There is an Iron curtain descending upon Cancun…
An iron curtain coming in as a Caribbean fog that brings a junta to chill any progress in our Climate aspirations for the future.
The Iron curtain descending upon the Climate negotiations of COP16 is the Corporate Junta of the biggest and baddest Corporate Earth polluters out there…
It’s the corporate junta that seeks to prevent you from enjoying your BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS.
If you don’t believe me – just look around – because they have been successful in doing just that both in America and around the world.
Now these dark armies of evil are coming to take over the Air you breath, the water you drink and the land you till, for the food you eat.
In short they are coming for you…
It’s armies are legions, made up of assorted regiments of dark blue, gray, black and stripped, suited and tied men and women, with precision analytics, order following MBAs and military style brass.
A well dressed and well heeled junta, visible and invisible is coming to take over the Conference of the Parties of the UN, and it’s feted with the UN’s best and brightest and pacified with champagne, canapes and vast profits – all of it paid by You – in order to entertain you with a spectacle of a global negotiation that really doesn’t stand a chance…
This iron curtain is called a Corporate Climate Junta and it descends upon the whole world now… And it doesn’t wear the military uniform, just the booted and suited and tied up corporate uniform of the legions of cogs and wheels of the machine.
A corporate junta, that prevents us from any real progress of Climate negotiations, because of it’s special interests and it’s assurances through the legions of PR cheerleaders strutting about their stuff claiming solutions to the Environment and Climate warming will have to come from the Corporations.
And their message is clear to all the little people: Don’t muddy the waters with little People’s demands, desires and agitation for democratic processes and Policies to solve the Planetary Crisis – because we’ll cut off your capital lifeline…
This Corporate junta has little time for Democracy. Short shrift is given to the traditional United Nations ideas. But they choose to co-opt the UN people one by one or en masse with the lure and promises of private sector jobs and gifts of glass beads and trinkets or worse, with major graft and corruption…
To expand upon my speeches and writings about the Corporate Climate Junta of last year – the junta that derailed COP15 in Copenhagen – You must put it in context with a seemingly random example of the recent Burmese elections.
Because that example illustrates and informs the Mondus Operandi of this Corporate Junta and it’s many faces…
Because it’s here in Rangoon where the minds of the generals are focused on stealing the People’s voice, their freedom, their capital and their votes. Stealing their human rights and all the wealth of this isolated nation. A junta made up of kleptocracts that now have invited the rest of the commercial class and the corporations to assist in deflowering this beautiful natural place.
And they do this in plain sight of the world. They do it with a sprinkling of liberal PR work, reminiscent of Hollywood. The same smokescreen applied by the PR chicks of the Corporate Junta ruining our world in Cancun and at the UN is responsible for the Rangoon Corporate junta. The people who brought you the Gulf spill – British Petroleum – is responsible for more Coup d’Etat around the world than CIA is. Ponder that for a moment.
And in Burma, the smokescreen behind which this corporate junta came to being, was the release of the sleeping beauty from a two decade forced slumber…
Aung Suu Kyi’s release, of course was a masterful PR stunt by Burma’s Rulers, but there is little doubt the real intention is to control now the nations’ wealth for posterity, via a corporate facilitation of their transition of Power to a lesser visible evil but just as bad…
And truly these shameful rigged elections in Burma last week – the first in 20 years – marked the isolated nation’s long-awaited transition from military to civilian rule. But the transition happened only in the minds of the easily deluded and those smoking the stuff they grow in the golden triangle. Think of Mafia’s transition into legal transport and waste business in America, only far worse…
Many journalists observed that the Elections were little more than a rubber-stamp procedure designed from the start to allow the military junta to prevail, the regime has managed to maintain its iron-fisted rule not simply by vote rigging but also by creating a corporate Junta.
A new kind of junta made of their Corporate cronies locally and internationally, with multinational’s representatives in Rangoon, clamoring to be elected – and elected to the highest posts – with the voting help from the generals, for whom they will rule by proxy.
Many Corporates have won seats in Parliament through the Military’s rigging the vote. And maybe over one hundred of the Corporates even pretended to have campaigned for the elections. And even some have already been brought into the government in an official capacity.
Now these Corporate mega nationals and Multi national representatives are all savvy businesspeople who are acting out of self interest and according to the agreed upon parent company plans and the favours and concessions that come their way…
No small potatoes here. They literally divide up the country into relative fiefdoms. And this way they accomplish what the generals crave most: Impunity from prosecution. And the generals used this ploy to transfer power without losing any of it… in a hurry.
And they are in a hurry for one reason only. Because the International Court in Hague has emanated some warnings that it will be issuing warrants for the arrest of the leading Burmese junta generals.
Those little smoke signals from Hague, therefore, have focused the military minds in Rangoon to find a way to have their cake and eat it too.
And here come the Corporates… to help solve the problem. It’s rumored that McKenzie was involved… Who knows. They certainly like to have their fingers in many pies. And this smacks of a Consultant’s job…
Multinational and international Corporates with local straw men, all willing and able to outsource the crimes against humanity committed by the Junta and absolve all blame from the generals. For a small price of course…
Now try to extrapolate this game and replace the General Regime with the autocratic UN regime of the arcane process of the Conference of the Parties and the COP9 – COP16 and you’ll see the realization forming that the Corporate polluters are now running the show.
Somehow the ones who pollute and their PR chicks, corporate cheerleaders, are celebrated in COP16, instead of being tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. The Corporate Junta is now working hard on the image of appearing that they are saving the planet, under the auspices of the UN.
They often condescendingly have this to say: We are doing the best we can. We are trying and trying, but it’s difficult. it might take a while….
And that’s not what they say to the people. The simple people buying their products and overvalued wares are fooled with serious fiction. Their PR and Ad campaigns are entire Hollywood fictions made of bathos…
Their mighty struggle to pollute the planet is now bathed in the Green glow of massive Greenwash. More money is spent today on Corporate Propaganda Greenwash than on Children’s Aid globally. Ponder that for a moment too…
All these large multinational Corporates who have skewered the earth and the Atmosphere for so damn long, that they feel they own it – now they really have bought up the Climate process from the willing UN in order to protect themselves totally from any prosecution because of their vast crimes against humanity.
Is the UN daft enough to believe the Corporate Greenwash? Apparently YES. A collective stupidity came in after the corruption years of the UN. A short term selfishness ensued and asked for a Corporate bail out of the UN people themselves for a golden parachute – after they serve the corporates well – while in office.
And like the Climate groupies and the Virgin chief and all their PR warriors against carbon this or that, and with the other major airspace polluters who collectively lobby hard to keep destroying the atmosphere without paying anything for it; and without placing any emission controls on the airplane engines or fuels; and the oil companies and Fossil fuel honchos, and the global strategies of domination, they organize the resounding World Climate Summit in Cancun to feed us some more chicken shit.
All the while using the UN for exempting their operations from even the minimum regulation and from shouldering their costs borne out of their highly profitable Corporate activities… that warm the planet through their emissions, destroy the Earth and pollute our lives with useless garbage ad infinitum production.
Hague anyone?
Couple that buying up of the UN, with the Corporate buying up of any election they want, including and especially the American one, starting with this last midterm election – because the ”Supremes” gave them Carte Blanche to finance at will electoral outcomes and buy votes willy nilly… and you get the whole approximate picture of the Corporate Junta.
You want to buy yourself an election in America? Simple. Set up a corporation and funnel through all the narcodollars, oligarch, Kleptocrat and corporate special interest dollars and dirty money you want and you’ve got it. It’s called corporate giving. No limit… to how much of an election and how many votes You can buy. Because while the American Democracy was sold down the river – by some gay old men in black robes – the American public was having itself a tea party.
Corporate junta anyone?
And now these same Corporate juntaists, want some special dispensation rights to keep on doing what they do best – pollute, rape and ravage the earth – and according to the UN, we should listen and follow them.
And the Un chiefs go further and ask us to Thank them for their participation in the process and reward them and admire them, when they say that they might – just might – start reducing their pollution.
But first we need to bail them out. And the UNFCCC fully agrees on that. And the successor to Yves is another Corporate PR chick – a corporate voice – lackey to big oil and the Corporate Junta that controls the show of COP16 by now fully.
And they also have ten year plans to fully enshrine their Cap and Trade profit making regime and absolve the governing bodies from the Crimes against Humanity they are committing. The Corporates are feeling rather smug these days. Having been bailed out of their miserable hole they dug and fell into – they now go on full speed pedal to the medal for the next speed bump and awaiting bubble hole on the road…
They even rejoice further now because the Corporates have also been able to repeal the Alien Torts Act by a sympathetic judge creating a nasty precedent. A precedent so bad that now, the Burmese villagers cannot sue Unocal… anymore in the US courts for breaching their human rights. Nor can they sue anyone else. They certainly can’t sue their local generals. They’ll be killed.
With repealing the Alien Torts Act, in America, the Corporates are getting full freedom to trash Human Rights across the globe all over again. That is what they want to do with the Climate too. And they have been doing it.
They’ve been doing just that. Now they have the courts behind them too.
No longer will distant plaintiffs come to the US seeking Justice for Human Rights violations against Corporate players doing the Burma thing to Peoples around the globe.
No longer people can ask redress. Redress for murders, like the Shell Oil Company’s complicity in the murder of the nine Nigerians who were executed, at the behest of Shell in the 1990′s. Shell’s public murders, included Ken Saro-Wiwa, a Nigerian playwright, who had non violently, accused Shell of complicity in human-rights abuses and for that He was executed in 1995. Now, the children of the nine murdered activists, won’t be able to bring these cases for justice in the US. No more. And these are the highly visible ones. Forget about the scores of killed villagers in the Niger Delta where BP and Shell ply their murderous trade with private armies and the paid for and corrupt Nigerian military wiping away whole villages….
No longer could others seek justice either. Justice seekers, like the Vietnamese villagers who sued Dow Chemical and others for injuries caused by the Agent Orange herbicide. A potent killer, used with devastating effect and alacrity by the US army and airforce during the vicious Vietnam war… Dow profited from their killing machines. Now they must pay… But it seems they are getting a Pardon from a little judge. Not from the People. They aren’t going to get a Pardon – ever – for their complicity to murder…
In essence Justice has been thwarted by the Corporate junta once more in America and elsewhere. But Justice is blind and patient with her scales. The Alien Tort Laws might have been mooted but the honest judges are aware and waiting for the lady to sing and ask for redress…
As a background, all this is because the US courts’ human rights avenue was abruptly closed, when the second circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled on September 17th that corporations could not be held liable under the Alien Tort Claims Act for breaches of international law abroad. Businesses had long argued this, but no American court had ruled clearly on the issue before. Both companies and their accusers reckoned that the courts treated the principle of liability as a given. The decision, if upheld, will bring an end to human rights lawsuits against corporations. But until all avenues of appeal are exhausted, the precedent will not be firmly set.
The US Supreme Court declined on October 4th to rule immediately on the specific question of whether corporations could be held liable under international law. It had been asked to do so by Talisman Energy of Canada, which won a case brought by Sudanese plaintiffs who accused it of conspiring with their government to commit genocide. As if it’s a secret that the oil companies around the world are complicit and often the instigators of genocide. They are Corporate practitioners of genocide, because they want to push people out from the areas they operate on, so they can ply their dirty trade and pollute at will – like in the Niger delta – without the indigenous people guardians of the land and it’s resources…
Malevolant corporates are always working in tandem with the dictatorial ruling elites and the juntaist status quo. Because they want totalitarian regimes to allow them to completely trash the planet without any redress. It’s good for Business – the usual refrain – or so they think. Like IBM working with the German Nazis on the final solution – extermination policy – providing the science of management and number crunching for records keeping.
This is very much like the Burmese government’s decision after this rigged election, to privatize the country by giving to their Corporate relatives the nation’s mismanaged economy, represents the biggest sell-off of state assets since 1962, when the junta came to power. Recent sales, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, include hundreds of government buildings and telecommunications facilities, as well as portions of the country’s seaports and the national airline. Of course all Burmese government owned corporate assets will be ”sold” for a pittance to the Corporate Junta shortly, to export and outsource the Rangoon Generals’ responsibility.
Much the same way is how the Corporate Junta in America looks to the future and much like the bloody Generals of Rangoon want absolution and a ”papal forgiveness” when massacring the Buddhist Monks of Burma, by using their Corporate junta sponsors, the Corporates themselves also want to get the ”Papal Bull” of Perpetual Indulgences, both domestically in the US through the repeal of the Alien Torts Act but also through the travesty of their control of the COP16 process fully.
The UN in the UNFCCC process does the exact same thing with our Climate and Atmosphere. Selling it that is – by giving it away – to their ”relatives” the Corporates. Their new found friends, who are already the greatest receptors of this Planet Natures’ largesse, and it’s the same Corporates who in return destroy and foul it wholesale.
And the hapless lady chair of the UNFCCC warns us to not have any expectation from a deal in Cancun now.
She promises that to all of us, because the Corporate junta holding her chair high, isn’t willing to reduce their emissions from turning a complete waste of this beautiful planet.
She says we should trust the Corporate friends of the UN process. They will do the right thing….
Of course they will.
However – me thinks – they will only do it when they are good and ready and we are way past peak oil, and past a useless atmosphere and rubbish environment, and things appear to be going all belly up.
Still we will pay them for that too.
Isn’t this wonderful?
Now if this isn’t a Corporate Junta – please – tell me what it is.
A topsy turvy world we live in eh?
Yours,
Pano
PS:
Please tell me why do we have the UNFCCC process and why such a corporate lackey-leader at the helm?
A person singularly destined to fail us by her own admissions and public admonishment to expect NOTHING.
NOTHING ???
Expect Nothing from her surely. Me thinks – Can her ass – right away.
Because we expect nothing from the b…. not today nor tomorrow.
Yet we expect everything from our Activists.
We expect everything from the people’s negotiators who honestly toil for years to bring justice to the Climate debate.
And we expect justice.
Even though in the time being, and in essence Justice has been thwarted by the Corporate junta both in Rangoon and in Cancun, we’ll persevere.
Because these setbacks for justice are not for long.
I hope.
Justice has been temporarily thwarted.
But she’s coming back with a vengeance.
Because remember, Justice – the old blind lady – holds the scales in one hand and a sword in the other.
It’s time the International Court in Hague it turns it’s attention to the Corporate Junta leaders ruining our Environment and start assigning warrants for Crimes against Humanity.
At least the Environmental Court is doing it…
Holding hearings that is.
In Cancun and London.
And the Environmental Parliament activists in Cancun and the People’s COP in London will rock your world.
Care to join?
