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destabilization. The biggest contributor is the USA, by far, with China a close second. And the USA has greatly contributed to China's pollution with "free trade for the rich." U.S. corps outsource to China and other countries BECAUSE they have no environmental or labor regulations. And U.S. corps have done nothing but undermine and sabotage environmental regulation here. Is the air in Los Angeles still highly polluted? Yes, it is. Are the redwood forests down to their last 5% of old growth and fast losing that final 5%? Yes. California's environmental regulations are under constant attack by global corporate predators, and Californians have lost significant environmental rights over the last decade due to that relentless and highly corrupt attack. California supposedly has the strongest environmental regulation in the U.S. That has become a lie, under corporate rule.
Bolivia has no pollution problems that I know of, and, like Ecuador--another leftist Bolivarian state--its constitution and its leaders hold Mother Earth ("Pachamama") to be sacred and are greatly influenced by indigenous culture in this respect. And the only pollution in Ecuador is Chevron-Texaco's massive oil/toxic dumping (the "rainforest Chernoybl," as it is called), which Chevron-Texaco refuses to clean up and compensate the indians for. Though Caracas has auto pollution, the Chavez government is learning because it is a responsive government, in which the indigenous and environmentalists have a strong voice. The government has halted several polluting/environmentally damaging projects in response to these voices.
Chavez's and Morales' point, at Copenhagen, was not that "third world" countries don't pollute. Some of them do. Their point was that "third world" countries CAN'T SOLVE THIS PROBLEM ALONE!
And if the U.S. had its way, the Chevron-Texaco's of this world would never, ever, ever pay for the massive damage they have done, and the U.S. military--one of the biggest polluters of all--would be enforcing "free trade for the rich" (free polluting for the rich, free slave labor for the rich, no rights or sovereignty for the poor or for any country) everywhere. The reason they hate Chavez is that he and his government, and the people of Venezuela, were the first in this hemisphere to declare their independence from U.S. global corporate predators, and are the leaders of this movement. If the U.S. had its way, the bloody-minded, rich, white separatists in Bolivia--who slaughtered some 30 unarmed peasant farmers in Sept. 2008, aided and abetted by the U.S. embassy--would reassert fascist white rule in that country. If the U.S. had its way, the richest man in Ecuador, a banana magnate, would be Ecuador's fascist ruler, and Chevron-Texaco wouldn't have a thing to worry about from Ecuador's courts. And if the US had its way, the fascists in Venezuela--whose first act in 2002, in their brief coup, was to suspend the Constitution, the National Assembly, the courts and all civil rights--would topple the elected government, again, and hand the oil back over to Exxon Mobil.
The U.S. corporate rulers have raped and plundered smaller countries throughout the last century. They have destroyed their democracies, time and again. They have created vast poverty and deliberately sabotaged the ability of smaller countries to address both poverty and environmental damage. And, more recently, through mechanisms like the World Bank/IMF and the WTO, they have tried to impose a global system of rampant exploitation that DIRECTLY ATTACKS all countries' environmental and labor laws.
I repeat, the answer is real democracy, and the U.S.--because it is not ruled by the people, because it is ruled by global corporate predators and war profiteers--DOES NOT SUPPORT REAL DEMOCRACY ANYWHERE, including here.
And I also repeat: Capitalism is not the problem. PREDATORY capitalism--the global corporate predators and monopolists who now control "western" policy--are the problem. The Soviet Union was a polluter, and also tried to cover it up. China--with its weird, hybrid, Stalinist communist/predatory capitalist system (--a system I really don't understand) is a big polluter, and also tries to cover it up. Communism, on that scale anyway, is obviously not the answer, as to this mortal threat to humanity from global pollution. (Cuba, on the other hand, has strong environmental regulations and is unpolluted--but Cuba is rather unique as to communist systems). But the kicker in all this is that, with the fall of the Soviet Union, western capitalists went nuts, and have consolidated their power, over us and others, in such a way that we here in the U.S. cannot break this tyranny (or haven't been able to, thus far), and the global corporate predators spawned from our shores--built of our labor, and our liberty, and our tax money, and our infrastructure--are now the biggest tyrants and the biggest polluters on earth and are killing the planet.
Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador all have mixed capitalist/socialist economies. They are not against business. They are not against trade. They are not against a healthy marketplace. All of them engage in business, trade and marketplaces. But they have learned--like many European countries have learned--that, a) capitalism MUST be tempered with socialism, if the best political system--democracy--is to succeed; and b) predatory, monopolistic, unregulated capitalism is huge destroyer of the environment, of workers, of society and of democracy.
It is FALSE to pose Soviet communism and the current predatory capitalist system in the U.S. as the only alternatives--for governance, or for solving the pollution problem that now threatens all life on earth. We need, instead, to foster real democracy here, in other countries and in international bodies. The U.S. is NOT doing that. It is DEMONIZING the very countries where real democracy is in progress, and allying itself, and FUNDING, putrid cesspools of fascism, corporate tyranny, rightwing death squads and vast toxic spraying of farm lands like Colombia!
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