Gotcha. There, I did it. Used two of the hottest current keywords to draw you in, and here you are. Thanks for visiting, I’ll make it worth your while.
They’re but two buzz words in a long line — longer than the trains stretching to the horizon, carrying crude (very crude) oil, frack sand, and yes, still a lot of coal.
Hydraulic fracturing, Keystone XL Pipeline, two buzz phrases in a long line of practices and projects that should have been prevented, or stopped, or at the very least scaled way down to something plausibly sustainable, or regulated down to something whose consequences would be truly minimal.
But instead, FRACKING and KEYSTONE are just the latest episodes in the long-running and on-going soap opera called Regulatory Agency Failure whose subtitle could be something like, No-Your-Community-Does-NOT-Have-the-Right-to-Protect-Itself-from-Obvious-Harms. Why do we keep banging our heads against the wall in the regulatory agency theme park — exactly where corporate strategists want us to be?
Is it because we can’t think of any other approach? That won’t work as an excuse for anyone who knows the history of regulatory agencies in the US, or the history of corporations in our states.
I’ve been trying to get people to question the whole regulatory agency framework for decades. Not to replace it with transparently self-serving “corporate social responsibility,” faux-green techno-fixes, or so-called “market forces” to further fatten the 1% — but with something that we could, with a straight face, call small-d democracy.
So, I’m handing you off.
If you think regulatory agencies were designed to actually regulate corporations, go HERE. If after reading those five pages you still believe in regulatory agencies, I’ll buy you a beverage of your choice. (I’ve been making that offer for fifteen years now, and have never had a taker.)
If you can’t imagine anything to do other than plead — and I mean plead — with bureaucrats in regulatory agencies, go HERE.
If you are ready for a comparison of activists’ ineffective, circularly addictive busy-work tactics with the straightforward, effective, corporate strategies that deal with fundamental law instead of frou-frou regulatory minutiae, go HERE.
By the time you’ve considered all that, I’ll be ready to dish out another installment of commentary.
Right now I’ve got snow to shovel.