Torrent links: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#bt

Check the features here.

More climate change stuff, this time a press release and call for action from Bill McKibben. See also “Himalayan sherpas bugged by the sight of house flies at 5,000m: House flies at Everest basecamp are another sign of climate change that is melting glaciers with worrying speed” by John Vidal.

NOTE: colonos really suspect that McKibben is aiming too low:

“NASA’s [politically conservative] Dr James Hansen says that an atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 325 needed to restore planetary energy balance and about 300 ppm CO2 is needed to restore Arctic sea ice to what it was 25 years ago.”

For a stronger demand, see: 300.0rg

October 13, 2009

Dear Friend of CommonDreams.org,

For years CommonDreams.org has been a leader in covering one of the most critical issues of our times: the survival of our planet. That’s why I approached Craig Brown and the CommonDreams.org team to ask if I could share this news with you about a milestone event coming up on October 24 – an event we hope you’ll take part in.

That day, in almost every country of the world, ordinary citizens will come together in a series of events and rallies and demonstrations and glorious public art projects, all designed to do one thing: make the most important number in the world the most well-known.

That number is 350, as in parts per million carbon dioxide. In the last two years, the scientific community has made very clear that it’s the maximum safe level for carbon in the atmosphere, at least if we want to have a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapated.” It turns out that people all over the world do — in more than 130 countries, they are organizing thousands of actions that will take those three digits and sear them into the planet’s consciousness. For instance:

On the melting slopes of Mt. Everest, Pemba Dorje Sherpa, who holds the record for the fastest ascent of the highest peak, will be spreading banners and signs

On the dying coral reefs of the Maldives, the government’s entire cabinet will don scuba gear and hold an official underwater meeting to pass a 350 resolution to send to the Copenhagen summit

On the shores of the fast-drying Dead Sea, Israeli activists will form a giant human 3 on their beach, Palestinians a 5 on theirs, and Jordanians a 0-reminding us we need to unite across all kinds of divides for effective action.

If you go to 350.org, you can find the action nearest you — and if there’s not one yet you can figure out something grand to do yourself. There will be churches ringing their bells 350 times, and farmers mowing the numbers into their fields, and hip hop artists staging concerts across urban America — it’s going to be a great day.

And it’s going to matter. Since so far our leaders haven’t shown enough willingness to do what needs doing, scientists and citizens have to stand up for the planet’s real bottom lines. We can refocus this debate, share the news about the planet’s limits, and about the planet’s possibilities when we respect those limits.

Already 89 nations have signed on to the target–the poorest nations on earth, for the most part. The ones that have done the least to cause this problem. Their citizens, rallying in Mombasa and Quito and Phnom Penh, need to see that the rest of us are joining them in this fight. Please help us at 350.org – it’s going to be a day of great passion, great joy, and great connection. You don’t want to miss it.

With the support of the CommonDreams.org team, and on behalf of 350.org, we hope you will join us.

Onward,

Bill McKibben
Author, Activist, and founder of 350.org

Join me at www.350.org

www.commondreams.org is an Internet-based progressive news and grassroots activism organization, founded in 1997.
We are a nonprofit, progressive, independent and nonpartisan organization.

To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.

Ecuador is currently seeing another indigenous uprising in response to the proposed Law of Water (amongst others). Yesterday, a group indigenous protesters (mainly from the Shuar nation) in the Amazon were shot at from a helicopter, leaving two dead and nine other wounded.

The proposed Law of Water is said to be in violation of the Ecuadorian Constitution, which prohibits all forms of privatisation of water. The law would allow for privatisation of water through the back door and prioritise needs of big developments (hydropower and mining) over those of the people. Moreover, in its article 43 it allows for the use of the Armed Forces in situations of protest and conflict around water use (such as when people would protest the diversion of community water for use in mining).

* * * * * * * * * *
The Governing Council of CONFENIAE (Confederación de las Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonia Ecuatoriana) denounces the grave human rights violations of the Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa Delgado with regard to its recent actions concerning in particular the Shuar Nation of the Amazonian province Morona Santiago, and calls for a response by national and international human rights organisations.

On Wednesday, 30 September 2009, at 4:30 in the afternoon, the public order forces used a helicopter and firearms to brutally attacked protesters on the main bridge over the Upano river which runs between the provinces of Morona Santiago and Pastaza. Two Shuar protesters died in the attacks, nine were left wounded, during the otherwise peaceful “resistance for life and in defence of nature (pachamama)”.

Today, the dictatorial president Rafael Correa has declared a civil war against the indigenous nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, which is why we ask the OAS (Organisation of American States) and the United Nations for urgent intervention in and observation of these violations in accordance with all the international treaties and conventions ratified by Ecuador.

We declare a maximum state of emergency in all the ancestral territories of the Amazonian Nationalities, without declining any actions of the current indigenous uprising.

We also ask for the formation of a commission comprising representatives of such countries as Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemale, Nicaragua, countries of UNASUR, CAN, the international human rights organisations, COICA (Coordinadora de Organzaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica) to help mediate between the Ecuadorian government and the indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Ecuador.

Finally, we ask for solidarity of all the social sectors of the country in the face of these events in Amazonia, that do not respect a true Plurinational State.

Puyo, Unión Base, 30 September 2009

CONSEJO DE GOBIERNO DE LA CONFENIAE

TITO PUENCHIR
PRESIDENTE CONFENIAE
* * * * * * * * * * *

More info (in English):

Ecuador Rising Blog http://ecuador-rising.blogspot.com/2009/09/ecuadors-indigenous-movement-mobilizes.html

More info (in Spanish):

Indymedia Ecuador http://ecuador.indymedia.org/

Ecuarunari http://ecuarunari.org/portal/PorDefensaAguayVida

video http://ecuarunari.org/portal/node/207

Agencia En Pie http://www.agenciaenpie.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2762&Itemid=36

A press release by Survival International:

“An article implying Peruvian Indians should be bombed with napalm has been named by human rights organisation Survival International as the ‘most racist article’ published in the last year by the mainstream media.

The article was published in the Peruvian national newspaper Correo. It calls indigenous people ‘savages’, ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘primitive’; says that their languages have no more than eighty words; and declares that, in the protests that have recently engulfed much of Peru’s Amazon, they were manipulated by ‘communist excrement’.

‘For those of you who still think of these ‘ethnic groups’ as ‘good’, ‘naïve’ and ‘pure’, I will remind you that it was these same people who perfected the art of shrinking the heads of their enemies and wearing them on the belts holding up their loincloths. If the ‘natives’ didn’t shrink the heads of the policemen they killed (in the recent protests) and eat their remains, it was only because there wasn’t time.’

The article also attacks three indigenous congresswomen, ridiculing their names and referring to them as the ‘three starlets in the parliamentary sewers’. Its response to the indigenous protests against the exploitation of natural resources on their land is: ‘Get f****d, loincloths and all’. The penultimate sentence is: ‘I don’t know what keeps the president from providing the air force with all the napalm necessary.’

The ‘most racist article of the year’ award is part of Survival’s ‘Stamp it Out’ campaign which aims to challenge racist descriptions of indigenous peoples in the world’s media. The winner receives a certificate inscribed with a quotation from Lakota Sioux author Luther Standing Bear: ‘All the years of calling the Indian a savage has never made him one.’

Stamp it Out is supported by eminent journalists such as the BBC’s World Affairs correspondent John Simpson, George Monbiot, John Vidal, and best-selling authors Tim Butcher and Simon Garfield.

Survival’s director, Stephen Corry, said today, ‘This article makes depressing reading for anyone who thinks newspapers should educate and inform their readers. We hope the publicity this award receives will make the paper think twice before printing such offensive rubbish again.’

Read an English translation of the article

For more information and images please contact Miriam Ross:
(+44) (0)20 7687 8734 or (+44) (0)7504543367
mr@survival-international.org

This is an unofficial translation of a Ecuadorian indigenous peoples’ statement on REDD:

CONFEDERATION OF INDIGENOUS NATIONALITIES OF THE ECUADORIAN AMAZON (CONFENIAE)
(Logo and letterhead, list of members including organizations of the Shuar, Kichwa, Achuar, Waorani, Siona, Secoya, Cofan, Zapara, Shiwiar and Andoa Peoples)

STATEMENT
Unión Base, Puyo August 3rd, 2009

CONFENIAE REJECTS ALL KINDS OF ENVIRONMENTAL NEGOCIATIONS ON FORESTS AND EXTRACTIVE POLICIES THAT DAMAGE THE TERRITORIES OF THE AMAZONIAN INDIGENOUS NATIONALITIES AND PEOPLES OF ECUADOR.

CONSIDERING

That the Right to Plurinationality and Sumak Kawsay, enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic, and the Right to Self-Determination of the Ancestral Nationalities and Peoples, consecrated in international instruments like Convention 169 of the ILO [and] the universal United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, exist to guarantee that human beings and nature live together in a world in suitable conditions, and that they can develop based on the principles of solidarity, reciprocity [and] the conservation of the territorial space as a whole, for the security and survival of the present and future generations; and to guarantee a healthy environment, free of pollution, repression and the imposition of government policies on indigenous peoples;

That all these policies and extractive activities and negotiations on the forests and biodiversity in our Ancestral Territories will have unfathomable consequences, including the extinction of our identity as Ancestral Nations, [our] loss of the control and management of our territories, which would subsequently be managed by the State, foreign countries, multinationals, REDD negotiators or Carbon Traders; which would result in unprecedented misery, hunger and extreme poverty, just like what is happening right now to our indigenous brothers and sisters in the Northern Amazon of Ecuador because of geopolitical, economic and commercial interests;

RESOLVES:

1. To warn and communicate to all the grassroots organizations of the structure of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon – CONFENIAE, which is comprised of centers, communities, associations, federations, organizations and nationalities, in the framework of the Resolution and Mandate of the Congress held on May 28-31, 2009, that the Regional Organization of the Ecuadorian Amazon, will not permit interference nor representation, nor allow spokespersons to discuss nor dialogue, let alone take steps to negotiate in national or international forums our Natural Resources that exist in our Territories.

2. The CONFENIAE will not negotiate nor dialogue without the consent of the grassroots on the issues of Oil Extraction Activities, Mining, Hydroelectric Dams, the SocioBosque Plan, REDD business, Environmental Services, etc., since certain entities, like the Energy, Environment and Population institution, the World Bank and Carbon Traders in alliance with Latin American governments are trying to negotiate the lives of the Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples [and] undermine our Rights to our Territories.

3. We recognize that climate change is a problem and we demand that Annex I countries acknowledge their responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions, [and,] therefore, diminish the burning of fossil fuels, whose extraction has caused deforestation in the Amazon and grave social and environmental problems in our territories.

4. We reject the negotiations on our forests, such as REDD projects, because they try to take away our freedom to manage our resources and also because they are not a real solution to the climate change problem, on the contrary, they only make it worse.

5. We inform COICA, of which we are a part, that, as Ecuadorian Amazonian representatives with the right to voice and vote, that no person, entity, NGO, etc., is authorized to speak on our behalf in favor or against any issue without our knowledge and participation.

Sincerely,

Tito Puanchir.
PRESIDENTE “CONFENIAE”

Address: Puyo – Unión Base CONFENIAE Headquarters, Vía Puyo – Macas Km 6 ½
Email: info.confeniae@gmail.com

See also:  Global warming solutions are hurting indigenous people.

SHARE: ShareThis |    submit | // Global warming solutions are hurting indigenous people

This is reposted from “Adivasi Struggle” by Food Energy Nexus and is a “short and entertaining video depicting the adivasi struggle in India [and] is well worth a view. The short music video focuses on land, resources and importantly adivasi way of life and being undermined by a range of developments. Although there is no footage of biofuels the broader concerns of displacement is captured well in this playful video.

The short video is based on a song entitled: We Will Not Leave Our Village“:

This is a joint News Release by Biofuelwatch / ETC Group / Greenpeace.

BIOMASS POWER GRAB HIGHLIGHTED AS BIOTECH INDUSTRY MEETS IN MONTREAL

Montreal- July 21 2009 — As hundreds of delegates gathered for the Sixth Annual Conference on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing at Palais des congrès in Old Montreal, a group of NGOs held an early morning press conference across the street. Greenpeace, ETC Group and Biofuelwatch joined forces to warn that the “green” energy of the biotech industry was mostly hype, that governments should not add to their already generous subsidies of the industry and that the feedstock on which it is all based – so called “biomass” – is neither plentiful nor easily converted into renewable chemicals, plastics and fuels.

Jim Thomas, a researcher from ETC Group, charged that behind the thin, green veneer of clean energy and renewable plastics, Big Bio is, in fact, engaged in a huge industrial power grab: “The Gene Giants’ control over the smallest components of life such as DNA has now become much more rapid and sophisticated with billions of dollars being invested in new technologies such as metagenomics and synthetic biology. Twenty-five percent of the world’s so-called biomass has already been commodified. Now industry is going after the remaining seventy-five percent. The quest for greater quantities of plant cellulose – the most abundant organic material on earth – will make nature reserves and marginal lands more commercially valuable than ever before. Three years ago, NGOs warned that the demand for corn ethanol would lead to higher food prices and hunger. We were right. And today we’re warning that this massive biomass-grab will bring about similarly devastating consequences for people – especially in the Third World, because that is where these companies will look when there’s no more feedstock closer to home.”

Rachel Smolker from UK-based Biofuelwatch challenged the companies present at the BIO Conference to ask themselves a fundamental question: “Is there enough biomass out there for the all the purposes being envisaged? The answer is a resounding no.” She cited targets and figures for biomass-use being used by governments and industry to prove the point: The U.S. has adopted a target of 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022, claiming there is 1.3 billion tons of available biomass. Yet by some analyses, this would require mowing down 80% of the available biomass from agricultural, forest and grass lands! And this is just one target. The U.S. air force has set itself a goal of replacing 25% of its fuel demand with biofuels, and commercial aviation is following suit. The chemicals industry has set a target of replacing 10% of its feedstocks with biomass as well. Meanwhile, policy measures intended to support the development of renewable energy (electricity and heat) are largely (about 70 percent of subsidies) translating into co-firing of biomass with coal and other biomass technologies. These combined targets are entirely unsustainable, especially in light of the need to feed a growing population, declining ecosystems and soil and water degradation.

Eric Darier, Director of Greenpeace Quebec, urged governments and private investors to approach the BIO lobby with great caution and to resist blindly jumping on the “innovation bandwagon:” “We need to support and apply the precautionary principle as recognized in international law and conduct vigorous and independent life cycle analyses before declaring any technology ‘green.’” Darier denounced the lack of public participation in debates over biotech and questioned our ability to ensure independent scientific expertise to properly check industry’s claims. “This will require a full strategic assessment of each technology as it is being developed. If not, we shall be left to clean up the mess decades from now, just as we are doing with toxic chemicals and pesticides today.”

The three speakers are available for media interviews.

Eric Darier, Greenpeace Quebec
+1 514 605-6497 www.greenpeace.org

Jim Thomas, ETC Group
+1 613 261-8580   www.etcgroup.org

Rachel Smolker, Biofuelwatch
+1 802 735-7794   www.biofuelwatch.org.uk

If you can see through fingers with the way in which one political party is singled out (when in fact the rest of the parliament and the country hide many racists as well) and the melodramatic, pathetically glorifying believe in and appeal to Obama bin Ltd., the representative of Goldman Sachs, – if you can distract your attention from that, then this video is a good introduction to the state of affairs in Denmark where things are most certainly rotten.

Danish: a language that in its native culture is infused with racism and homophobia, linguistically embedded in jokes, sayings and exclamations.

Interview with Peter Linebaugh, Professor of History at the University of Toledo and author of “The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All” recorded March 14, 2009.

Great talk by Law Professor Louis Wolcher. This is the first talk in a one day conference on part of The Law of the Commons Organized by the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild Friday, March 13, 2009. Here is the programme.

Today The Guardian writes “Pirate Bay site sold to game firm“, so the download fest is over – the hosts run for cover under the wings of capital interest?! No news there, then, really. Capital recuperation, primitive accumulation, enclosure and so on – many names for the old familiar saga of the ever richer. Anyway, the fest was fun as long as it lasted, or is it only just getting started, perhaps? The next few months will likely see torrential downloading via The Pirate Bay: grab what you can before civilization and its laws enter the bay. That leaves us with only one question: where can the next hidden bay be found in the liquid architecture of cyberspace?

Or so one might think. The Pirate Bay people don’t:

TPB might change owner

Yes, it’s true.

News reached the press today in Sweden – The Pirate Bay might get aquired by Global Gaming Factory X AB.

A lot of people are worried. We’re not and you shouldn’t be either!

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it’s value if the money would be the interesting part. It’s not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site.
As all of you know, there’s not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It’s the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn’t evolve. We don’t want that to happen.

We’ve been working on this project for many years. It’s time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

Nevertheless, we can always hope that other pirates are conspiring to carve out a little nice for sharing and cooperating somewhere …. Guardian article below…

“File-sharing site The Pirate Bay has been sold to a Swedish gaming company.

Global Gaming Factory (GGF) has paid 60m kronor (£4.7m) to take over the site from its founders.

Once it has taken control, GGF said it would start paying copyright fees for the movies, music and games linked to via the site.

In April, The Pirate Bay owners were found guilty of promoting copyright infringement, fined 30m kronor and were sentenced to one year in jail.

New owner

The four men behind the site, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde, said they planned to appeal against the sentence.

The Pirate Bay is one of the most well-known file-sharing sites on the web. Many people use it to find copyrighted material such as TV shows, games and music tracks. The Pirate Bay does not host any of the pirated material itself.

“We feel that we can’t take The Pirate Bay any further,” Mr Sunde told the Swedish news agency TT. “We’re in a bit of a frozen situation where there’s not much happening and there are neither people nor money to develop things.”

Half the money GGF will pay for the site will be in cash and the remainder in shares in the company.

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site” said Hans Pandeya, head of GGF in a statement.

“Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it,” he said.

GGF has not released details of how it will charge for the content downloaded via the site. The Pirate Bay will be handed over to GGF in August.

It is not clear how the deal affects the Video Bay – a video-sharing site set up by the people behind The Pirate Bay.”

GGF specialises in software that helps run and maintain PCs used in cyber cafes and gaming centres.

News are circulating as matter of fact statements that NASA will bomb the moon without any critical reflection. Bomb the moon? Who in the heaven’s name are these people?

The ScientificAmerican.com writes:

“NASA will tomorrow launch a spectacular mission to bomb the Moon. Their LCROSS mission will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a missile that will blast a hole in the lunar surface at twice the speed of a bullet. The missile, a Centaur rocket, will be steered by a shepherding spacecraft that will guide it towards its target – a crater close to the Moon’s south pole. Scientists expect the blast to be so powerful that a huge plume of debris will be ejected.”

This is what it will look like in an “artists’s representation”:

Apparently this is a cool thing to do:

“NASA has always done cool things, but its latest mission is really a sci-fi geek’s dream come true, as it includes flying a rocket into the moon, triggering a huge explosion.”

… and has even spawned some conspiracy theory:

“The planned October 9, 2009 bombing of the moon by a NASA orbiter that will bomb the moon with a 2-ton kinetic weapon to create a 5 mile wide deep crater as an alleged water-seeking and lunar colonization experiment, is contrary to space law prohibiting environmental modification of celestial bodies.  The NASA moon bombing, a component of the LCROSS mission, may also trigger conflict with known extraterrestrial civilizations on the moon as reported on the moon in witnessed statements by U.S. astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and in witnessed statements to NSA (National Security Agency) photos and documents regarding an extraterrestrial base on the dark side of the moon.

If the true intent of the LCROSS mission moon bombing is a hostile act by NASA against known extraterrestrial civilizations and settlements on the moon, then NASA and by extension the U.S. government are guilty of aggressive war which is the most serious of war crimes under the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, to which the U.S. is subject.  The U.N. Outer Space Treaty, which the U.S. has ratified, requires that “ The moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden.”  98 nations have ratified and 125 nations have signed the U.N. Outer Space Treaty.”

What has the world come to – not even the moon is safe from the warmongers and all the corporate media and techno-fetishist bloggers can do is to cheer on!?!? And the only response that a quick search returns is some far out story about aliens on the moon – strangely reflecting the corporate chain mail, press release, which states that “there are no aliens in the moon”.

The story about the aliens, however, includes some rather genuine looking “evidence” – can this really be true?

The Guardian’s John Vidal recently wrote a welcome piece – ‘We are fighting for our lives and our dignity’ -  that connect some of the dots in the current end game for the Earth’s natural resources most of which are on indigenous land inhabited for thousands of years by people who care for it, worship and respect it. Transnational corporations drilling for oil, mining for minerals or cutting down all the trees and polluting the rivers – and so on – are competing to grab hold of the Earth’s last resources – and there really is not much left! (See also: UN expert puts forward measures to regulate ‘land grabbing’).

“An aggressive drive is taking place to extract the last remaining resources from indigenous territories,” says Victoria Tauli-Corpus, an indigenous Filipino and chair of the UN permanent forum on indigenous issues. “There is a crisis of human rights. There are more and more arrests, killings and abuses.
“This is happening in Russia, Canada, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, Nigeria, the Amazon, all over Latin America, Papua New Guinea and Africa. It is global. We are seeing a human rights emergency. A battle is taking place for natural resources everywhere. Much of the world’s natural capital – oil, gas, timber, minerals – lies on or beneath lands occupied by indigenous people,” says Tauli-Corpus.

What until quite recently were isolated incidents of indigenous peoples in conflict with states and corporations are now becoming common as government-backed companies move deeper on to lands long ignored as unproductive or wild. As countries and the World Bank increase spending on major infrastructural projects to counter the economic crisis, the conflicts are expected to grow.

It is a pretty good article – constituting a very important step to bring together these issues in a coherent analytical manner and to the attention of mainstream readers – but one could really have wished for something more to the point with regard to the Ecuadorian context – it is widely known and well documented that the Chevron pits are still there, even mainstream U.S television have shown such images.

“In Ecuador, Chevron may be fined billions of dollars in the next few months if an epic court case goes against them. The company is accused of dumping, in the 1970s and 1980s, more than 19bn gallons of toxic waste and millions of gallons of crude oil into waste pits in the forests, leading to more than 1,400 cancer deaths and devastation of indigenous communities. The pits are said to be still there, mixing chemicals with groundwater and killing fish and wildlife.”

To use the expression “are said to be still there” is really not appropriate, when anyone having spend five seconds googling the issue will have seen horrible, terrifying images:

…as the last natural resources of the Earth are being extracted by industrialists, their political cheerleaders, such as Rafael Correa and Hugo Chavez, are laughing all the way back to their chambers of power:

The Chevron case (crimes committed by Texaco, which Chevron has swallowed) is the Ecuadorian “Chernobyl” the repercussions of which unborn children will still suffer for generations. Because there is a tendency in capitalist culture to blame the past – and even accept, sometimes, the blames of past actions – in order to displace the problems of today and distract attention from crimes of a very similar kind being committed now – this article is good: it places all of these corporate crimes in the context of here and now. The Earth is not dying, it is being killed!

AS if killing the Earth was not enough, they are of course also trying to wiggle their way out of it with the help of expensive lawyers and misleading information – they go as far as even buying bloggers:

Chevron public relations director Donald Samson is orchestrating secret payments to bloggers to make on-line postings attacking Ecuador’s courts for determining the oil giant might owe up to  $27 billion for the dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest, the Amazon Defense Coalition charged today.
The practice of paying bloggers for editorial content is considered highly unethical and Chevron shareholders should be aware company management engages in the practice to hide its actual financial risk in Ecuador, said Julio Prieto, a lawyer for the group, which represents 30,000 rainforest residents in the legal case.

“Paying so-called independent bloggers to post is just one part of a wide-ranging fraud designed by Chevron to cover up the company’s enormous exposure in Ecuador,” said Prieto.
Prieto said Samson, Chevron’s public relations director, has built an “empire” of consultants in the U.S. and Ecuador to put out misleading information about the case.  Chevron’s environmental problems in Ecuador have become the company’s largest worldwide public relations problem.

Samson has retained the New York office of the global public relations behemoth Hill & Knowlton — the same firm that represented the tobacco industry for decades– to manage Chevron’s image problems stemming from the Ecuador case.

Chevron is now claiming in Ecuador there is no link between oil contamination and cancer using the same form of junk science the tobacco industry used to deny the link between cigarette smoking and cancer, said Prieto.

Zennie Abraham, a blogger known as Zennie 62, has several postings on his site that parrot Chevron’s litigation strategy in the Ecuador case without disclosing payments he is receiving, said Prieto.  Abraham also posts pro-Chevron blogs on a human rights legal case stemming from the killing of Nigerian villagers protesting Chevron’s environmental practices.

“Zennie Abraham’s postings on the Ecuador litigation are grossly one-sided, ill-informed, and favorable to Chevron,” said Prieto.”

Given these circumstances, however, it appears incredibly important what choice of words John Vidal or any other (corporate) journalist chooses when speaking about the Ecuadorian Chernobyl – unless they’d want to lean toward the spin campaign of Chevron et al.