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Thursday, August 25, 2011

The Passenger Pigeon and Sustainable Prosperity



              The Passenger Pigeon
                        &  Sustainable                      Prosperity               
The longer we allow Predatory Capitalists to maintain their ferocious pace of resource depletion, the more difficult it will be to try and achieve a sustainable  prosperity in the future.  
The Illusion of Prosperity is a phrase I’d like to popularize, because today’s prosperity is due, at least partially, to stealing resources from the sustainable future.  This prosperity creates an illusion that the Industrial Revolution and “progress” are responsible for this affluence; but there is a hidden cost of exhausting land, compromising water quality, polluting the air, and stealing from the Prosperity of the worlds  future.   
                                                                               
Boomers have become obsequious sheep; a hard working productive work life, the most productive generation ever: but the corporate stranglehold on America IS nearly complete. “One generation got old, another generation got sold." The baby of freedom got thrown out with the bathwater of prosperity at any cost, and wars without end that have nothing do with
 "providing  for the common defense. "         
    
I often note the many examples of corporations making billions of dollars, leaving industrial towns abandoned and decrepit, while creating toxic and carcinogenic pollution. We are somehow thankful of this and willingly PAY THE CLEANUP COSTS. 
Corporations have lobbyists to sit in politicians’ offices to continually steer things their way, and the balking heads of television create various forms of hysteria to keep us distracted from the many forms of white collar crime, such as the 29.99% credit card interest. Banks complicit in the funding of the profitable enterprises that has put Mother Nature  on the ropes.

          The one thing environmental alarmists have proven to everyone, was that oceans were being over-fished and depleted. The over fishing issue had your factory fishing fleets all groaning and complaining as areas were  closed to restore fish populations. Hopefully we won’t have any examples, IN THE FISH POPULATION, like the passenger pigeon, a population that crashed in fifty years, an inexplicable extinction that still has scientists scratching their heads.
  
       Passenger pigeons were once the most numerous birds in North America, yet in 50 short years they became extinct, mostly from habitat destruction which may have disrupted breeding cycles and millions of pigeon pies  also hastened their demise. 
             The American ancient forests were ignominiously sliced and sold like luncheon meat as Canada’s Boreal Forest is today. So much habitat being lost with virtually no public outcry. 
            But close down a military base and  the public jumps into action to protect their form of military socialism.         



                                                                                     
The reckless factory style fishing will beget legacies of scarcities and will be the bane of future societies. For instance, Codfish is hard to get anymore, isn’t it?  We  suffer in the present for the profits of the past, and there are many more resources being depleted like this.  
Predatory capitalism serves CEO’S and stockholders: with little or no respect for the diversity of life in the ocean or any of the other world habitats. The predatory capitalists would sell every fish in the ocean if they could, without giving it a second thought.  Recently an important study concluded that fishing in the Atlantic will end by 2048. The restrictions, rationings and pain have hardly begun.  Exacerbating the problem, fish farm fish often require three pounds of fish meal for every pound of weight! This is not a real solution.        
              The small local sustainable fishing industry has nearly disappeared and the livelihoods of many small, family run fishing fleets are gone with it as once sustainable stocks became depleted. If oceans had been fished sustainably the last 100 years by small family businesses, fish prices would have been 50% more, depending on species, and  this would have been more realistic. We are under this illusion of prosperity with low prices but are beginning to understand the long term web of death created by humans.








          Fish populations would not have crashed as they did.
   An entire network of small business would have remained intact and every community would have locally caught fresh fish in the America that once was and will be again. Fish so numerous you could scoop them out of the river with your boot. 


                   Sustainability will be the byword now instead of profits, and plummeting populations of important fish may be saved from extinction.  It is not radicalism to curb gross and obscene profits or to maintain sustainable animal populations.  It'w what must be done.
                                            
             Pig related production by factory farms is responsible for  water contamination in rivers and lakes. There’s just too much hexcretous effluvium with factory style agriculture and cheap meat is what people want, all 7 billion of us. We wanted cheap fish prices for 50 years, but now the prices are pushing upwards and will spike up in the future. With the newly prosperous Chinese middle class wanting a lot of fish, what do you think will happen? I know I’ll be investing in companies that make tartar sauce. 


   The millions of cars we sold in China now need gasoline. We've learned that their demand is what has pushed oil prices over 70 dollars a barrel for the first time. Sort of shot ourselves in the foot with that one, eh...lot’s of profit for Ford, Toyota, GM,  Mercedes and Nissan but higher prices of gasoline for all Americans and Japanese and Germans. 




                  It’s astounding that people do not see that the Predatory Capitalist system is anti family, anti-labor, anti-nature and anti-peace and they have created an illusion of prosperity.
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