Obama’s “Rules” for Killing People with Drones
This video is re-posted from the Real News Network.
In this video, Michael Ratner, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, discusses President Obama debating rules that allow him to kill extra-judicially anyone considered an enemy combatant anywhere in the world including US citizens and by logical extension, within the United States.
This discussion comes on the heels of a new report that documents the amount of civilians deaths, particularly child deaths, have occurred because of the US administration’s use of drones in the War on Terror.
Another excellent analysis of the US use of drones is the book Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt.
Marijuana Convicts Scarred While BP Execs Untouched
This article by Paul Street is re-posted from ZNet.
It’s a hell of a thing to go through life with a felony record in the United States. The consequences are different depending on who and/or what you are, however.
Take a 20-something black American who has just finished serving three years in a state correctional facility after pleading guilty to a minor drug offense – possessing a modest amount of marijuana and/or cocaine. He was born into a deeply disadvantaged single-parent family stuck in a jobless ghetto where drugs, gangs, guns and crime were ubiquitous, where economic opportunity was absent, and where schools were dilapidated, underfunded, unsafe and obsessed with standardized tests scores.
He grew up in what researchers call “deep poverty,” at less than half the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level (more than 1 million live in that condition). Food pantries, food stamps, public family cash assistance and the underground economy kept him alive in his youth. 
His childhood unfolded against a backdrop of vacant lots, broken glass, boarded-up homes, gunfire, used hypodermic needles and constant police harassment. His teachers expected him to end up in prison from the early grades on. Incarceration was a normal experience for young men in his neighborhood. A large number of the folks he went to (and dropped out of) school with have already been killed or maimed in street violence.
His arms are marked with gang tattoos a prison release counselor told him to get removed – a painful process – if he wants to find a job on the outside. He also has a four-inch gash over his left eye, courtesy of an abusive cellmate.
He’s back on the streets after three years on the wrong side of one of the many hundreds of prisons that dot the rural landscape of the world’s leading mass incarceration nation. (The supposed land of liberty, the United States is home to more than 2 million prisoners, nearly half of them black. The number of black Americans currently under criminal supervision in the United States is greater than the total number of slaves in the country on the eve of the Civil War). Now he is one of the one in three black adult males marked with the lifelong stigma of a felony record.
As if he wasn’t already sufficiently disadvantaged by the savage racial and socioeconomic disparities that scarred his life from birth (from conception, in all truth) and by the prison experience itself, he now wears the badge of what law professor Michelle Alexander calls “the new Jim Crow” in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010). When he agreed to plead guilty to a felony, he was “told little or nothing about the parallel universe [he was] about to enter, one that promises a form of punishment that is often more difficult to bear than prison time: a lifetime of shame, contempt, scorn, and exclusion. In this world,” Alexander notes, “discrimination is perfectly legal” – and technically “colorblind.”
Along with his race, dismal education, and an awkward three-year gap in his school and work history, his felony record would be a nearly fatal hurdle to decent employment. Nobody told him about that. Or that he would lose his rights to sit on a jury and (in many states) to vote – two of the most basic rights in a democratic nation. Or that he would become ineligible for numerous federally funded health and welfare benefits, including food stamps, public housing and educational assistance. Or that he would no longer qualify for numerous employment and professional licenses (a law degree, for example) or be able to obtain a federal security clearance or be permitted to enlist in the military and that he might have his drivers’ license automatically suspended. Or that he would be shackled upon release with various debts (a “new debtors’ prison”) resulting from fines and other payments he would be required to make to probation departments, child support officers, parole officers, fees to work-release authorities and public defenders among other “post-conviction fees,” according to Alexander.
Given their common debt burden and the remarkable difficulty “ex-offenders” have getting work and public benefits in a society that requires people to exchange money or food stamps for basic necessities, it is unsurprising that released prisoners commonly return to the black market drug economy that made them targets for arrest and imprisonment. It’s a vicious circle whereby the criminal (in)justice system uses “the war on drugs” to turn millions of black and Latino and poor white Americans into a permanent criminal underclass that cycles in and out of jail, court, prison, parole, probation, the nation’s poorest and most opportunity-starved communities and the most marginal sections of the labor market. This mostly nonwhite criminal caste is the critical human raw material for an industry that provides jobs for predominantly white rural workers who no longer find employment in agriculture or industry: racially disparate mass incarceration. Along the way, the nation’s colossal human warehousing and branding system serves the predominantly white economic elite by further cheapening the price of black and lower-class labor and suppressing the official unemployment rate, which would be much higher if it included prisoners.
It isn’t just about the specific forms of discrimination and the terrible material consequences of the barriers felons face. “Many ex-offenders,” Alexander notes: ”will tell you that . . . the worst of it . . . is the shame and stigma that follows you for the rest of your life. . . . It is not just the job denial but the look that flashes across the face of a potential employer when ne notices that ‘the box’ has been checked – the way he suddenly refuses to look you in the eye. It is not merely the denial of the housing application but the shame of being a grown man who has to beg his grandmother for a place to sleep at night. It is not simply the denial of the right to vote but the shame one feels when a coworker innocently asks, ‘Who are you going to vote for on Tuesday?’ “
A felony record is a social and political death sentence for many.
Things are different for the artificial person called BP PLC – the giant England-based petroleum corporation British Petroleum (BP). Two weeks ago, BP agreed to become a convicted felon by accepting a deal with the US Justice Department. It will plead guilty to 11 felony counts of “seaman’s manslaughter” and one felony count of obstructing Congress related to the offshore Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers and riveted the world by causing an epic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in early 2010. In what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls “the largest environmental disaster in history,” the spill lasted for months and was captured on live underwater camera even as BP officials lied about the volume of toxic oil (60,000 barrels) it spewed each day into the ocean.
In addition, the company has agreed to pay a record US fine of $4.5 billion and faces up to $31 billion in additional pollution penalties under the Clear War Act and the Oil Pollution Act. (It had already paid out $36 billion related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.) The Justice Department is charging BP engineers Don Vidrine and Robert Kaluza, 63, with manslaughter in the Deepwater incident. Vidrine and Kaluza face the possibility of going to prison for a decade or more. And last week, the Obama administration ordered a temporary stop to new federal contracts with BP, citing the company’s “lack of business integrity.” The action by the EPA bans BP and its affiliates from new government contracts for an indefinite period. At the same time, the administration has disqualified BP from winning new leases to drill for oil or gas on taxpayer-owned land until the suspension is lifted.
But the spectacularly wealthy corporation BP has the resources to make the payments demanded, some of which it will meet by selling off a few refineries and other assets. No top executives at the artificial felon BP will be spending any time in a prison or a jail or on parole or probation. With the Vidrine and Kaluza indictment, BP is permitted to offer up two of its lesser professional employees as scapegoats. The charges against them are cynical, predicated on the ridiculous notion that two immediate supervisors, without any influence over BP’s destructive practices and culture, can be held accountable for a complex and many-sided disaster. The two retirement-age professionals are being sacrificed to protect the real criminals in the corporate suites. As The New York Times reported the day after the BP settlement was announced: “Brian Gilvary, BP’s chief financial officer, said in a conference call with analysts that the [BP] board weighed the settlement struck with the government against the prospect of a much wider criminal indictment that would have involved more people in the company. ‘A criminal indictment would have been a huge distraction,’ he said.” Gilvary might have added the prospect of a much wider criminal indictment “might have involved people higher up in the company.”
The EPA ban on new contracts and leases is strictly temporary, unlike the numerous lifetime barriers experienced by many millions of poor, disproportionately black and Latino flesh-and-blood American felons. It does not impact existing BP contracts with the federal government, which include “hundreds of leases it has signed to drill for oil or gas in the United States and agreements worth billions of dollars to supply the government with fuel.” It will remain in effect only “until the company can provide sufficient evidence to EPA demonstrating that it meets federal business standards,” the environmental agency said. BP is already working with the EPA to prove it is meeting standards and said that this temporary suspension should be lifted “soon.”
CNN Money reported that BP shares fell early in the day the suspension was announced but “recouped most of their losses by noon.” Nobody in the EPA or the Justice Department or elsewhere in the oil-friendly Obama administration is talking about permanent debarment – the disqualification of the mendacious, man-slaughtering multinational from ever again receiving federal contracts and leases. Looking forward to the increased shareholder price, improved reputation, and enhanced investor stability it expects to result from a resolution of the claims against it, BP remains at liberty to rake in untold billions of dollars in super-profits while working to push humanity’s doomsday clock ever and more rapidly closer to midnight as more and more surplus carbon emissions collect in the atmosphere and as more American water supplies are exhausted and poisoned by the hydraulic fracturing practices BP and other leading oil corporations exploit.
A report in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) the day after BP agreed to wear the felony mark bore an interesting headline: “Accident Fails to Dent British Firm’s Ambitions in US.” Forget for a moment the newspaper’s curious choice of the word “accident” over “crime.” How about “Admission to Eleven Counts of Felony Manslaughter Fails to Dent British Firm’s Ambitions in US”? to appreciate the remarkable degree to which BP expects to survive its conviction with profits and US production capacities intact. According to the WSJ:
“BP PLC’s operations in the US, which once seemed in jeopardy because of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, have instead taken on greater importance at the London-based oil giant. . . . The company employs about 23,000 people, 30 percent of its workforce – in the US, which is home to 40 percent of its shareholders. It also produces 20 percent of its oil and gas in the country. . . . BP remains the largest oil producer in the US Gulf of Mexico and runs a huge oil field in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. It maintains strategically important refineries in Washington, Ohio and Indiana. And the company is exploring for oil and gas in emerging shale formations located in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Ohio. . . . Its chief executive, Bob Dudley, is an American, who in a speech at Harvard University on Tuesday, said BP ‘remains committed to the US and our role in its energy industry.’ . . . Executives have made clear BP is committed to drilling in the US in the long term . . . [saying it will] invest $4 billion in Gulf operations in 2012 and at least that amount every year over the next decade.”
While millions of living, felony-marked Americans can never vote in another election even after they serve their time for a minor felony drug offense, the felony-marked artificial person called BP will remain free under Citizen United-era US campaign finance law to pour unlimited resources from its corporate treasury into the money-soaked US elections system. Along with the billions of dollars BP and other global corporate fossil fuel giants like Exxon-Mobil and Chevron pour into lobbying, public relations and propaganda, its political investments will continue the psychopathic work of discrediting the urgent and overwhelming scientific consensus on the ever-deepening existential threat posed by anthropogenic global warming and preventing serious public action to save the species from the specter of climate change. It will continue along with its corporate brethren and their criminal front the American Petroleum Institute to bet against the fading prospects for a decent future, destroying a livable Earth with recklessly excessive carbon emissions that are warming the planet beyond the “tipping point” of sustainable habitation.
Thanks to that deadly influence, the WSJ can report that “the oil industry rebounded quickly from the [Deepwater Horizon] accident in spite of a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium and a spate of new regulations. Thirty months after the spill, offshore gas and oil operations in the Gulf have all but returned to their pre-accident levels. The latest rig count shows 47 offshore rigs in the gulf, just shy of the level right before the accident.” Remarkably enough, one of those rigs (the Black Elk platform, 25 miles southeast of Grand Isle, Louisiana,) blew up on the day after the announcement of BP’s settlement with the Justice Department.
Also thanks to the extraordinary influence of BP and other giant oil companies, climate change was almost completely missing from the 2012 election. In their second televised debate, the two presidential contenders went back and forth trying to outdo each other in touting their commitment to making America “energy independent” through fracking, expanded domestic and offshore drilling, and accelerated coal extraction. Neither of them seemed to care much about what the world is going to look like after a few more decades of such practices. It was futile to hope that Hurricane Sandy – its remarkable fury driven by greenhouse emission-warmed ocean waters – would do much to penetrate the petro-corporate, plutocracy-imposed silence. The record-setting heat, droughts, and forest and grass fires of 2012 didn’t do it, so how was yet another example of Nature’s revenge going to break through the eco-cidal consensus with less than a week to go?
Such is the dark, slimy nature of what passes for justice in the United States, where money talks and eco-cide walks. It’s a nation where droves of young black males are multiply disenfranchised for life for dealing modest amounts of weed while giant corporations who fill the planet with lethal carbon emissions and who dedicate huge resources to undermining public regulation of mass-murderous greenhouse gases remain free to pursue lucrative federal contracts and purchase decisive political influence even after they commit spectacular and egregious crimes against human beings and the Earth we all share.
This article by Dave Zirin is re-posted from The Nation. Editor’s Note: Zirin and Olympic great John Carlos were at GVSU in February and GRIID conducted an interview with them.
Michigan, the cradle of the union movement in the United States, is poised to join the ranks of so-called “right-to-work” states. The Koch Brothers’ meat puppet Governor Rick Snyder says that this attack on the political power of unions would be a victory for “freedom.” Unless he’s talking about the freedom to gut the wages of Michigan’s workers, he’s not telling the truth. The bill Snyder poised to sign this week is about restricting the freedom of working people to organize. It even blocks the “freedom” to challenge the bill in a referendum. This is an outrage and the unions are fighting back. Amongst their ranks are the Major League Baseball Player’s Association and the National Football League Player’s Association. This might shock some people. Sports unions are often criticized, incorrectly, for not caring about issues off the field. It’s a piece of “conventional wisdom” that stretches back to the first chief of the AFL-CIO George Meany who said, “I have no use for ball players as union men. You’d never see the day when one of those high priced bozos would honor a picket line.”
I spoke with DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFLPA about his thoughts on the right-to-work issue in January when Indiana became the first rust-belt state to pass their own version of the bill. He said, “When you look at proposed legislation [called] ‘right-to-work’ let’s just put the hammer on the nail. It’s untrue. If [you want] ‘right-to-work’ have a constitutional amendment that guarantees every citizen a job, that’s a ‘right-to-work.’ What this is instead is a right to ensure that ordinary working citizens can’t get together as a team, can’t organize, can’t stand together and can’t fight management on an even playing field. From a sports union, our union, our men and their families understand the power of management and understand how much power management can wield over an individual person. So don’t call it a ‘right-to-work.’ If you want to have an intelligent discussion about what the bill is, call it what it is. Call it an anti-organizing bill. Fine. If that’s what the people want to do in order to put a bill out there, let’s cast a vote on whether or not ordinary workers can get together and represent themselves, and let’s have a real referendum.”
I also asked, DeMaurice Smith how he responded to people who say that this is just unions standing up for other unions with no care for workers. His answer stands as a terrifically important response to those standing with Snyder and the Koch brothers on this issue.
Smith answered, “I used to say that we have forgotten a lot of the lessons from organized labor over the last 100 years, but I’m now convinced that we never learned them. Whether your talking about fire escapes outside of buildings or sprinkler systems inside of buildings, fair wages for a days work, laws that prevent child labor, things that led to the abolishing of sweatshops in America, let alone management contributing to healthcare plans or a decent pension… all those things over the last 100 years were not gifts from management. Someone in a corporate suite didn’t decide one day that they would bestow that wonderful right upon a working person. The way those rights were achieved was through the collective will of a group of workers who stood together and said, ‘This is what we believe is fair, and we are all going to stand together and demand that those things be provided to us. We’ll do it as a collective group. You may be able to pick off one of us or two of us or five of us, but you will not be able to pick off all of us.’ When you look at legislation that is designed to tear apart that ability to work as a team… that is not just anti-union. That is anti–working man and woman, and that’s why we weighed in.”
The fight is certainly not over in Michigan. Those opposing right-to-work legislation however are going to need to expand the planned protests and civil disobedience in the coming week. It’s safe to say that it would make a substantial difference to this struggle if members of the Detroit Tigers and Detroit Lions take a cue from their own union executive boards and make their way down to the capital.
Michigan AFSCME Council 25 and many other labor organizations, civic, and faith based groups will be heading to Lansing on Tuesday, December 11, 2012 to protest the Right to Work legislation jammed through both the House and Senate Chambers. Michigan Forward is urging everyone to come and Stand up for Democracy.
People will be traveling to Lansing on Tuesday from all over the state and there is a bus leaving from Grand Rapids, which is organized by the Kent Ionia Labor Council. They will be leaving on Tuesday at 7:00AM from the Kent Ionia Labor Council headquarters located at 918 Benjamin NE in Grand Rapids. You can sign up to get a seat by going to this link.
There is also a Facebook event page for the bus trip protest leaving from Grand Rapids, which might be a place to get other questions answered.
We hope to be able to attend and report on this rally/protest and we will see if the most recent legislation to make Michigan a Right to Work state will just result in more speeches or direct action by occupying the Capitol to let politicians know they mean business.
Crude Behavior: The Tarnished Legacy of the Tar Sands Industry
This article by Peter LaFontaine is re-posted from EcoWatch.
If the American dream can be reduced to a single image, it is of the homestead—a place earned through long days and late nights, hard work, planning and saving. It represents not only a dream realized, but an investment in your family and future, and a place that is rightfully all your own.
Now imagine that home, that achievement, taken away with a knock at your door, seized in the blink of an eye by a company you’ve never heard of, stolen away in distant boardrooms without your knowledge or consent, all of it enabled by the government you pay your taxes to. As Americans this seems unimaginable, and yet, for those whose homes lie in the cross-hairs of the tar sands oil industry, it’s a bleak reality.
Crude Behavior: TransCanada, Enbridge, and the Tar Sands Industry’s Tarnished Legacy, a new report from NWF, details the recent history of those companies, including underhanded legal campaigns against landowners, a systematic disregard for the rights of Native American tribes and negligent behavior that has led to significant tar sands spills in the U.S. and Canada.
As the industry plans to build thousands of miles of new or re-purposed tar sands pipelines across the country, the public and government officials need to learn what it actually means to invite in these neighbors. As the report makes clear, you shouldn’t unroll the welcome mat.
In the Great Plains, TransCanada (of Keystone XL infamy) has mounted a widespread misinformation assault, threatening lawsuits when farmers refuse to sign over their land to the company. In Texas, landowners and journalists have been threatened with arrest for “trespassing” as TransCanada bulldozes its way to the Gulf coast.
In New England, tar sands companies continue to insist, against all the evidence, that they have no plans to bring their dirty fuel through Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine—while simultaneously sponsoring tar sands spill cleanup workshops. And in the Midwest, Enbridge Inc. is plowing ahead with a massive expansion plan despite the lingering effects of the biggest inland oil spill in U.S. history, the 2010 Kalamazoo River disaster.
I’ve spent over a year following the ups and downs of this roller coaster ride, and it’s hammered home the fact that the tar sands industry (and oil companies in general) have an incredibly twisted understanding of what it means to be a good neighbor. In conversations with dozens of landowners and Tribal members, I have heard a constant message: “We feel powerless and betrayed by a system that is supposed to protect us.”
The Obama Administration has a crucial upcoming decision on Keystone XL, and we’re holding our collective breath, aware that the wrong choice would lead not just to climate catastrophe but also a dismantling of our basic rights to clean water, a meaningful voice in the process and safeguards for our private property.
As Jeff Insko—a Michigander who has been fighting back against these companies—puts it: “We’ve experienced first-hand the enormous gulf between Enbridge’s ‘good neighbor’ rhetoric and their callous treatment of landowners.”
Whether by looking for back-room deals in Washington, DC or taking ranchers to court, TransCanada, Enbridge and the other players have rewritten the book on how to do bad business in pursuit of profits. National Wildlife Federation has already detailed how tar sands is a terrible bet for wildlife, our climate, the American economy and public health, and Crude Behavior is another chapter in the sordid story of this industry.
Burn the Rich, not Fossil Fuels banner hung in Grand Rapids
Today, GRIID received a media release and pictures of a banner hung in Grand Rapids off the blue bridge that connects GVSU’s Pew Campus campus to the downtown.
The Media Release states as follows:
The world leaders will not solve this and the media will not tell us the truth about the seriousness of climate change.
Director of Drug War film opening at UICA tonight: “Capitalism is destroying Democracy”
Eugene Jarecki, director of such powerful films as Why We Fight and Trials of Henry Kissinger, has directed a new documentary that exposes the Drug War as a complete sham, entitled The House I live In.
In an interview with independent journalist Laura Flanders, Jarecki talks about his motivation for the doing this film that exposes the War on Drugs. Jarecki covers lots of aspects, such as the war against poor people, racism and the prison industrial complex, but towards the end of the interview, the filmmaker talks about what the film is really about and what concerns him most as an insurgent documentary maker.
Jarecki states:
I am very frightened by the impact of modern capitalism on American democracy. I think that capitalism is destroying democracy in this country because we drank a kool-aid under Reagan of a kind of runaway, not mom and pop capitalism. We love the idea of entrepreneurs and pioneers who start their little store and make a success of it. Modern capitalism is something else. This is the idea of free market as promoted by people who want anything but a free market, what they want to do is monopolize the free market so mom and pop can’t compete and ultimately go out of business and get replaced by a box store. So that’s the America that I fear because it’s in an America where, you can go into Burger King and you can have it your way and you can design your little burger the way you want to with pickles or mustard, your choice, but Americans don’t realize by entering the Burger King to begin with, a Burger King that’s able to query incredible favor with your politicians that you can’t. A Burger King that could pollute your water supply and you couldn’t stop them. A Burger King that engage in shady labor practices and you don’t have the power. All of those things that those major corporations are doing, you’ve given away your actual choice already by letting Citizens United and other decisions in this country let loose the dogs of capitalism on the American body politic.
I think that is a theme common to all of my films. I made a film about the military industrial complex, and how it threw us into war whether we wanted to or not. The majority of the American people are peace seeking and yet we find ourselves in war after war. The American drug war which has perpetuated despite every evidence of its failure by a system of industrialized for-profit incarceration. So many businesses, so many jobs, so many bureaucrats relying upon such an inhumanity as the profiteering on the incarceration of others that that could continue.
The film opens tonight in Grand Rapids at UICA and will run through December 13.
Right to Work: Brought to you in part by the DeVos Family
As people are still reeling from news that the state legislature passed a Right to Work bill for Michigan, some sources are saying that Gov. Snyder will sign the bill into law, despite his previous claims that it would be bad for the state.
One source that is saying that Snyder will make Michigan a Right to Work state is the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which euphemistically calls Right to Work, Freedom to Work.
Not only is the Mackinac Center a source for this news, they are in many ways the architect behind the push for Right to Work legislation in Michigan. The Mackinac Center was involved in the introduction of Right to Work laws in Indiana in the past year and they have been leading the charge in Michigan, even before Snyder became Governor. The Mackinac Center also has a long history of pushing for privatization and other pro-capitalist policies ever since the right wing think tank formed in 1987.
It is also important for those of us who live in West Michigan to recognize that the Right to Work policy that Michigan is about to make into law is a policy that many business leaders in the area have been championing, none more so than members of the DeVos family.
Richard, Dick and Betsy DeVos have also been major donors of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy according to SourceWatch, Right Wing Watch and stories we have posted in the past. In addition, all of these sources also document that the Edgar & Elsa Prince Foundation and the Van Andel Family have been donors to the Mackinac Center as well, making West Michigan a major source funding for the right wing think tank.
Besides funding the main architect behind Right to Work policies in Michigan, West Michigan elites like the DeVos family are deeply involved in the creation of the West Michigan Policy Forum, which since 2008 has been pushing for Right to Work legislation in Michigan.
We reported on the West Michigan Policy Forum in 2010, when they brought anti-union strategist Rick Berman to Grand Rapids and the focus on Right to Work policies at this year’s conference as well.
If indeed, Right to Work becomes policy in Michigan, much of the blame lies with the role that West Michigan elites have played in funding and pushing such a policy. Remember this the next time someone talks about the “philanthropy” of DeVos and company, especially since Right to Work policies are really an attack against working people.
Holland City Council decision on power plant will kill us
The Holland City Council decided in an 8 – 1 vote that the new electricity plant, that provides electricity for many communities in West Michigan, will be powered by natural gas.
The current General Manager of the coal-powered plant along the lakeshore Dave Koster said in an Mlive story, “What we have (had approved) are a set of recommendations that are going to be transformative for our community, and will lead us to a cleaner, more efficient energy future.”
Such a statement nothing short of a lie. While natural gas might be perceived as cleaner and more energy efficient, the reality is that natural gas extraction and burning is just a different method of environmental destruction and negative impact on climate change.
By committing the residents of West Michigan to the use of natural gas to generate electricity, the Holland City Council has doomed the public to an increase in horizontal hydraulic fracturing.
With a growth of horizontal hydraulic fracturing will come the following:
- The use of toxic chemicals (often undisclosed) in the fracking process, chemicals which cause cancer.
- The use of millions of gallons of water, which will not only mean water diversion from lakes, streams and underground aquifers, but the disposal of this water, which will be contaminated with chemicals. Where will they dispose of this toxic water?
- New roads or the widening of roads will take place, especially in more rural and environmentally sensitive areas, causing more environmental destruction – deforestation, run-off and impacting wildlife.
In addition and more importantly, the commitment to extracting and burning a fossil fuel for electricity generation will contribute negatively to climate change. As a species, we are not in a position to continue the burning of fossil fuels, particularly at the current levels. According to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, we need to reduce current carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 or we will be beyond of point of no return.
The Holland City Council not only made a wrong decision, they made a decision that will negatively impact us for years to come and they did it with virtually no public input. Say that natural gas is cleaner than coal is like saying execution by lethal injection is more humane than by hanging.
Anti-Marriage Equality groups told to get nastier
This article is re-posted from Right Wing Watch. Editor’s Note: One of the groups encouraged to get nastier is the National Organization for Marriage, which recently received $500,000 from Doug DeVos, President of Amway. Because of the DeVos funding of this anti-equality group there is a formal boycott against Amway.
After four defeats on the issue of marriage equality at the ballot box and a failed attempt to remove an Iowa justice who favors same-sex marriage, right-wing activists are starting to panic and offering their advice to the GOP and groups like the National Organization for Marriage and Focus on the Family: you’re not anti-gay enough. Yesterday, Matthew Cullinan Hoffman of LifeSiteNews similarly argued that organizations that oppose same-sex marriage need to get nastier.
According to Hoffman, who is also a correspondent for the National Catholic Register, “the very fact that” gay marriage is even up for debate “is an indication of a level of moral confusion and decadence that borders on the apocalyptic.”
He went on to maintain that same-sex unions are a “narcissistic parody” of opposite-sex relationships as “homosexual relationships do not represent an authentic intimacy, but rather involve mutual exploitation for the sake of satisfying an unnatural lust” and lead to suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, violence along with other “destructive consequences.” “Homosexuals themselves, who are the greatest victims of the ‘gay lifestyle,’ and are in desperate need of the truth,” he writes.
“Until and unless pro-family activists adopt a comprehensive and coherent answer to the ideology of the culture of death,” Hoffman concludes, “we will continue to suffer defeat after defeat, until the institution of marriage is completely destroyed.”
If Hoffman really thinks that conservatives aren’t being aggressive enough in their attacks on gays and lesbians, then we suggest he listen to the extreme anti-gay tirades we consistently find coming from right-wing talk show hosts, televangelists and many of the Religious Right groups behind the marriage campaigns.
Although questions of tactics are always relevant to the postmortem analysis following an election loss, they ultimately cannot address the essence of the problem these defeats represent: a grave sexual perversion, one rightly denounced by virtually every society that has ever existed, is being converted in the mind of the public from a vice into a public institution, with associated privileges and rights, including access to infants and small children.
In short, the losses experienced in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington State could never have happened in a healthy society that upholds basic standards of sexual morality. The very fact that they were on the ballot at all, that the subversion of the institution of marriage has become a topic of polite conversation, is an indication of a level of moral confusion and decadence that borders on the apocalyptic.
…
In reality, homosexual relationships do not represent an authentic intimacy, but rather involve mutual exploitation for the sake of satisfying an unnatural lust. Such behavior harms bodies and minds, causing physical damage and spreading diseases, and leading often to depression, drug abuse, domestic violence, and even suicide. Numerous studies have documented the destructive consequences of the “gay lifestyle,” although they should be hardly necessary if one merely considers the physical and psychological incompatibility of same-sex relationships, which substitute the natural complementarity of an opposite-sex companion in favor of a narcissistic parody of the same.
…
If we really wish to make the case for marriage, we must take a comprehensive natural-law approach to human sexuality that does not evade the more politically difficult aspects of the question, one that affirms the integral nature of sexual relationships and the corresponding duty of the state to defend sexual morality and repress vice. That is the approach laid out by then Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in an instruction issued by the Holy See’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during his leadership of the same. While affirming the goodness of natural marriage, Ratzinger also noted that homosexual unions, without qualification, must always be explicitly opposed, and that governments should act to “contain the phenomenon” of homosexuality.
Although such an approach will entail short-run difficulties and will not yield immediate victories, it is the only long-run solution to America’s terrible moral decline, which is not isolated to the definition of marriage, but includes an almost total corruption of the nation’s understanding of human sexuality, reproduction, and the value of human life. It is also the only truly charitable approach towards homosexuals themselves, who are the greatest victims of the “gay lifestyle,” and are in desperate need of the truth. Until and unless pro-family activists adopt a comprehensive and coherent answer to the ideology of the culture of death, we will continue to suffer defeat after defeat, until the institution of marriage is completely destroyed.
