New legislation from big oil and ALEC curbs states rights to use less carbon intese fuels.
Labor unions are key to the fight against austerity in Turkey.
(Photo: 350.org / Flickr)The recent revelations about the NSA's far-reaching program of domestic surveillance have been met with an astonishing lack of outrage from the American people. A combination of "I'm not doing anything wrong, so why should I worry?" and "We've known this was going on for years" has led to a big national shrug over the matter.
If the rise in local, state and federal government's willingness to act on behalf of major corporations by labeling lawful American citizens as terrorists does not shake people out of their lethargy, then we deserve everything we are certainly going to get.
Need a reason to worry about the NSA spying scandal? Try this: you legally protest an oil company in your town, are arrested, and wind up in court facing federal terrorism charges and a personal eternity behind bars. The evidence presented against you was gathered by NSA monitoring of your telephone usage and social media communications, all at the behest of said oil company, which owns every Senator who sits on the Intelligence Committee in Washington DC.
Think it can't happen?
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For as long as humans have been growing food, farmers have saved seeds from their harvest to sow the following year. But Monsanto and other big seed companies have changed the rules of the game. They have successfully argued that they spend millions of dollars developing new crop varieties and that these products should be treated as proprietary inventions with full patent protection. Just as one can't legally reproduce a CD or DVD, farmers are now prohibited from copying the GM seeds that they purchase from companies like Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and Syngenta.
It's time to end the era of Big Finance capitalism and an economy based on the extraction of resources, especially for energy. This statement is not an ideological proposal, but a practical one. We simply cannot continue on the present path, and as systems fail and resources become scarce, we will be forced to change what we do.
While this sounds pessimistic, it is actually an opportunity to be optimistic. Out of crisis spring new opportunities.
