Obama's TPP Promotes Environmental Destruction

[Star Man]

Business Enterprise is the dominant religious belief of our time even though few recognize it as a religion. Its core beliefs are that profit is paramount, that endless expansion is possible, and that We The People are a resource to be harvested for our dollars, our labor, and our attention (TV, internet, smart phones). The needs of We The People for uncontaminated water to drink, pure air to breathe, and healthy food to eat are ignored by the Church of Business Enterprise (CBE). Our Mother The Earth is a mere resource from which oil, natural gas, and minerals are extracted. The CBE is anti-life. The political arm of the CBE is the corporatocracy that operates America and much of the world for its benefit and not the benefit of human beings. Obama's TPP will further destroy Our Mother The Earth, which the CBE does not understand is the essential habitat for the life of human beings. Recently it was as cold as Mars right here in America. Before long Earth will be as desolate and devoid of life as is Mars.

Star Man
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The entire article, written by Coral Davenport for the New York Times, January 15, 2014 can be found at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/u...e.html?hp&_r=0

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is retreating from previous demands of strong international environmental protections in order to reach agreement on a sweeping Pacific trade deal that is a pillar of President Obama’s strategic shift to Asia, according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks, environmentalists and people close to the contentious trade talks.

The negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would be one of the world’s biggest trade agreements, have exposed deep rifts over environmental policy between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. As it stands now, the documents, viewed by The New York Times, show that the disputes could undo key global environmental protections.

[Star Man]

Business Enterprise is the dominant religious belief of our time even though few recognize it as a religion. Its core beliefs are that profit is paramount, that endless expansion is possible, and that We The People are a resource to be harvested for our dollars, our labor, and our attention (TV, internet, smart phones). The needs of We The People for uncontaminated water to drink, pure air to breathe, and healthy food to eat are ignored by the Church of Business Enterprise (CBE). Our Mother The Earth is a mere resource from which oil, natural gas, and minerals are extracted. The CBE is anti-life. The political arm of the CBE is the corporatocracy that operates America and much of the world for its benefit and not the benefit of human beings. Obama's TPP will further destroy Our Mother The Earth, which the CBE does not understand is the essential habitat for the life of human beings. Recently it was as cold as Mars right here in America. Before long Earth will be as desolate and devoid of life as is Mars.

Star Man
--------------------------------------
The entire article, written by Coral Davenport for the New York Times, January 15, 2014 can be found at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/u...e.html?hp&_r=0

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is retreating from previous demands of strong international environmental protections in order to reach agreement on a sweeping Pacific trade deal that is a pillar of President Obama’s strategic shift to Asia, according to documents obtained by WikiLeaks, environmentalists and people close to the contentious trade talks.

The negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would be one of the world’s biggest trade agreements, have exposed deep rifts over environmental policy between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations. As it stands now, the documents, viewed by The New York Times, show that the disputes could undo key global environmental protections.

A very informative article on Truthout demonstrates that capitalism and environmental responsibility are incompatible. Capitalism is not capable of acting responsibly toward the environment. The author, Richard Smith, talks about how capitalism casts as "spell" upon people. I founded Humanity Rising on the principle that capitalism, like alcoholism, is an addiction, and just as alcohol or cocaine or heroin or marijuana casts a spell on the addict/alcoholic, so capitalism creates the spell of obsession and compulsion in people addicted to money, unlimited growth, and unlimited resources. You can read a little more about Humanity Rising at . The site focuses on the principles of recovery.

Capitalism, like addictions and alcoholism, is a spiritual disease. Addictions to money, sex, TV, Internet, pornography, drugs, or alcohol are all characterized by a "hole in the soul." The soul is damaged by childhood experience -- either by things that should have happened and didn't or by experiencing things that should never happen to any child -- and the Addict Self, a personality fragment, emerges to try and protect the damaged soul. Step 12 of AA (the grandfather of all 12 Step programs) begins "Having had a spiritual awakening...." The Big Book makes clear that a spiritual awakening is a "change of personality" sufficient to stop drinking, stop drugging, or in the case of our environmental catastrophe, to stop abusing Our Mother The Earth through pollution, fracking, extraction, global warming, overfishing, overpopulating. We must recover from capitalism if we are to survive.

Sadly, because capitalism has attained the status of religion as I argue in my introduction to the NYT article, the possibility of recovering is vanishingly small. As we say in NA, "Sometimes the addict has to die." In the case of Homa not so-sapiens it may very well be that the cure for our addiction to capitalism may be our own extinction.

Star Man

[podfish]

Business Enterprise is the dominant religious belief of our time even though few recognize it as a religion.

I think that's a much more insightful way to look at the forces that are shaping our world, rather than seeing things as interlocking conspiracies. Similar behavior and results, but emerging from very different places and maintained in very different ways.