BAD NEWS PAGE
With all the good stuff happening from the increased environmental activity in the world, there are still plenty of people looking to cash in on polluting the planet. This page looks at all the problems we still have and what's being done about them, or not. Below are a few vignettes on some top stories as NBN sees them.
The Real China Syndrome
Since the Great Wall, Excess Labor=Over
Building 12.06.11
Apparently
answers
are scarce to
questions surrounding this series of odd, enormous structures China
built is its Kumtag Desert. So NBN would like to offer up its own
answer: China builds whatever the heck it wants. NBN risks sounding
like paranoid China-bashers (again), to point out this is a
government completely enfettered by the irons of environmental or
humanitarian ethics. NBN knows from personal experience that the
Chinese people are wonderful, as likable as any other culture when
not viewed through the lens governments uses to present a country's national
interests to the rest of the world. But citizens of countries making
a genuine effort to embrace individual rights and environmental
protection might want to consider what a government that doesn’t
can do with the resources China has. They can build anything for the
cost of a ham sandwich and throw it away if it doesn’t
pan out.
It’s easy to be
paranoid about
what you can’t investigate and
that pretty much applies to anything going on in China. But logic
suggests that temptation for government leaders controlling the vast
economic, labor, and natural resources that China has at its disposal
has got to seriously challenge ethical constraints. (See: Josef
Mengele and
the Third Reich.) China has unrestricted labor resources,
unrestricted finances and a completely restricted flow of
information. It’s not a great leap of logic to think anyone in
control of that kind of power might be horribly tempted to apply it
in ways that would be completely off limits in any other country that
at least feigns an interest in serving its people first. Forgive us
for being so suspicious of China, but after reading a blood
curdling biography of
Mao Zedong and realizing the same government is still running the
show and is still erecting statues to this
total maniac, is it crazy to think they may still be a little
ruthless?
The Koch Bros: Leading a new Cultural Revolution?
NBN
fears that these odd buildings are just the tip of a very large
iceberg of bad stuff going on in a ruthless county with all the
money, labor, and natural resources it could want. Then again, to put
things into a little perspective, let’s look a little closer to
home. The U.S. leveraged its early dominance of the fossil fuel
industry into an empire that’s ground zero for global warming. And
like China’s leaders, our own oil emperors are proving to be pretty
ruthless in
their intention to hold onto that dominance. But since the days of
Ulysses
S. Grant this
country has been appreciative of its natural resources, albeit more
in
some years than
others. Our greatest fear is that China has made a mess of its
own country and these odd in the country's deserts are just part of a growing
aftermath.
Please click here to add your two cents. Or two bits.
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