Can a 'grass roots' initiative overcome corporate greed and government compliance?

Open Letter to John Key and Helen Clark


Governments and Vandals Unite - Taggers? Yeah Right!

Governments are increasingly being captured by the corporate vandals who have money, power, insatiable greed and no morals. Luckly in NZ it is more transparent, the Government are the Vandals, with MAF trying to prevent the cleanup of Manawatu's water, Meridian wanting to flood old growth forests to build a dam, Solid energy wanting to mine happy valley, and Landcorp converting forestry into intensive milk production. This list could be expanded I'm sure, and will only be worse under National. Crap or worse? what a choice to offer voters, and what a way to inspire our youth.

Nice work Russel and the Greens for exposing and stopping MAF: http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/PR11852.html


From Brazil:
I give up, says Brazilian minister who fought to save the rainforest
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/i-give-up-s...

The departure of Marina Silva, who admitted she was losing the battle to get green voices heard amidst the rush for economic development, Since President Lula won a second term Ms Silva found herself a lone voice in a government acutely aware that its own political future depended on the vast agribusiness interests she was trying to rein in. The final breakdown in her relationship with the President came after he gave the green light to massive road and dam-building projects in the Amazon basin, and a plan she drafted for the sustainable management of the region was taken from her and handed to a business-friendly fellow minister. record levels of deforestation, violent land disputes and runaway forest fires have followed in quick succession. The worldwide boom in agricultural commodities has created an unparalleled thirst for land and energy in Brazil, and the result has been a potentially catastrophic land grab into the world's largest remaining rainforest. The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world's mammals and 15 per cent of its land-based plant species. It holds more than half of the world's fresh water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink on the planet, providing a vital check on the greenhouse effect.


From the UK:

Nothing Left to Fight For
Posted May 20, 2008

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th May 2008.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/05/20/nothing-left-to-fight-for/
New Labour's apologists keep reminding us of the redistributive policies it has introduced: But the catalogue of failures, backsliding and outright destruction is much longer and more consequential.

It provides military aid to the government of Colombia, whose troops are involved in a campaign of terror against the civilian population. It granted an open licence for weapons exports to the government of Uzbekistan, and sacked the British ambassador when he tried to draw attention to the regime's human rights abuses. It has collaborated with the US programme of extrajudicial kidnapping and imprisonment, left our citizens to languish in Guantanamo Bay, and made use of Pakistani torture chambers in seeking to extract testimony from British suspects(9). Until 2005 it tied its foreign aid programme to the privatisation of public utilities in some of the world's poorest countries(10,11). Last year it held out against reform of the International Monetary Fund's unfair allocation of votes(12).

In April 2002 it helped the Bush administration to sack Jose Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, in order to prevent him from settling the dispute over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction(1,2). In two separate offers before the invasion began, Saddam Hussein agreed to meet the terms the US and Britain were demanding. But they slapped him down and concealed his offers from their electorates(3).

Cluster bombs can be legally used because the British government helped to block an international ban in 2006(4): it is still holding out against an outright ban at the current talks in Dublin(5). The government has undermined another international peace agreement – the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – by deciding to renew the Trident missile programme. It was the first administration to announce a policy of pre-emptive nuclear attack(6): even the great nuclear enthusiast Harold Macmillan never went this far. In 2007, the defence secretary, without parliamentary debate, revealed that the US would be allowed to use the listening station at Menwith Hill for its missile defence system(7).