Saturday, June 02, 2012
Beyond Their Wildest Dreams
Collective
amnesia and social attention deficit often erase the memory required to
understand where new phenomena like green greed came from. Of course,
greed isn't new, nor is fraud, but this particular combination might be
new to those just encountering it. It's why we have memory systems like
archives, stories and films.
In the 20th century, industrial extraction was unapologetically
brutal--hiring propagandists, ideologues, field agent provocateurs and
thugs to silence critics and crush opponents. They still do that, but
now they deny it, or conceal it with confusing cover stories.
Likewise, they always co-opted less committed critics, but not to
the present degree of comprising vertically-integrated industries where
they have their own green NGOs and news services that enable them to
promote green greed as sustainable, even humanitarian.
Initially, the Wise Use movement in the 1980s sought to intimidate
community activists opposed to environmental destruction, literally
threatening and assaulting them. After Congressional hearings on this
extraction industry-financed thuggery in the 1990s, they trotted out the
concept of Free-Market environmentalism, whereby extraction industries
and real estate developers could cash in on public environmental
sentiments with minor concessions--often little more than public
relations gimmicks. With the development of climate change scams like
REDD -- perhaps the epitome of green greed -- securities traders and other
sectors of the financial services industry are now getting in on the
action.
Looking at the lineup of players involved, the overlap between REDD
and Wise Use is remarkably consistent; even the usual suspects in the
bank bailouts that led to global austerity measures have a continuous
presence.
One interesting aspect of REDD and Wise Use is the fact that both
are anti-democratic by design -- thereby corrosive of accountable
governance -- and both view Indigenous peoples rights and Fourth World
sovereignty as targets to be strategically undermined and destroyed. In
the 1980s and 1990s, extraction industry-financed organizations and
networks were used to foment racism and violence against American
Indians over treaty-protected resources. The same funding went to
political campaigns to elect anti-Indian officials willing to thwart
federal law on behalf of the industries.
