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Criminal corporations are free to clearcut vast areas, pollute water, air and soil with pesticides and other toxics, extinguish entire species of birds, fish and other wild critters, endanger our food supply with GMOs and toxic substances, continually violate the precautionary principle--with bee die-offs, frog die-offs, and melting polar ice caps and glaciers, they just keep on polluting and degrading the environment and committing every manner of environmental atrocity, and furthermore are permitted to lie about it, egregiously, by their bought-and-paid-for governments. They're doing it here, and they're doing it in Brazil. 'Legally.' And with "free trade" (global corporate predation), they're doing it virtually everywhere, and in between everywhere, with massive tanker traffic on the oceans, to bring oranges to California, and clothing items sewn in sweatshops in Cambodia to New York, and to bring dog food from China! All the things that we could be producing here, made elsewhere and SHIPPED here, leaving trails of oil and garbage in our dying oceans.
Resource extraction, pollution and the craziest, most environmentally degrading trade system imaginable, are absolutely running rampant over the planet. It's not just the illegal, rogue operations. It's the 'legal' ones that are the biggest and the worst. I am, nevertheless, glad to see environmental regulations enforced--because the PRINCIPLE of government regulation and protection of the public interest in the environment is an extremely important one, even if it's not very effective (due to political corruption). This principle is being frontally assaulted here in the U.S. by U.S.-based global corporate predators, who want NO regulation, and who have actively sought to shred the U.S. regulatory system, not to mention the political system, in order to destroy our sovereignty as a people and our RIGHT to regulate them. They have done this elsewhere in the world for several decades, and now they're doing it here, with the support of the Bush Junta and Vichy Democrats. The South Americans are fighting back, at last, with the center of the resistance in Venezuela and the other new leftist (majorityist) democracies in the Andes region (Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina). Brazil is a mixed bag--with a leftist president who is somewhat more in the mold of Bill Clinton, but not nearly as bad (as to being a corporate shill). Brazil's president, Lula da Silva, is walking a tightrope, with leftist inclinations, on the one hand--an advocate of the poor and workers--but, on the other hand, he loves big development projects, some of which are very bad (such as a deal in the making with Bush on biofuel production). Actually, who he most reminds me of is California Governor Edmund G. Brown, in the 1960s (Jerry Brown's father), who was a strongly left-leaning Democrat--very pro-labor, for instance, and opposed to capital punishment--but who nevertheless presided over the biggest loss of redwood forest in the entirety of the 20th century. Short-term job creation trumped any environmental considerations, or even considerations of California's natural legacy. There is hardly anything left of the redwood forest. 95% of it is gone--cut down in the last 100 years. Lulu is more conscious of environmental concerns about the Amazon than almost anyone was in the early 1960s. But his inclination is similar to Brown's--jobs, employment, economic growth, a bootstrap for the poor, and little or no long term thinking.
Nevertheless, enforcement of laws against illegal logging maintains the principle that logging IS SUBJECT TO REGULATION. That is a vital principle--and it holds the potential for more stringent regulation of 'legal' global corporate predator loggers. There is, in fact, a lot of outlaw activity in the Amazon--and a number of murders of environmentalists and of the indigenous indians who try to protect the forest. We have to beware, though, of "bait and switch" tactics. For instance, in Colombia, U.S./Bush's $$billions (of our tax dollars) to the rightwing Uribe government, for the murderous "war on drugs," is used to spray pesticides on small farmers, who may be growing a little traditional coca leaf, to drive them off the land, so that the BIG drug traffickers (with close ties to the Uribe government) can take over the land, and also Monsanto et al (biofuels, GMO crops). Busting an illegal logging gang does NOT necessarily mean that the forest will not be stripped of it trees and its many birds, fish and other species sent to extinction--with profound impacts to our planet's climate and viability. It may just mean that BIGGER corporate loggers, with much more sophisticated machinery, and access to more markets, will move in, in their place. I don't know all the details of this logging gang bust (for instance, was it in a preservation area?). But that is one possible consequence of such a bust, if history (and what is happening in Colombia) is any guide.
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