26th August 2012
By Matt Mellen
Guest Writer for Wake Up World
The ‘global financial crisis’ has been revealed to be a scam to pass huge amounts of public money to banks. The super-rich just got richer, they smuggled £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth into offshore accounts – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together.
Meanwhile, a devastating article published June 6 2012 in the science journal Nature cites 100 papers in summarizing what’s known about environmental tipping points. In “Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere,” they put forward evidence that the entire global ecosystem could flip rapidly to a new state with devastating ramifications for billions of people.
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Not only are national governments failing to take action, they still work on behalf of (and subsidize) the gargantuan fossil fuel companies who are committed to transfering as much carbon from the ground into the atmosphere as possible. They diffuse the carbon to concentrate their wealth and the public pays for the pollution. Bill McKibben writes: “Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.”
McKibben goes on to argue that the only force powerful enough to stop the planet destroyers at the helms of these behemoths is widespread moral outrage transformed into a campaign of disinvestment. This worked in the 1980s campaign to stop apartheid by demanding divestment from companies doing business in South Africa. It could work again now if we take enough money away from the corporations committing ecocide. A key part of the anti-apartheid campaign was an alliance of artists making potent music.
About the Author
Matt Mellen is the founder of ecohustler.co.uk and is the director of ecologicalminds.com.
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