Monday, 1 August 2005 - 2:40 PM CDT
Name:
Francis Scully
Home Page:
http://dreamseekah.squarespace.com
I have a number of questions. Very important questions that may help you understand something more about the world in which we currently live.
Do you support slave labour sweatshops? Fences, gaurds, and wages from 6-30 cents an hour pumping out 1500 junk garments a day getting screamed at to make their daily quota working in miserable dark diseased infected rooms with no bathroom breaks for 12 hours and fired if they get pregnant or demand a better wage or better working conditions.
The globalized economy (trade) is dependent on cheap transport and cheap transport is based on cheap fuel. Currently, our cheap fuel is oil; oil is a destructive force in it’s own right, and pervasively used in everything from agriculture and plastics to transportation and homes. The US contains 4.6% of the global population, produces 9% of the global oil, owns a mere 2% but uses nearly a third of annual global oil use. The total distance traveled by Americans exceeds that of all other industrial nations combined. Today, worldwide, we are using at least 6 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil we find. According to new research by the Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC), the world will face a global oil supply shortage after 2007! Currently, oil is about $60 a barrel, nearly double the price a year ago; and estimates to upwards of $100 a barrel near the end of this year have been claimed! Unless we ween ourselves off of an oil based economy quickly, we’re going to scramble for the rest as the oil prices rise because of dwindling resources, and slide right into a market crash... So of course oil would be an important US resource from Iraq. In March 2003, The Treasury Department provided assurances that the United States would not obstruct two companies' plans to import millions of barrels of oil from Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions... That's Democracy in action!
The oil we’re burning in two centuries took hundreds of millions of years to form from a quarter-million pounds of primeval plants. The United States consumes about 10,000 gallons a second, 19,500,000 (19.5 million) gallons a day, 593,125,000 (593 million) gallons a month and 7,117,500,000 (7.1 billion) gallons a year. The average U.S. light vehicle burns 100 times its weight in ancient plants each day in the form of gasoline. Only an eighth of that fuel energy even reaches the wheels, a sixteenth accelerates the car, and less than one percent ends up moving the driver. A 20-mile round trip in an average two-ton new light vehicle to buy a gallon of milk burns a gallon of gasoline at about half the milk’s cost. The extraordinary global oil industry has made U.S. gasoline abundant, cheaper than bottled water. A comedian’s acid remark, even if it touches a sensitive nerve today, could as well have been made under at least six of the past seven Administrations - "Two dollars a gallon to go ten miles is too much, but five to the parking valet to go ten feet is okay. The irony is that what we love most about our cars (the feeling of freedom they provide) has made us slaves. Slaves to cheap oil, which has corrupted our politics, threatened our environment, funded our enemies….Faced with our addiction to oil, what does our leadership say? Get more of it! Strange when you consider their answer to drug dependence is to cut off the supply.
Do you support a toxic agricultural system? Where billions of toxic pesticides are dumped on the land eliminating biodiversity. Our soil has basically become a sponge with barely any nutritional topsoil to keep plants healthy. We replace organic farming techniques with chemical fertilizers. So much of the system is incredibly based on oil, from pesticides, to tractors, to shipping the food around the country and the world, to the plastic packaging to keep things from going bad. Plastic is oil based, understand?
Do you support toxic manufacturing? Mercury, Dioxin, POP's, PPCP's, PCB's, PBT's, BFR's, PFC's, PAC's, pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, and the thousands of other highly persistent organic pollutants. Does this mean anything to you? Do some research and wake up! Your ignorance of these issues does not mean the issues do not exist! Just recently, the EWG released a study showing that all these toxins that we are accumulating in our bodies flow into babies in the womb through the imbilical cord. This is important knowledge, wake up ant take heed to these warnings or else we'll all faithfully stumble into dangerous situations for the human race and the rest of earth's inhabitants!
Let's focus on just one of the many different toxins we're spewing out into the enviornment and food chain just to give you a sense or the dire importance of what i'm saying. Dioxins are one of the 12 most toxic chemicals in the world - known as the "dirty dozen" or, more technically, as persistent organic pollutants (POP), or bio-accumulatives. Bio-accumulatives dissolve in fats and readily build up in the fatty tissues in animals and humans. They are also biomagnified through the food chain. When an animal higher up the food chain eats an animal that has accumulated POPs in its body, the POPs present in the prey build up and become concentrated in the predator. Animals at the top of the food chain such as birds of prey, humans and large predators can be exposed to levels millions of times higher than species at the bottom. Dioxin has been found in significant levels in the food chain, in people in the US, and other industrialized countries. The World Health Organization upgraded dioxin from a "probable" to a "known human carcinogen" in February 1997. It's being found at dangerous levels in cows milk, mother's milk, sperm cells, and more. Studies of humans exposed to high levels of dioxins have documented higher cancer mortality, heart disease, liver damage, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, cognitive damage, nervous system damage, endocrine system damage, immune system damage, birth defects, respiratory damage, diabetes, infertility, endometriosis, and more. It is highly persistent in the environment and is extremely resistant to chemical or physical breakdown. In just six months of breast feeding, a baby in the US will, on average, consume the EPA's maximum lifetime dose of dioxin. The average person in the US is already contaminated with an average "body burden" of 9 picograms of dioxin per gram of body weight. On May 23, 2002 the EPA reported in its Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) that 99,814 grams of dioxin were released into the environment in the year 2000. One gram of dioxin is enough to exceed the acceptable daily intake for more than 40 million people for one year! That is only ONE chemical!
Many factories (energy, production-based, etc) release unsafe levels of toxic elements, including Mercury and Dioxin. In a study completed in March 2005, scientists found that Mercury pollution in the north-eastern US is much more pervasive than scientists had realized. The discovery of high levels of the most toxic form of mercury in a mountain songbird has stunned scientists. They are now asking where else it may be found and are worried that Mercury may have finally bio-accumulated in humans and will start to cause all sorts of dire health problems.
To keep this as short and sweet as possible, I won't bother going too extensively into all the Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Pollutants (PPCP's). Up to 90% of every drug that a person takes into their body is either excreted from the body totally unchanged or is broken down into an active metabolite before being flushed down the toilet and into the sewage system, ultimately finding it's way into the water supply... This chemical potpourri eventually returns to us every time we turn on the kitchen faucet. In addition to pharmaceutical drugs, more than 10,500 chemical ingredients are used to manufacture what is collectively known as personal care products (moisturizers, cleansers, bubble baths, shampoos, fragrances, deoderants, mouthwashes, sunscreens, etc.) No municipal sewage treatment plants are engineered for Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Pollutants (PPCP) removal.
Between the thousands of pharmaceutical products that often specify "DON'T MIX WITH ANY OTHER MEDICATION," and the thousands of chemical ingredients used in many non-organic personal care products, and the extensive buildup and shifting around of chemicals like Mercury, and the massive buildup of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP's) such as dioxin (arguably the most toxic known chemical on the planet) is now working it's way into the environment at every level of the food chain and has now polluted our bodies to such an extent that we'll all go crazy from hormone imbalances, neurological disorders, and reproductive disorders; the list goes on and on and on. I ask you, are we not there allready? Take a look at the BodyBurden study! ( http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden/dynam-healtheff.php?sub=0 ) Find out what your body pollution consists of with this extensive survey. ( http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden/usertest/index.php )
Depleted Uranium ( http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=9 ) explodes over declared war-zones, dispersing itself accross the earth. Potent dioxins ( http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/031017.asp ) are being manufactured in our town's drinking water whenever Triclosan ( http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/toxics/news/news.cfm?uNewsID=21255 ) comes in contact with sunlight. Obscene amounts of poisons are being dropped on much of our food supply; or worse, designed to actually manufacture it's own poison. Humanity and the rest of earth's inhabitants on this plane of existence is on the brink of some serious mutations, and irreversibly soon if not now; SERIOUSLY!
According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005, (which included the United Nations, World Health Organization, World Bank, World Resources Institute, Global Environment Facility and 1300+ other scientists from 95 countries) approximately 60% of the planet’s “ecosystem services” are being degraded or used unsustainably. This degradation increases the risk of abrupt and drastic changes, such as climate shifts, collapse of market economies, dwindling freshwater supplies, and abrupt mass famines!
As Derrick Jensen would say, "At what point do we resist? That is the point I try to make with dioxin. Every mother’s breast milk in the world is contaminated with dioxin. My grandfather died from pancreatic cancer. I have Crohn’s disease, a disease of civilization. How close does it have to get before we realize we don’t have anything left to lose? When the salmon are gone? Ok, well that’s fine, but they can’t take the redwoods. Well, ok, they can’t take clean air. We draw a line in the sand and say they can’t cross it. Well, ok you can’t cross this one and ok now you can’t cross that one. Well, ok you can have all my clothes. Well, you can rape me but you can’t make me say I like it. Ok, I’ll say I like it but you can’t cut off my foot. Ok, just don’t cut off my other foot."
One has to ask... what are we protecting? why are we protecting such a corrupt destructive economy with such a level of unquestioned support? For me, morally, it would seem like a suicide terror attack to stop the complete destruction of the earth would be justified to some extent. Killing hundreds or thousands of corporate criminals to try and save the entire earth's population; including the rest of the food chain. Sound familiar? This scenario can be completely paralelled with the war on terror trying to kill thousands of people to try and stop the complete destruction of the globalized economies and massacres of people. So it shouldn't take that much finagling to get people to see the importance of the similarities and ask how to change things and being so frustrated with everything that terrorist attacks might be carried out in order to get people to listen and make important changes. Though, I would NEVER condone that kind of activity because I believe there to be much more effective ways of bringing about change because any intentional statement that the terror attack might try to get through usually is filtered out by the media. The irony that terrorists blew up the World Trade Center just screams that they dislike the global trade system based on slavery, reduced environmental rules and regulations, increased poverty and increased requirement of buying into the corrupt global trade system (which ironicly is what many argue keeps multiple countries from fighting is the sharing of resources and technologies)... After all it was the WORLD TRADE Center! But try and tell that to the public media, with all of its financial support from many of these corporations and businesses through advertising and marketing campaigns, and be laughed out of the room for being a "conspiracy nut." How are people supposed to make informed decisions when we have media bias and the general public accepts that there is nothing seriously wrong with our economy, so it never thinks to ask these important and pertinent questions. However, maybe im reading into it too much.... Maybe the terror attacks have no message. Maybe it was just extremists flexing their superiority over all other races just for the sheer rightousness of it... I know I would want to perform a suicide attack with no message to communicate, NOT!
Al-Qaida can easily monkeywrench our oil dependence resources and collapse our current economy; which by the way is exactly what Bin Laden wants for America... to be bankrupt. What was that? LOL $11,000,000,000,000+ US Deficit and growing!? I have video footage of Bush saying (just before the recent G8 summit) that he doesn't like Kyoto because it would "wreck our economy." Our president is inching us closer and closer and closer to precisely one of the key components of what Bin Laden's mission is trying to manifest... bankrupting America.... US deficit is $11 trillion!
