by Joe Kandra (cartoonist) & Kathie Malley-Morrison
Monday’s post on Engaging Peace provided a warning about two obstacles to recognizing when someone is lying to you: 1) you don’t really want to believe people (at least some people) will lie to you; and 2) your personal biases. Now there’s a slippery slope!
Here’s a test. Whatever your personal beliefs are about global warming and other threats to sustaining life on earth, assume for the moment that you’re skeptical about all the global warming warnings (which some people assert are “fake news”).
Really try to get into the character of a doubting Thomas. Now suppose you have the opportunity to listen to a speech by one of the individuals portrayed below. Also suppose you’re actually curious about the ongoing climate debate. To whom would you choose to listen? Who looks sincere and honest and might even have some chance of converting you to the environmental cause?
Even if you’re dubious about this entire exercise, please choose one:
Okay. Which individual did you select as someone worth listening to, someone who wouldn’t lie to you? Why did you make that choice? Were you equally as likely to trust a woman as a man? a person of color as compared to a white individual?
Now think about the current candidates for political office who are trying to recruit supporters. Do you believe they are all telling the truth? If not, what factors are influencing your judgments about them? Do you know?
Pegean says, Personally, I’d be more likely to trust another kitty than a lot of people (but maybe I’m biased). Bottom line, I sure hope someone will put an end to fossil fuels and start reducing global warming. I’m already too hot!
A video of an emaciated polar bear on Baffin Island was recently shared on social media. Warmer temperatures have led to longer ice-free periods throughout the year in the Arctic, increasing the risk of starvation for the animals. (Photo: @mitrasites2016/Twitter)
Today’s post features excerpts from a Common Dreams staff writer, Julia Conley, who describes an award-winning video of a polar bear starving to death. Global warming results in less ice, which means less availability of polar bears’ food.
Conley’s story and the video deserve attention because, frankly, the powerful oil industry magnates and the politicians in their pockets don’t give a damn about polar bears. They care only about profits and the power that money brings.
And face it, they also don’t give a damn about you or your children or your grandchildren, and certainly not the environment that sustains — or cannot sustain — life.
Julia Conley tells us:
“A video of a starving polar bear led to calls for climate change deniers to confront the real-world effects of global warming this week. Taken by a Canadian conservationist and photographer and posted to social media, the video offered a stark visual of the drastic impacts of climate change that have already begun taking root.
“‘When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death. This is what a starving bear looks like.’ (Paul Nicklen)
“On social media, viewers of Nicklen’s video called for political leaders like President Donald Trump, who has refused to take part in global efforts to minimize the warming of the earth by reducing carbon emissions, to reconsider their climate-wrecking actions.”
We can all take part in those efforts before the earth becomes unable to sustain life at all. Remember, the oil magnates and the banking system and the military-industrial complex has tons of money and power, but you have a voice and a vote. There are millions and millions more people like you, like us, than like them.
Conley’s article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
In a world where you can be anything, be kind. Eastern Bank, #joinusforgood, posted with permission.
by Kathie MM
Big banks (the ones that claim to be too big to fail) are a big—very, very big cause for concern. The charges directed at them:
They reap profits by exploiting (not educating, not rehabilitating, not treating) men and women languishing in for-profit prisons, victims of the slow wheels of injustice that grind people up because they’re poor, powerless, and/or black/Hispanic/immigrant.
But today I want to throw a little salt on the flames by talking about different type of bank—a bank that tries to put its money and talents where its mouth is—supporting progressive agendas.
I am referring to Eastern Bank, the bank that handles the Engaging Peace account.
On average, since 1999, the bank has donated 10% of its net income to local charities, for a total of over 100 million.
This includes 7 million to nonprofits in 2016. Their 2017 Targeted Grant opportunity focuses on immigrants.
Quoting MA Congressman Joe Kennedy, they say, ““A great nation does not wall itself in. A confident nation does not close its door to the people that need her protection most. A tolerant nation does not target children who have only known her streets or retaliate against communities that protect their neighbors. And a nation built on the sweat and sacrifice of generations of immigrant families does not take that patriotism for granted.”
In keeping with their social justice orientation, Eastern Bank has regularly received awards for its success as one of the “Best Places to Work for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Equality” and has been recognized as a “Leader in Diversity” for its workforce diversity initiative.”
Eastern Bank, it seems, is amodel for what a bank can do when its leaders actually want to make the world a better place. What a revolutionary idea!
Beyond NoDAPL March on Washington, DC. Woman in red jacket speaking about her experiences as a water protector at Standing Rock. 8 December 2016. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Rob87438.
by Roy J. Eidelson
Over the past year, a remote area of North Dakota has been the improbable and prophetic site of a struggle with profound ramifications for us all. The confrontation has pitted the Water Protectors — the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their allies — against the oil profiteers of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. The source of conflict is completion of the $3.8 billion, thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline — the Black Snake — that Energy Transfer Partners has built to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois.
The current planned route for the pipeline takes it beneath the Missouri River treacherously close to the Standing Rock and other Sioux reservations. A serious leak will threaten the water supply of these tribes and millions of people who live further downstream. Meanwhile, pipeline construction has already caused irreparable harm to Native American ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites.
The Water Protectors
Beginning last April, Water Protectors from across the country — indigenous and non-indigenous alike — began to gather in the thousands at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, established just north of the Standing Rock reservation. Around the camp’s sacred fires, they shared and honored the rituals, stories, and principles of community fundamental to the traditional values of the Lakota tribes: prayer, respect, compassion, honesty, generosity, humility, and wisdom.
At the same time, the Water Protectors sought to block construction of the final section of pipeline. Their non-violent acts of civil resistance were met with attack dogs, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, water cannons, aerial surveillance, and hundreds of arrests by militarized law-enforcement personnel. The standoff ended a few weeks ago when the Governor of North Dakota, citing safety concerns, issued an emergency evacuation order. Shortly thereafter, authorities forcibly shut down and razed the camp.
Assaults like those that took place at Standing Rock are really nothing new for our nation’s Native peoples. Their history of removal, dispossession, degradation, attempted forced assimilation, and betrayal at the hands of White America runs as long and as deep as the Missouri River itself. Spanning centuries, these experiences form a chronicle of unresolved grief and historical trauma, which Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart has described as “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land, and vital aspects of culture.”
The consequences of these brutal colonization practices are visible too in a range of cold, hard statistics. Today Native Americans have a median household income barely two-thirds that of the general population, and their poverty rate is nearly twice as large. They’re half as likely to have a college degree, and their life expectancy is six years shorter. They also suffer from higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, incarceration, depression, and PTSD, as well as suicide among their youth.
The survival of Native Americans, their diverse communities, and their rich cultures — despite hardship and oppression, and against such long odds — is a powerful testament to their extraordinary resilience. This abiding strength deserves greater recognition than it receives; like historical trauma, it too is transmitted across lives and generations. Shared narratives, traditional practices, spiritual teachings, the prayerful appreciation of time and place, and respect for the interconnectness of all things serve as crucial protective factors for indigenous tribes and their members.
The Oil Profiteers
Compared to the Water Protectors who converged at Standing Rock, corporate oil profiteers are a very different breed. But they too have their sacred places: anywhere fossil fuels can be extracted from the ground at a handsome profit. They have rituals too: board meetings where successful ventures are celebrated and forays for new plunder are devised. And, of course, they have their own cherished stories: about the day they first struck it rich; or the time they duped a community into believing that fracking is risk-free; or the shrewd business deal that bankrupted their competition.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this contrast in cultural values. After all, consider the company profile for Energy Transfer Partners. Among its top institutional owners is Goldman Sachs, once famously described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Donald Trump — “I don’t believe in climate change” — was himself a high-profile investor until conflict-of-interest controversies during his presidential campaign reportedly forced him to sell his holdings. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was on the company’s board of directors until earlier this year. Perry’s response to the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — ruled “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” by a federal judge — is memorable in its own right: “There are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.”
And above all there’s Kelcy Warren, the multi-billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer Partners. His business philosophy is dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest, as he once explained this way: “Like Mother Nature, the energy industry purges itself now and then. …I don’t wish any negatives on my friends, but the most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.” So where was Warren while the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies were braving “dark times” during a bitter North Dakota winter in makeshift huts and tipis? He was probably more than comfortable in his 23,000 square-foot home on ten acres in Texas, with six bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and “a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit, a four-lane bowling alley, and a 200-seat theater.”
A Movement Grows
Energy Transfer Partners boasts that the nearly completed pipeline utilizes state-of-the-art safety measures. But comparable pledges have preceded other environmental disasters in the past. The Water Protectors alsorecognize that these assurances are essentially meaningless for another reason: any construction that encourages continued reliance on fossil fuels is inherently dangerous and potentially calamitous for the Earth and future generations. The world’s leading scientists long ago reached an overwhelming consensus that climate change and global warming are the result of human activity — especially the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — and that among the adverse consequences are more destructive floods, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires.
The oil profiteers know this too, but they have hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits at stake, and large shareholders who vigilantly watch the bottom-line. So greed overwhelms conscience and they resort to false-alarm mind games as part of a massive misinformation campaign, insisting that warnings of planetary peril are vastly overblown. Favorite appeals in their propaganda arsenal include disingenuous denials that climate change exists; bogus claims that scientists disagree about the facts; unfounded assertions that there’s no crisis because we’re capable of adapting to change; and deceitful efforts to portray environmentalists as radical extremists.
Three days after last November’s election, CEO Kelcy Warren was confident about the prospects for the Dakota Access Pipeline: “They will not stop our project. That’s naïve. They’re not stopping our project.” Such arrogance seems to come naturally to someone who’s grown accustomed to relying on friends in high places and his personal wealth — he gave over $100,000 to Trump’s campaign — to achieve self-aggrandizing goals. The words of Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, communicate humility instead: “We have no power…the only thing that we have is support from around the world.”
But this support and solidarity shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of the pipeline’s final disposition in the federal courts, Energy Transfer Partners and its cronies have unleashed a counterforce that may well exceed their comprehension and control. While digging for dollars they’ve awakened a movement that combines a long-overdue commitment to addressing the trampled rights of Native Americans with a reinvigorated call for climate justice and environmental action. Today the ranks of the Water Protectors present at Standing Rock have been thinned. But as spring soon arrives on the North Dakota plains, countless more of us are embracing their powerful message of reverence and resistance.
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Roy Eidelsonis a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.
