Steven Colbert has proposed a solution to the BP spill problem (which seems to just get worse and worse every day). Maybe I’m just punchy, but….well, you watch and see if it doesn’t make you smile, too.

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A new organization, Seize BP, has a novel idea: Let’s (the USA) seize BP and manage them till they do right—sort of the way we seized the big banks.

Doing that—or even the possibility of doing it—might just cause some other big polluters and wrong-doers to straighten up and fly right—for awhile at least.

When corporations become so large and politically powerful that they act as though they are above the law, and the corporate officers have no accountability for the deaths and damage they cause, maybe seizing the company and reforming it is the only viable solution.

I had a PR client many years ago that that had happened to. A natural gas distribution company had sold exclusive natural gas supply contracts to several large Texas cities. They planned to buy the gas later, whenever the prices were at their lowest, and make a killing.

My client had sold natural gas that they did not actually own. Then the US deregulated the price of natural gas. Prices soared.

Merely having signed contracts to provide a product at a certain price, the super-rich owner felt, did not obligate him to actually deliver the natural gas at that price. After all, he would have lost a lot of money.

The cities who had contracted for the gas felt differently.

A U.S. Federal court agreed with the cities, upheld the contracts and took control of the gas distribution company. The court then installed new acting management (chosen from within the company) and continued to oversee the company operations.

The acting management had hired the PR firm I worked for. My task was to help restore the company’s reputation. I suggested renaming the company, came up with a corporate identity program, and sold it to the client.

Unfortunately for my agency (and my job security), the federal judge did not agree. When he found out the company was spending money on PR, he put a stop to it.

So the BP seizure idea is not so novel after all. Taking permanent ownership would be unusual. But taking control for a few years would not.

What do you think will happen?

What do you hope will happen?

What would you do?

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Haiti is an amazing country. Sure, it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But that is not the fault of the brave and generous Haitian people.

Haiti was formerly one of the most brutal French plantation colonies. Some of the planters there were monsters of sadism and depravity. Read the history.

The rum and sugar trade was so lucrative that it was much cheaper to buy more slaves than to take care of the current batch of Africans. So the plantation owners/managers just worked them to death and bought more.

Besides the obvious cruelty and inhumanity of that practice, there was another drawback. Eventually all the relatively docile peasant farmers who had made the plantations such a success were all used up. In West Africa the European slavers then fomented wars among the tribes and bought the resulting captives as slaves.

These later slaves were mostly highly trained and experienced warriors and sometimes shamans or other spiritual leaders, adept in magic, martial arts, espionage, and other practices. Those were valuable leaders and valuable skills for, say, a revolution.

They escaped by the dozens off the crowded docks of Port au Prince and disappeared into the rugged mountains of Haiti. There they joined forces with former enemies from West Africa and a few tough remnants of the indigenous Indians and formed a formidable fighting force.

They were able to infiltrate the plantations to pass information and coordinate a successful revolution in 1791 against the brutal plantation system in Haiti that was so very profitable for France.

Napoleon sent troops. The Haitians defeated them.

The Spanish sent troops. Ditto.

The successful revolution in Haiti is said to be one reason that Napoleon sold the Louisiana Purchase to Thomas Jefferson in 1803.

When Simon Bolivar, the Liberator of South America, lost his first revolution, the Haitians took him in. They outfitted a new army for him. The only obligation? He must abolish slavery in every country he freed.

The U.S. was still 60 years from even nominally abolishing slavery. A black democracy only a short sail from U.S. shores? Unthinkable! Not to be tolerated.

In (I think) the 1830s France sent an armada of powerful gunboats to blockade the coastal cities of Haiti, threatening to destroy all the coastal towns (at great loss of life) if the government of the fledgling democracy did not agree to pay “reparations” to France for freeing themselves from slavery.

The French forced the Haitians to pay virtually their whole national income to France till the end of the 19th century. Do not criticize Haiti for being a backward country. All the money that should have been used to build roads, schools, universities, hospitals, and other infrastructure had to be paid to the French for generations.

But wait, there is more: The United States of America has invaded tiny Haiti 13 times!

Throughout the 20th century we repeatedly deposed democratically elected presidents of Haiti who stood up for the Haitian people against U.S. corporate interests. We imposed and supported brutal dictatorships.

Popular, democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted by the CIA under President Clinton and exiled from Haiti for 3 years. When he came back, he was reelected.

The U.S. kidnapped him at gunpoint under President Bush and held him incommunicado in Central Africa for weeks. The Bush government threatened the President of Jamaica with similar treatment for offering sanctuary to the Haitian president and his family.

So do not blame the Haitians for their predicament. The U.S. and France put them in the position they are currently in. Only Venezuela, Cuba, and a handful of other countries freed by Bolivar have ever stood up for them.

We owe the Haitians our support for the movement to insist that the French repay the so-called “reparations” they extorted from Haiti at gunpoint in the 19th Century.

America owes the Haitians help and monetary aid now to make up abusing them in the past. And because they need help as our fellow human beings and near neighbors in the New World.

When it gets right down too it, we also owe the Haitians for a huge chunk of middle America—from Louisiana to Idaho—known as the Louisiana Purchase.

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Coalition of Immokalee Workers protest. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

What is it with Florida? The reports just keep coming in about Immokalee County, where poor immigrant workers are lured with the promise of jobs and then trapped in brutally inhumane conditions and not allowed to escape.

Over and over we have been asked to boycott this or that fast food restaurant in the last few years. After awhile we hear that the restaurant has nobly given in and agreed to pay a whopping extra penny a ton for tomatoes or whatever. And so we go back to eating there, maybe.

But the truth is none of that money ever goes to the poor workers, slaving under that hot sun without water, abused by overseers, and forced to live in abysmal squalor. None of that money is ever passed along to them so that their children can quit working in the fields to help feed the family.

Instead, the money is kept by the growers association, which has been running this racket for decades and does not want anything to interfere with it. So poor workers continue  to be lured to Immokalee County with false promises, only to labor and live in conditions that would make most third-world countries look enticing.

For more information see the website of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Their stories will break your heart and turn your stomach. And make you angry–not only at what is being done to them, but that it is being done right here in the United States of America.

From election fixing to virtual slavery. There is a deep pattern of corruption here. When will someone clean up Florida?

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Four years after Hurricane Katrina, only 19 percent of residents have returned to the poorest neighborhoods. That is a disaster for them, but it is not an accident.

A wealthy New Orleans resident gave away the game in 2005, during the Katrina disaster. Referring to the poor, black population of the flooded areas, he told the Wall Street Journal “we do not want them back”.

Standing beside the swimming pool in the backyard of his New Orleans mansion, this latter day “Southern gentleman” said that the storm was a good opportunity to “clean up the city” by getting rid of “those people” (the poor and black who have still not been allowed to move back in to New Orleans). And so the New Orleans elite have managed to do since the storm.

Perfectly sound public housing and homes were torn down to ensure that the poorest people could not return to New Orleans. Naturally the land for the public housing units, only a fraction of which will be replaced (somewhere, sometime, supposedly), is being sold.

The land under the scarcely damaged, sturdily built old public housing projects just happens to be quite near some very expensive New Orleans real estate—and therefore highly valuable to developers.

For decades, everyone knew that New Orleans was a disaster waiting to happen. Yet the federal government (the only entity who could legally do so) did not rebuild or reinforce the levees.

In the interests of real estate developers and right-wing politics they simply waited for a major hurricane to free up valuable land—and vastly change the demographics of New Orleans by getting rid of many thousands of poor, black Democrats.

What happened and is still happening in New Orleans is a crime. People were put in harm’s way and deliberately allowed to die for the sake of politics, racism and greed. Then their homes, including houses that had been owned by families for generations, were taken away.

We must never forget the real meaning—and purpose—of the Katrina disaster.

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The insurance giants and big pharma feel really threatened by the prospect of healthcare reform. Insurance is spending $1.4 million each day to fight reform.

As part of that effort, the right-wing is organizing “unruly mobs” to disrupt healthcare town meetings across America.

Unfortunately for them, the behavior is so obvious, so obnoxious, and so antidemocratic that reporters have noticed and written about it all over the country. Here are a few samples of the media coverage of the carefully orchestrated disruptions of public discussions.

The Post-Standard

“‘It was like he was tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail,’ [one of the protesters] said. ‘It was a beautiful thing.’ Actually, for anyone who treasures a functioning democracy, where ideas from all sides are respectfully debated, it’s a pretty ugly development.” [RIP, public discourse?, Post-Standard, 8/5/09]

Herald Times Reporter

“He’s absolutely right. There’s no place for mob behavior in these kinds of situations, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. We always can agree to disagree, but shouting down an adversary won’t accomplish anything.” [Editorial: No room for mobs, Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter, 8/5/09]

SalisburyPost.com

“The protesters jeer, heckle, wave placards, shout over the speaker and carry on much like the student radicals of yore. Memos that have cropped up on the Web show that these protests are not intended to be any kind of dialogue but purely disruptive, preferably ending with the member of Congress forced to retreat. Videos of the demonstrations almost immediately appear on the Internet. The idea is to make opposition to health-care reform seem more widespread than it really is.” [Beware of staged disruptions, Salisbury Post, 8/5/09]

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In a devastatingly insightful column in the Huffington Post, naturopath Anne Dunev writes about our broken healthcare system and what should be done to fix it. Dunev has practiced naturopathic medicine both in Britain and in the United States. She has experienced how both systems work.

Not surprisingly Dunev is not impressed with the President’s healthcare proposal. She thinks it does not go nearly far enough.

Dunev urges us to do away with insurance entirely, because it costs too much and contributes nothing to healthcare. In fact, she feels that insurance companies by their nature are counterproductive to healthcare.

She also takes aim at the bloated and cynical pharmaceutical industry, which spends more on advertising and promotion than on research and development. Properly prescribed prescription drugs now kill 2 1/2 times as many people as car wrecks ever year.

Not only that, properly prescribed prescription drugs kill three times a many people each year as illegal drugs. And the FDA, filled with former and future big pharma executives is the fox guarding the hen house.

In both insurance and pharmaceuticals, Dunev marshals the facts to show that the profit motive corrupts absolutely.

As Dunev says, “Most decent people cannot conceive that anyone would profit from knowingly harming others. That is the flaw in capitalism. And that is one reason that evil can exist.“

Read her column for yourself. It is concise, insightful, and based on factual evidence. It is also chilling! Read it and weep.

And then get busy and do something about fixing the problem!

Lobby your congresspersons, write to your newspaper. Become an online activist. For that matter, lobby your friends and neighbors to take action, too.

Taking action now could save your life or that of someone you love.

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Six months ago if anyone said there could be a civil war in America (again), I would have thought they were being right-wing ridiculous. (Remember the corporate-sponsored Tea Party nonsense?) Now I’m not so sure.

In just a few months, the ultra right has begun to reap the harvest of hatred they so shamelessly seeded during the last presidential election campaign.

Oh sure, they have been at it for years. But I cannot believe the fury of people I personally know who used to care about others, who even used to be liberal, against all of us who still are liberal.

I have seen otherwise seemingly nice people literally snarl at a silent TV screen across a crowded restaurant just because it showed an image of the newly elected president. And I have seen people turn on their own families with an irrational hatred for being “liberal.” (You would think it was a curse word.)

Sure the highly paid right-wing propagandists have always spewed vitriol, but somehow this is different. This is ordinary people who have suddenly turned into snarling, spitting Limbaugh sock puppets.

Interestingly some of these folks claim not to even listen to Limbaugh. But then, they don’t have to listen to him to hear the same nasty lies and perverse prevarications repeated endlessly by the Limbaugh wannabes.

For some reason ordinary folks think the imitators are less vicious because they do not bellow and spit into the microphone the way Rush does. But they are wrong.

You know, blatant racism is horrible. But unacknowledged, subtextual racism is horrible, too.

And selfishness, even short-sighted, ignorant selfishness, where people preach and vote against their own interests in order to keep some other, despised group from being treated fairly, is horrible.

But this is different. There is an anger being expressed that just is not rational even by the the usual irrational logic.

And that brings me back to the civil war angle. I’m seeing people turn against their own family members. We are being treated as heretics.

The angry ones are not listening. There is no conversing with them. Their minds are closed.

They parrot propaganda in an angry tone. And here’s what’s weird: they don’t bother to listen because Rush and his cronies have already told them what we supposedly believe, and exactly where we got our benighted notions.

They claim to be mind readers. They know what we read. They know what we think.

We are credulous dupes and conspiracy nuts who believe anything as long as it is left-wing (and apparently “evil”) enough. Whereas they are paragons of rationality, brilliant intellect, omniscience, and common sense. They know this, because Rush (and company) tells them so.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Um-hmmm. Yep.

Sorry, but turning on your own family that way reminds me very much of another era of demagoguery that filled people with irrational hatred for their erstwhile friends and neighbors.

It was not so long ago as our American Civil War. It was the Nazi era before World War II. Kind of scary, yes?

As part of this whole weirdness, the far-right, the very mouthpieces of corporate greed, are labeling centrists like the President as fascists. The people who listen to them may not know it, but the very definition of fascism (by Musselini himself) was “the merger of business and government”.

Fascism is when business interests take over the government (not, as the Rushites claim, when government takes over a business). So they label Obama as both a socialist and a fascist (two opposite labels, neither of which applies).

You would think the two labels would cancel each other out. But then, you would think.

Are you scared yet? If not, you haven’t been paying attention to what is happening all around you. Things have gotten very, very ugly, and I suspect they are only going to get much uglier between now and the mid-term elections in 2010.

All this slavering hatred is being drummed up for a purpose. And that purpose is to make the world safe for rapacious greed. Again.

There is no compassion and no conscience in it. And that’s what scares me. Again.

Just when we thought Democracy was going to be saved.

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StarBucks (otherwise known as AstronomicalBucks), it turns out, treats its workers like dirt.

Just like WalMart, StarBucks plays dirty tricks to (illegally) keep workers from unionizing. To find out more, watch this video:

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