.

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Originally posted by Earth First! News here.