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Old 07-04-2008, 06:27 AM   #1 (permalink)
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Happy 232nd Birthday, America! But, isn't it again time to work for Independence?

On this 232nd anniversary of our declaration of independence from British rule, I think it is fitting to begin a general discussion on the idea of corporate "reform" in the US, here at TFP, a non-commercial, discussion forum. Even without yet adding some of the evidence of the influence that the defense industry in the US and in the world plays in deliberate efforts to maintain a perception of tension between nations, because it is "good for the bottomlines" of armament producting corporations, I think the small amount of information I am including in this OP, outlines the size and scope of "the problem".

A drive for US independence from corporate dominance, or a defense of corporations and their influence on our lives? What is your opinion?

I think it is time to say "no more" to these "takings", time to assert ourselves to insist on reform of corporate practice and influence:
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...ain/index.html

...our political establishment is doing what it now habitually does: namely, ensuring that the political and corporate elite who break our laws on purpose are immune from consequences....

....The excuses offered by our political establishment for this rampant lawbreaking have been systematically rejected by the institution the Founders intended to adjudicate these legal issues -- our courts -- and it's for exactly that reason that our establishment is now conspiring to take away from the courts the responsibility they were assigned to hold lawbreakers accountable......
We have incontrovertible evidence of Multinational Oil companies at work recently, to DIMINISH the domestic petroleum exploration and production, and of the refining of gasoline:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...LD#post2447974

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...34#post2447734 (See post #9)

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...34#post2447734 (See post #30)

,,,,and, there is this assault to our sensibilities, our environment, to "justice", to our future as a nation:

Could it be that a political "hack" appointee, Collister W Johnson Jr., is arguing that it is better to risk the complete environmental destruction of the great lakes to avoid incurring $55 million in annual shipping costs increases, and avoid renegotiating a treaty with Canada, versus ending the risks of additional damage by banning foreign sea going freighters from the St. Lawrence Seaway? That is supposed to pass as the argument that "balances" the best interests of Americans, vs. corporate shipping interests?
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv...s_high_low.htm

White House Paychecks

Johnson, Collister W. Associate Director of Political Affairs $55,000

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll...OINS/307070079

.....Once Mr. Noe was in the White House on Feb. 24, 2003, his itinerary included an “Ohio political strategy session’’ with Ken Mehlman, who was later named Mr. Bush’s campaign manager and Collister “Coddy’’ Johnson, later named the campaign’s field director.

Quote:
Seaway administrator to visit north. | Watertown Daily Times ...
Collister W. Johnson Jr., now in his third week as administrator of the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corp., said he will spend Thursday and part of ...
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2...6-21882972_ITM
Quote:
http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008..._invaders.html
Seaway acts to flush Great Lakes invaders
Posted by Jeff Alexander | The Muskegon Chronicle May 06, 2008 09:38AM

....The number of foreign species in the lakes has soared since 1959, when the St. Lawrence Seaway's manmade locks gave ocean freighters access to the Great Lakes. Exotic species cause about $4 billion damage annually in the Great Lakes basin, according to a Cornell University study.

Ocean ships account for nearly half of the 185 known exotic species in the lakes, according to independent research data. Two of the most destructive invaders, zebra mussels and quagga mussels, hopscotched the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1980s in the ballast tanks of transcontinental freighters...


....A Grand Valley State University study said banning ocean freighters from the lakes would add $55 million, or six percent, to the cost of moving cargo around the region. Such a move also would create about 1,300 new jobs for truckers and train operators, according to the GVSU study....

....Collister has said there is no way the Seaway will ban international freighters. He said such a move makes no sense and would require renegotiating the 1908 Boundary Waters Treaty between the U.S. and Canada.
Quote:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=766864

Quote:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=767107
U.S. Seaway boss resists efforts to bar overseas vessels
By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: June 28, 2008

U.S. Seaway boss Collister Johnson Jr. was new to the job in early 2007 when he called the study that pegged the annual savings tied to allowing oceangoing vessels into the Great Lakes at $55 million “ridiculous.”

But he could not specifically say what was wrong with the study that was co-written by Grand Valley State University professor John Taylor and funded by the Joyce Foundation.

More than a year has passed and Johnson still can’t say what’s wrong with the study. He hasn’t read it.

“And the reason I haven’t read it is it is just pure hypothetical, you know, academia — no practical value,” says Johnson, who was nominated for the Seaway job by President Bush, a classmate from Yale University. “We’ve got to focus on things that are real.”


Johnson says talk of blocking oceangoing traffic on the Great Lakes isn’t realistic because the U.S. jointly owns the Seaway with Canada, so the U.S. could not unilaterally close the door to oceangoing ships.

“It’s just not going to happen,” he says.

It isn’t just Americans who have floated the idea of locking out overseas vessels. In May last year a binational coalition of 90 environmental groups endorsed the idea of a shipping moratorium until those vessels can prove they will not further pollute the lakes.....

Quote:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=594384
Ban ocean vessels in lakes? Some are floating the idea
As invasive species multiply, plan no longer looks radical
By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: April 21, 2007

...The group argues that the idea of slamming shut the Seaway to oceangoing "salties" has become an environmental and economic no-brainer, like padlocking a struggling little factory that is ruining life for everyone in town because it won't fix its oversize smokestack....

...Evidence suggests that the costs of the biological pollution gushing from the ship-steadying ballast tanks far outweigh the benefits of maintaining the world's largest freshwater system as a nautical highway for saltwater traffic.

A draft study from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, meanwhile, indicates that recreational boats dwarf overseas freighters in terms of economic importance to the region
, yet the recreation industry is entirely dependent on the very waters the salties continue to irreversibly pollute.

The overseas shipping industry acknowledges there is a problem and says it's time to pass a new federal law to phase in ballast treatment systems. But the industry is burning much of the lingering sympathy it has enjoyed by suing the State of Michigan over its efforts to address the ballast problem on its own with a new law restricting contaminated discharges....
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=766864
GREAT LAKES, GREAT PERIL: A SPECIAL REPORT
'The beach speaks for itself'
What price would you put on our Great Lakes - the sand beaches and rocky shores; the salmon, perch and rainbow trout; the smell of a freshwater breeze? Should we give it all up so that international shippers can save about $55 million a year? What if we already have?
By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com
Posted: June 28, 2008

First of two parts. Also read Part 2: Ecological problem, economic distress
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=767291

When Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969 near where it oozed into Lake Erie, pictures of the flames shamed Congress into passing the Clean Water Act, resuscitating the Great Lakes after a century of industrial abuse.

Two decades later, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spewed 10.8 million gallons of crude into Alaska's pristine Prince William Sound, images of cleanup crews spooning up goo and wiping off tarred birds pressed the government into ordering double-hulled oil tankers.

But you won't find any network camera crews in front of Pat Nell's Lake Michigan home just north of Sturgeon Bay. The 72-year-old retired physician and Air Force Reserve colonel is suffering the consequences of a biological pollution far more destructive than the Cuyahoga fire and far more persistent - and ultimately more costly - than the $2.2 billion it cost to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Her sand beach this spring is smothered by a two-foot-high pile of rotting algae - a mucus coughed ashore by an ailing Lake Michigan.

The rancid slime known as cladophora is just one nasty byproduct of an invasive mussel population discovered in the Great Lakes 20 years ago this month. And the mussels are just one kind of invader. The Great Lakes today are home to more than 185 exotic species, and the overwhelming majority of those that have colonized the world's largest freshwater system in recent decades did it the same way as the mussels. They arrived as accidental cargo aboard overseas freighters sailing up the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of channels and concrete-lined canals that form an artificial shipping link between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.

The scope of the ecological damage of the biological pollution linked to overseas shipping is matched by its staggering economic toll.

• The cost comes in lost tourism on beaches unsuitable for swimming and in the empty recreational fishing boats that are the backbone of a Great Lakes fishery valued at over $7 billion a year. Recreational fishing from Michigan's 10 busiest fishing ports on Lake Huron, for example, has plummeted from around 1.2 million hours in 2003 to about 300,000 last year - because of a crash in salmon. And there are early but ominous signs Lake Michigan's sport fishery could be headed in the same direction.

• The cost comes in power and water bills as part of never-ending programs to keep water intake pipes free of mussel and algae buildup. We Energies alone spent well over $3 million on structures to keep cladophora out of intake pipes at just two power plants, in Port Washington and Oak Creek. It is spending an additional $2.6 million on special mussel-proof screens as part of its expansion at Oak Creek, and its overall operating costs for controlling mussels - which cluster and clog industrial intake pipes like plaque in a carotid artery - is estimated at $500,000 a year. That's just one company. The most comprehensive survey to date indicates the pipe-clogging costs to industry and government since 1988 approach $1.5 billion.

• The cost comes in tax bills - $358 million has been spent by the U.S. and Canadian government since 1958 killing just sea lampreys, an almost-forgotten bloodsucking parasite that swam into the lakes through the shipping canals and still must be controlled with annual doses of poison or it will devastate what's left of the lakes' prized predator fish.

• The cost comes in shrinking property values and our ability to enjoy the lakes. Just one county in Wisconsin gives a glimpse of the fortune at stake. Property records show shoreline properties in Door County, where Nell lives, have an assessed value of $2.6 billion.

It is an ecological tragedy that didn't ignite like a fire or gush like oil from a cracked hull.

It's been a slow-motion accident, spanning decades and growing rather than dissipating. Its tentacles are strangling the Great Lakes' natural food web, trashing beaches, plugging water intakes at power plants and municipal drinking systems and, scientists suspect, triggering botulism outbreaks that have killed thousands of birds.

Yet the damages are so insidious and diffuse that there is no iconic image to focus public outrage - and political attention.

That's why Pat Nell wants you to see what's become of her beach.

The filter-feeding mussels are fueling an explosion of the sunlight-loving cladophora, which grows on the lake bottom, washes ashore and rots in front of her house - and on untold miles of shoreline across the Great Lakes.

"I was going to come here, park my keister and have a good time," Nell says of her mind-set when she retired to the property six years ago after a globe-hopping career.

She initially coped by raking the "green muck," but the problem has grown way beyond manageable. She says a group of neighbors even tried bulldozers and dump trucks to haul the stuff away. It was back in a month.

Now Nell, with no small amount of sadness, tries adapting to the stink.

She stopped swimming.

She quit trying to push her boat through the slop to go fishing.



She takes her dogs for walks inland, so they don't get covered or stuck in the muck.

Nell lives in a house with super-sized windows designed to catch the cool, sweet breezes that blow off the world's fifth largest lake, a body of water that is 307 miles long, more than 100 miles wide and rarely warmer than 70 degrees.

And she's planning to buy an air conditioner.

Biologists thought they had seen the worst of the mussels in their first decade here. But their numbers in the past three years have ballooned beyond anything scientists could fathom.

The estimated population of invasive mussels in Lake Michigan has increased three- to fourfold in just the past three years and now stands at more than 1 quadrillion.

That's more than 1,000,000,000,000,000 mouths stripping the formerly plankton-rich lake almost Perrier-clear. These filter feeders aren't cleaning up the water; they're sucking the life out of it.

And fresh invaders continue to arrive with distressing regularity; a new one is discovered in the Great Lakes, on average, about every six months.

Scientists say the only way to stanch the shipborne onslaught is to somehow sterilize the freighter-steadying ballast water sloshing in the bellies of the 700-foot-long behemoths that lumber up the Seaway. It's a tall order, given how difficult it is to sanitize a hospital room.

But there is another simple, radical and potentially cheap way to address this problem - shut oceangoing ships out of the lakes until they can prove they won't pollute them.

The shipping industry claims a ban could deal a brutal economic blow to the Midwest. But the relatively tiny amount of overseas cargo that flows on the Seaway likely could be absorbed at a relatively small cost by a handful of daily trains, or transferred before the ships reach the Seaway door to a Great Lakes-based freighter fleet.

The shipping industry bristles at the notion. But the industry also balked at the mandate for double-hulled oil tankers; now it boasts about its safety record.....
Quote:
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/story/447078.html

Alaskans less than happy
DAYDREAMS OVER: At least, some say, the stress of waiting is over.

By TOM KIZZIA and MEGAN HOLLAND
Anchorage Daily News

(06/26/08 00:04:25)

Reactions from Alaska plaintiffs to the Supreme Court's Exxon decision Wednesday ranged from disappointment to cynical outrage -- mixed, for some, with a tinge of relief that a two-decade ordeal had come to an end.

"It kind of sends the message that big corporations that have the right money and political power can throw safety and responsibility to the wind," said Mark Witteveen, a former Kodiak fisherman turned fisheries biologist. "I mean, $500 million for Exxon? That's not even a blip on their radar."

"This is a total slap in the face," said Andy Wills of Homer, a former Prince William Sound salmon and herring fisherman. "It just shows how corrupt our country has become. This won't even pay off a credit card."

The punitive damage limit set by the Supreme Court, including interest, should pay out just less than $1 billion when the paperwork is settled in the coming months. For commercial fishermen with the biggest shares, that could add up to $100,000 apiece or more.

But it's a far cry from the life-changing amounts dangled by the original $5 billion jury award in 1994. That award, 10 times the number approved Wednesday by the Supreme Court, became the stuff of daydreams, of big new boats and retirement homes in Mexico.

Over the years, those turned to dreams deferred as the legal case meant to bring closure to the 1989 oil spill became instead a major source of stress in coastal communities.

"Everybody has just got to shift gears again," said Frank Mullen, a Cook Inlet driftnet fisherman who also works as a financial planner. He got steady calls Wednesday from fishermen seeking advice.

"For a lot of people, I'm recommending they zero out their credit card balance and get rid of high-interest debt, then fund their IRAs to the max," Mullen said. "Many fishermen who hoped to retire soon because of the graying of the fleet are going to have to keep fishing and hope the price of fish is high."

'GRAPES OF WRATH' REVISITED

Dave Kubiak of Kodiak, a former English teacher turned commercial fisherman, said he was disappointed but not surprised at the Supreme Court decision. The court is "part of owned-and-operated corporate America," he said.

"It's 'The Grapes of Wrath' all over again. (John) Steinbeck was a visionary with that," said the former teacher. "Where do you punch your fist to pierce the corporate mask to really make anybody hear you? Nowhere. It doesn't exist. Just like in 'The Grapes of Wrath' when the farmer said, 'Well, I'll take my shotgun to town and find the banker that took my land.' It's not the banker. He's just a figurehead."

Gov. Sarah Palin said she is extremely disappointed with the decision. She said the court "gutted the jury's decision on punitive damages" and undercut one of the principal deterrents for marine shipping accidents in Alaska.

"It is tragic that so many Alaska fishermen and their families have had their lives put on hold waiting for this decision," Palin said. "My heart goes out to those affected, especially the families of the thousands of Alaskans who passed away while waiting for justice."

Palin's Fish and Game commissioner, Denby Lloyd, said the harmful effects of the spill are still being felt in Prince William Sound.

Limiting punitive damages this way sets a bad precedent, said Mary Jacobs of Kodiak, one of relatively few women commercial fishing in 1989.

"This is just saying that the oil companies aren't accountable for doing really bad stuff," she said. "Punitive damages is what keeps some businesses in line from taking risks, and the cost of operations just got less."

POLLUTION AND PEBBLE

Some plaintiffs related the Exxon spill to a current big issue for commercial fishing, the proposed Pebble mine in Bristol Bay.

"What makes me worried on the Pebble mine, it makes it pretty wide open that these guys can pollute," said Dan Winn of Homer, a former Cook Inlet drifter.

Lloyd Miller, a lawyer for Native subsistence villages that were part of the lawsuit, said he was shocked that the justices would not use the term "malicious" to describe Exxon's tolerance of what he called an alcoholic culture in its shipping arm.

The ruling Wednesday recounted how witnesses testified that Hazlewood, an alcoholic who had dropped out of a treatment follow-up program and had stopped going to AA meetings, downed at least five double vodkas in the waterfront bars of Valdez the night the ship left port. "Although Exxon had a clear policy prohibiting employees from serving onboard within four hours of consuming alcohol ... Exxon presented no evidence that it monitored Hazelwood after his return to duty or considered giving him a shoreside assignment," the ruling said.

The company showed disregard for small villages that suffered lasting devastation to their subsistence, Miller said.

"I think it's a tragedy," he said. "Justice has not been done."

In the small Kenai Peninsula village of Nanwalek, people stopped hunting and gathering on the beaches for years after the spill. A generation of young people grew up without subsistence and it has been difficult to revive, said Nanwalek council chief Wally Kvasnikoff.

"All the game that lived along the shoreline was licking up all that crude," said Kvasnikoff. "Subsistence kind of died. And they gave their retired guy $400 million."

Indeed, Exxon Mobil's retirement package for company CEO Lee Raymond was on many lips Wednesday, as was Exxon's profit of $40 billion last year.

On reflection, though, some coastal residents said they were glad at least some money was headed their way.

"It was just dragging on and on and on. I didn't have the feeling it was going to turn out good," said Rolf Christiansen, a fisherman and general store owner from the Kodiak village of Old Harbor, where he said local seabirds have still not recovered fully.

State Sen. Tom Wagoner, R-Kenai, was a plaintiff as a former Cook Inlet driftboat fisherman. He said the case speaks poorly for the American justice system: 20 years to resolve what one lawyer described to him as "just a drunk driving case."

"I was telling a friend last week, I'm hoping to get enough for a new four-wheeler out of this," Wagoner said. He'll do a little better than that, he said, if the average payout for Inlet driftboats under the new figure extends to $150,000 or so.

Some fishermen said the amount of money to be deducted by their lawyers for expenses could cause friction in the coming weeks, given the smaller total award. .....

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