[GPSCC-chat] #Occupy is the Most Important Thing Going

[Brian Good]

Sez Naomi Klein

http://www.thenation.com/article/163844/occupy-wall-street-most-important-thing-world-now 

the 1 percent loves a 
crisis.... [the] 99 percent 
is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not 
pay for your crisis.”

You have refused to give the media the 
images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And
 that tremendous discipline 
has meant that, again and again, the story 
has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality.

In 1999, we were 
taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom.... It was all about start-ups, not shutdowns.... Ten years
later, it seems as if there aren’t any more rich countries.
 Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public
 wealth 
and exhausting natural resources around the world.


Unfettered greed has trashed the global 
economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well.... The new 
normal is serial disasters: economic 
and ecological.


We act
 as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the 
atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there 
are 
strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial 
resources to build the kind of society we need. The task of our time 
is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, 
respect the real limits to what the earth can take.
================================================================================

Brian here:

On University Avenue in Palo Alto today I saw them tearing down a perfectly good building simply because somebody can make a buck
building something new and somebody else can make a buck on the loan package necessary to finance a replacement for a building
that had obviously been paid off 50 years ago.  

The vandals ignore the carbon footprint of their machinery and their concrete and their steel, and they pretend that these vintage 
structures can not be retrofitted with steel supports to assure their earthquake resistance.  When I used to do concrete work I 
thought the material was environmentally benign--it was long-lasting and no trees were harmed.  I did not consider the fossil fuels 
consumed in the cement furnaces or the carbon dioxide released in the chemical reactions.  

Greens should point out the damaging consequences of building destruction by profit-seekers and oppose their activities everywhere. 

B























 		 	   		  
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