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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Water-Contamination, Soil-Contamination, Law-strategies -Remedial actions-US.TX, US.NC

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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Water-Contamination, Soil-Contamination, Law-strategies -Remedial actions-US.TX, US.NC
  • Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 02:16:27 -0500

Kenneth Benway wrote:
On one final note, one of the obstacles that have faced litigation
efforts in cases like this is that corporate (fictitious) entities are
treated as persons under the law, this notion in my view is insane. If
you've watched the documentary "The Corporation" one of the final
conclusions reached is that we need a constitutional amendment
abolishing these corporate rights, then we can really start making some
headway with these polluting bastards!
It is certain that allowing corporations to keep the rights of natural persons that they stole is a continuing monumental mistake. We are in Iraq because the owners of a lot of corporations saw a way to make a lot of money by kicking a country when it was down, they lobbied for war, they are Dubya's true constituency, and Dubya is the sort of coward who kicks a country when it's down. /Unequal Protection/ by Thom Hartmann tells the sordid story of how a few sleazy Republicans stole the rights of natural persons for corporations by hijacking the 13th or 14th Amendment to the Constitution (that was supposed to grant freed slaves the right to vote) by eliminating the word "natural" from the phrase "natural person." A fictitious person gained the same rights as a natural person through this deliberate subterfuge, after enough court shopping and packing the Supreme Court with railroad lawyers. The book should be required reading for every US citizen, but it isn't, and it won't be, because it doesn't serve the corporate interest. What would be very cool is if every US citizen *wanted* to read Hartmann's book and find out how to go about correcting the single most egregious injustice ever perpetrated on the US public. We've, in essence, had the WTO for more than 100 years in this country, since /Union Pacific Railroad v. Santa Clara County/. Unmitigated corporate dominance, with the noose ever tightening, is our lot. When they've killed enough of us to finally get us pissed off, we'll follow Hartmann's plan, turn the world right side up again, and return corporations to the service of the people. Government will quickly follow suit.

There's no way we can live out Permaculture ethics under corporate dominance. Taking care of people is not going to happen. If it was, it would have by now. Some call it corporate rule, and it is, in many ways, especially de facto, since corporations own every politician in the country who has served more than one term in office. If you look at how things are in the US and ask, "Who benefits?", it's always a corporation. The people are simply their chumps, and the carcasses left in their wake. Corporations have stolen our future (what else is global warming?) and will continue exploiting it until we reclaim it. What else is there to do now but to reclaim the future?

I suspect "The Problem" is a pervasive unconscious belief in the King James /Bible's /assignation to humans of dominion over nature. Dominion is the unspoken presupposition in every action that damages the natural order and its creatures, including humans. The dictionary definition of "injustice" is denying another the right to a full life. Even under a casual application of that definition, dominion is profoundly unjust. I suspect dominion was the Cambridge dons sucking up to King James and we've seldom since brought the question to conscious thought. It seems to me that dominion and Permaculture are mutually exclusive ideas and that to truly practice Permaculture means we have purged our souls of the damages done by our unconscious devotion to dominion, at least to the degree that it's a conscious choice if we make it.

Bare knuckle dominion is surely unleashed when corporations exercise the rights of natural persons. How do we make that sort of dominion culturally unacceptable? But is dominion ever appropriate in Permaculture? Don't we voluntarily and as fully as possible cooperate with nature in our designs? Doesn't nature occupy the superior position in our considerations? Isn't dominion utterly absurd? In the context of Permaculture design, doesn't dominion seem spectacularly ignorant?

Why do we tolerate it? In /Ishmael/, Daniel Quinn says we have no choice in a society that guards the food supply. Permaculture, to me, is a way to return to the land, to work the land in an ethical manner that earns a living so that I can say "just say no" to dominion because I have a secure food supply and cash flow for those things that require cash. So Permaculture buys liberation from corporate rule? Have I grown delirious? If I can feed myself and my family, I can say "No." That's what Thomas Jefferson had in mind with Jeffersonian democracy: a nation of people who could feed themselves, had time to inform themselves, and owned their land, so they had the means to say "No" when a "No" was needed. Comparing that vision with what we have now shows how far corporations have brought down our humanity in service to their god, capital.

Tommy Tolson
Austin, TX




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