:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 4.22.2007 ::
:: Love Your Mother ::
This Earth Day, Corporate Accountability is the Inconvenient Truth
The Huffinston Post
The great green bandwagon that has come of age this Earth Day has been a very long time coming. With Rachel Carson's 1963 Silent Spring and Earth Day 1970 and the first arrests at the Seabrook Nuke in 1976 and the decades of writing and marching and organizing and fundraising, the landmarks to a growing green consciousness are epic.
The past fifty years have seen the rise of the movements for civil, gay, and women's rights; for an end to nuclear bomb testing and atomic power plants; for peace in Vietnam, central America and Iraq; for the right to open access and accurate vote counts in elections that cannot again be stolen, and much much more.
These national and global campaigns have been accompanied by never-ending battles at the grassroots, against Jim Crow, for equal housing, against local polluters, for paper ballots, and for an ever-growing range of vital causes that demand human attention if we are to retain our rights and dignity.
This on-going grassroots fervor is the essence of democracy, the lifeblood of our ability to survive and grow.
Today, another specific cause---this time the environment---has finally become fashionable.
But this moment has been long delayed by big corporations that profit immensely from the destruction of the Earth, and that intend to continue.
It comes with a classic hijack---the theft of imagery. It's now the height of corporate fashion to be painted green.
Many companies have indeed come around, and deserve their new badge of honor. But some paint themselves green no matter how much harm they do.
From Exxon to Ford, from Mobil to Monsanto, the world's worst polluters buy fuzzy, feel-good advertising with an environmental message. Columnists and politicians who have pushed catastrophic policies like utility deregulation and the war in Iraq now genuflect at the media's green altar. Without a hint of irony, some even claim authorship of a movement they've scorned for decades.
To be sure, we can be thankful for genuine progress. But some of this advertising costs more than what the companies spend to actually save the planet.
It is absolutely true that individual behavior is a core element of our eco-crisis. Each of us bears some guilt for our part in fouling our global nest.
We consume too much. We waste with impunity. So at its finale, Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" rightly lists individual steps we can take for saving the planet. We all must do our individual part.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 8:09:00 PM [+] ::
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