Sign, signifier, signified...
Saturday, September 15, 2012
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| A Hardee's and a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) fast food outlet burns after protesters set the building on fire in Tripoli, northern Lebanon September 14, 2012. (REUTERS/Omar Ibrahim) |
Showing posts with label corporate intransigence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporate intransigence. Show all posts
Capitalism's Dirty Water
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Coca Cola takes a lot from my local region. It sucks Dja Dja Wurrung groundwater from the ecosystem, trucks it to a Melbourne factory where it's rumoured it's mixed with ordinary tap water, then it is packaged in petrochemical bottles, and marked up several hundred percent to sell to idiot consumer-polluters as bottled water.
I came up with the lyrics for this song after I and my son Zephyr came across a fellow community gardener, Lena, had picked up a half-consumed bottled of coke that had been thrown into one the community gardens. She looked at Zeph's interest in the bottle and said, "don't worry, I don't drink this toxic rubbish", and borrowing a line from a friend she added: "this is capitalism's dirty water you know." Awesome stuff! Lena is a true elder...
So, introducing to permapoesis for the first time, the band I'm in, Bunch of Bandits singing Dirty Water. (All of us in the band met through our community gardens... Corporate bullies beware! Strong language alert, this one's aimed straight at your pea brains; or for those who know better, a jingle to sing to your kids at night to counter the multi-million dollar ad campaigns Coke directs at them):
This little clip was filmed by Zephyr (aged nearly 10). Nice work Zeph!
Read more...
When cops do good
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Former Philadelphia Police Cpt. Ray Lewis being arrested this week, Wall Street, New York.
Captain Ray Lewis arrested (Photo via @AdamGabbatt)
Read more...
GM...fail
Sunday, October 30, 2011
GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs
Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues:
More here.
Monsanto biopiracy
Saturday, October 29, 2011
When all Australian state governments except for South Australia are greenlighting toxic (but nonetheless greenwashed) GM farming, the Indian government is showing courage and following Europe and Japan in banning Monsanto and co's crude and irresponsible shareholder science.
Meanwhile in Australia GM canola has contaminated an organic farm in WA, and the farmer is rightly suing. READ more here.
Boycotting supermarkets, growing your own, instigating or joining food co-ops that only support biodynamic and organic farms... we don't have to support biopiracy, corporate bullying and corporate destruction of the world's biodiverse free seed bank.
If you don't know where your food is coming from, and the means in which it is produced, then you are most likely supporting mass-scale biospheric degradation and consuming healthless foods.
Just Free Water
Monday, October 10, 2011
In 2007 I walked Melbourne's CBD mapping all the public drinking fountains (bubblers). It later prompted this article in The Age. Many of the fountains didn't work and I estimated on figures of population I obtained from the City of Melbourne that there was only one working bubbler for every 40,000 people.
Today I read in The Age that VCA has banned bottled water on its campus. This is great news as we move into the hotter months. If you're still a bottled water drinker here's an article I wrote that may dissuade you from partaking these toxic waters again.
Read more...
Pushed to the brink, America rises
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Official Statement from Occupy Wall Street - this statement was voted on and approved by the general assembly of protesters at Liberty Square: Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!
From here.
Read more...
Unwatchable – more 'at arm's length violence'
Thursday, September 29, 2011
This short film is disturbing to watch but probably more disturbing not to.
With Apple being responsible for about a quarter of this unwatchable, unknowable violence, this is just another reason I will never get an iPhone and why when my seven year-old crapola phone dies I'll not replace it with anything except longer walks in the bush.
The even shorter vid below filmed on location gives some further context for the extremely disturbing, five minute vid, Unwatchable.
Wheel of Progress-Capitalism (another false cycle)
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
I created this drawing today as a teacher and parent teaching aid. It's incredible how pervasive the dominant ideology is, and how the ad-men get into even the most conscientious of schools. Zeph's school is founded on non-harm Buddhist principles, however 'the winners' (the popular and influential) are still the kids who drink caffeinated energy drinks, know all the celebs, obsess over brands and labels, and are across junk food products like junkies in a chemist.
This is a reasonably new phenomenon in the school, so before it really takes hold a number of us are getting fairly active. Ad-men (and of course women) are setting the social agenda in the school through their new disciples – the whatevs. Those kids restricted in their access to pop culture consumption are made to feel inadequate, uncool. Peer-group pressure has hit middle years primary school in a big way, Target stores sell padded bra t-shirts to girls in this age group. Peer pressure was a thing that happened at high school when I was a kid. This is more of the aggregating hyper-mediated state I keep writing about...
Advertorial enterprise is a trillion-billion dollar industry engaged in strategic warfare against a bunch of disparate volunteer parents, teachers and carers. It's a David and Goliath scenario, and Goliath is romping it in.
So here's my catapult, my slingshot. Feel free to rip it and distribute widely (I can send you a high res copy if you want to make a poster of it). The idea of this drawing is to ask each child to imagine they're in the hub of the wheel (the mediated blob, or ambient blur), ask them to choose their favourite bought item, and then find out about it by researching all the possible energy inputs, social inputs, ecological inputs and pollution outputs that each item is likely to produce.
Click for bigger.
NB. Schools shred diversity by ordering students into year groups. This makes them easier targets for commerce pests to pinpoint specific generational desires, much like reduced biodiversity in environments encourage plagues and outbreaks – a weakened state. There are actual companies who profit by collating all forms of social data on all the various age and interest groups, and sell this information to businesses so as they can target consumers with deadly accuracy.
If our schools were generationally diverse the ad-man's power would be considerably reduced, especially if our elders abandoned the wheel of progress-capitalism too and began to behave again as elders. Currently schools are breeding grounds for self-interested bystander consumers. Addressing this issue may be part of addressing the strategic war on children by big business.
Even in death Monsanto follows
Monday, June 6, 2011
Today I walked through a graveyard and noticed the grass around the tombstones had been recently herbicided. It caused me to make the observation, that which is hidden is no less violent, in fact the hiding makes the act a double atrocity.
Herbicides even kill the good soil microbes where we finally lay. Is there no rest from the tireless ecocides of Monsanto and co? Can not our bodies be simply left to rejoin the dynamic microbial flux that is supposed to renew life?
Roundup ready? Rapture Ready!
Monsanto'd graves.
Peak Shell (a poem on the slide)
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Let's make what
>we've<
got [left]
go further.
Let's go!
to the
other side
of
Hubbert's
Peak.
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