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in the late 1980s, five thousand people showed up (in a town of about 7,000) to testify against it. Loggers, tree huggers, fisherfolk, inn owners, farmers, teachers, children, old Hippies, new NIMBYs, leftists, rightists, real estate agents, the Chamber of Commerce--everybody. And they basically ran the Minerals Management team out of town on a rail.
Nothing unites Californians like a threat to the coastal environment.
A similar thing happened when State Parks tried to impose beach fees on the Mendocino coast--total rebellion.
So, here's what I think the situation is: 9/11 was, among others things, intended to break the back of all resistance to off-shore drilling and all corpo/fascist environmental degradation. It--combined with the recent Financial 9/11--improved the climate for just fucking Nature over out of fear and want. What I have noticed on many environmental issues is that the Democrats get in, and erode the law and the rights of the people, and the Pukes follow them, and break the law and the people. So, Obama won't put oil rigs off the coast, but he will begin a process of passing laws/regs that weaken coastal protections and override state law and local will. There won't be a hearing this time in Fort Bragg. It will be in Dallas or Maryland, or a thousand miles away in Los Angeles. The requirement of a hearing in Fort Bragg will be eliminated. That sort of thing. That's what the Democrats are good at--pretending to be for the environment, but setting things up for the Pukes and the global corporate predators to take what they want.
I am looking forward, like most other people, to a respite from the brutality of the Bush Junta, but I have no illusions about our national political establishment nor about what Barack Obama had to agree to in order to be permitted in the White House. The global corporate oil predators will never give up until they have the 'right' to destroy every last living thing, and every last beautiful place, on Earth. They have become monsters. And I don't know what to do about them, except what I have repeated over and over again, here at DU: Priority No. 1--throw Diebold, ES&S and all of these election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' now! Until we do, this is our situation. We have no power. We can perhaps hold off oil drilling on the northern California coast, because the Democrats still need us to get elected--with maximum effort, we can outvote the machines--although we do NOT have the final word on who represents us. And nothing is going to change until we regain direct power--the power of our votes--over our leaders.
Example: In Venezuela, transparent vote counting has made the difference between a country that is dominated by global corporate oil predators and corpo/fascist politicians, and a country that has gained control over its own resources. Venezuelans use electronic voting, but it is an open source code system--anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount a whopping 55% of the votes, as a check on machine fraud. Here, we now have trade secret, proprietary programming code in all of our voting systems, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushwhack corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. With transparent vote counting, Venezuelans have been able to elect a real representative of the people--Hugo Chavez--who re-negotiated the oil contracts with the multinational corporations, demanding and getting a 60/40 split of the profits for Venezuelan social programs (education, medical care, etc.), a big change from previous rightwing governments, which were giving away 90% of the profits. Further, when Exxon Mobil would not agree to this arrangement, Chavez said, "Fuck you, goodbye" to Exxon Mobil! (The other multinationals agreed.) Exxon Mobil then tried to seize $12 billion of Venezuela's assets around the world--literally trying to take food out of the mouths of babes, and books away from schoolchildren--but they lost that bullying effort in a London court, against a Venezuelan government that fought back. The oil was nationalized prior to Chavez, as it is in many countries. But what Chavez did was assert the rights of the Venezuelan people to benefit from their own resources, and established the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people in relation to multinational corporations.
And this why the Bushwhacks and collusive Democrats hate Hugo Chavez so much. He has successfully asserted and defended the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people, in relation to U.S.-based and other global corporate predators!
We have lost that here. And we must regain it, if we want serious reform on any matter in which corporate profits are involved. Voting is how we exercise our sovereignty. That is why the corporations took it over--specifically to destroy our sovereignty as a people. And until we seize that power back from private corporations, we cannot elect people who truly represent us. Even good guys--and I think Barack Obama is a good guy--must compromise away their hearts, their minds and their souls, to be permitted anywhere near power in this country. That's the reality, until we restore democracy here. Priority No.1: Transparent vote counting!
Without transparent vote counting, we surely will see oil rigs and major oil spills and other horrors off the Mendocino/Sonoma coast within a decade. The Democrats set it up. The Pukes carry it out.
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