Bottle ban quashed at national parks

Banning the sale of disposable water bottles at national parks? Sounds like a good way to preserve the natural beauty of our national parks--and remember that we got along without disposable water bottles for centuries, until about 1990. But banning disposable water bottles means banning Dasani brand water, which is owned by a big company . . .

Weary of plastic litter, Grand Canyon National Park officials were in the final stages of imposing a ban on the sale of disposable water bottles in the Grand Canyon late last year when the nation’s parks chief abruptly blocked the plan after conversations with Coca-Cola, a major donor to the National Park Foundation.
And here's more information, from Philanthropy News Digest. And also consider the fact that the tomato paste used on pizza turns pizza into a vegetable, thanks to Congress.

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Chris Hedges on the Revolution

Chris Hedges of Truthdig writes the following (and much more) on what the Revolution looks like:

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke. Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television.

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Arrests should not also be convictions and punishments.

An arrest should be merely an arrest, not a street-conviction or a street-sentencing-and-punishment. This story about the pepper-spraying of an 84-year old Occupy protester in Seattle makes me think that at least some police officers have decided to render their own version of justice on the street, rather than take protesters into custody using the minimum amount of force necessary.

Continue ReadingArrests should not also be convictions and punishments.

Who owns America? Who is covering this story?

Listen carefully to the #OWS protesters and the journalists trying to cover this story: More from Free Press:

The NYPD is using more than words to fight journalists. This morning, five reporters were arrested, another was put in a choke hold, and others were subjected to police harassment. Journalists are being swept up in ongoing police actions happening right now in New York City. In fact, since the birth of the Occupy Wall Street movement two months ago, 18 journalists have been arrested2, 3 and countless others have been roughed up, tear-gassed and pepper sprayed. There have even been reports of police using high-powered strobe lights to disable video cameras and stop people from recording their actions.

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The Occupy Protests: It’s about going on strike from our entire culture.

Matt Taibbi describes the motivation of the Occupy Protesters:

But I'm beginning to see another angle. Occupy Wall Street was always about something much bigger than a movement against big banks and modern finance. It's about providing a forum for people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one's own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it's flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.

Continue ReadingThe Occupy Protests: It’s about going on strike from our entire culture.