We must fight for our rights and demand our share of earth’s resources

You have a right to the resources of this earth. If you live in a country where there is oil, and corporations are making a profit from it, demand your share of the oil revenues. They must give it to you. Petroleum underneath the earth belongs to you as much as it belongs to any one else. This resource like all other resources does not automatically belong to governments and corporations. The main reason why poverty exists, often in countries rich with natural resources, is because the people are denied the right to those resources by oppressive governments and corporations.

Freedom isn’t just a word. It has real meaning. It is a way of life. A free people are people who are not oppressed with the situation of having to run after money and worry about how they are going to pay for food, clothing and shelter, all the time. When people have to run after money and spend their waking hours worrying about it, they are no longer free. They are preyed on by governments and corporations who threaten them with their sustenance and absorb them into a system of debt slavery and tax slavery. The money that people are forced to run after, a fiat currency, a piece of paper, has no value, other than what is ascribed to it by governments. Money is not backed by gold or any tangible resource. Governments print as much of it as they want, devaluing what exists in the hands of the people, forcing people to run after money even more vigorously to sustain their livelihood. In a money driven society like this, people become increasingly immoral, and a group of people emerge who have no ethics and conscience, other than their love for money. They abuse other human beings for money who in turn, from their traumatic experience of being oppressed, falsely learn that running after money is the main goal of life. The cycle continues and eventually destroys whatever little sense of community people have, making people more anxious and willing to prey on each other. People are given a false sense of security in chasing after money.

Governments will never give people their rights unless people demand them and are willing to fight for them. You must be willing to fight for the ideals of freedom in order get freedom and stay free. This fighting spirit must be greater than your desire for money. Only then will you truly be free. There must be something in our hearts that is more sacred than any earthly possessions.

9/11 becoming a ‘weapon of war’

While the terrorist incidents in America on the eleventh of September, 2001 are certainly sad and tragic, they have also been used as an excuse to terrorize people in other countries such as Iraq and create killing and massacre on a scale that is even more tragic. The United States government has used “9/11″ as a weapon of war, an excuse to launch pre-emptive strikes on unsuspecting people. 9/11 has been used to bypass congress in the United States and start wars without the approval of the American people. 9/11 has been used to bypass the United Nations and launch unilateral and illegal wars. 9/11 has been used to detain thousands of innocent people illegally in shadow prisons where torture takes place. 9/11 has been instrumental in maintaining the extremely bloated military industrial complex remaining after the ‘cold war’ and create a new direction of perpetual war and manufacture new weapons. 9/11 has been used as an excuse to rob people of their rights within the United States, spy on them and silence them. The police has gradually been militarized and performs more ‘command and control’ functions than friendly protectors of ordinary citizens who serve the community.

With such great power it is no wonder that many governments now want to join the league of 9/11-like victimhood, they want to have their own weapon, their very own version of 9/11. Britain calls it their 7/7. India has its Mumbai attacks and has hinted it wants to do ‘surgical strikes’ in Pakistan. The Russian government has had its own war in Chechnya, all the while pretending that they are a bigger victim than the Chechnyan people. The Israeli government is always portraying itself as the main victim, no matter how aggressive it is towards other nations, and no matter how many innocent people they kill.

Anyone who is thinking, notices that it is the military superpowers and middle powers that fully use this new weapon and are looking to have their very own 9/11. With the rise of the Chinese economy and their military power, it should not be surprising that the Chinese government may look to expand militarily and have their own ‘controversial’ military operations. The government may feel that they are too powerful to bother with ‘petty things’ like permission of the United Nations Security Council (which itself is a puppet of the superpowers) or support of the global community. In that case they will need their very own version of 9/11. As the global military industrial complex manufactures new weapons of war, increasingly weapons that distance the controller of the weapon systems from the actual battlefield, weapons like drones, that are controlled like video games from a safe bunker far away, launching wars become more like a game in a world with detoriating ethics. Countries that acquire these types of weapons, like drones, also need a 9/11 scenario in order to use these weapons, because under the traditional system of war, one country can not simply have drone attacks, ”surgical strikes” (a euphemistic name for an attack that kills innocent people and calls them collateral damage), or deploy their very own version of Delta force. Illegal and perpetual war that is easily launched at the push of a button, also requires complementary self-assured, feigned victimhood. The question is what happens when these superpowers butt heads in the future? When countries with such high-tech gadgets of weaponry cross each others path, they tone may be, ”my 9/11 is greater that yours, therefore I can launch a pre-emptive strike”. The other may imply, ”I am a legitimate victim of terrorism too and so do not need to care about the sovereignty of other nations”.

True victimhood is irrelevant in this military game of dominance. Governments with high-tech weapons increasingly behave like narcissistic people. Seeing themselves as the victims while hurting other innocent people. However, weak smaller nations can not have their 9/11. If they do, it is simply a day of mourning with no retaliatory weaponized value. The 9/11 of poor countries simply does not get media attention, history does record them as significant events, and their lamentations fall on deaf ears with the superpowers. The unfortunate death of millions of people and many genocides in poor countries are simply reduced to the inevitability of happenstance. Powerful countries look with apathy as if somehow they must have done something to deserve it all.

America has no moral authority to preach women’s rights

The rights of women living in America are not protected in the most basic ways. In the increasingly unethical immoral pornographic culture of America, it is shocking to know that the laws do not protect women from degradation, humiliation and even violent abuse. Such treatment of women, often young women who are vulnerable has become so mainstream in America that one can easily see such exploitation and abuse via the internet, while the government does nothing to protect the most vulnerable members of society. Given that America tolerates and even taxes the pornographic industry allowing such behaviour to continue, the United States can not be referred to as a civilized country in the most basic terms. Simply possessing technology to cause immense destruction, having military and economic power to bully other countries and cause wars of aggression does not make one morally superior in any way.

Muslim countries are in fact superior to America and The Western World in many ways in regards to the respect given to women and motherhood in islamic cultures. One of the things that can be noticed everywhere in the western world is the sexual objectification of women. Many western men no longer seek lifelong relationships with the person that is in a woman but simply want to use and abuse the body of a woman. In this superficial culture many men discard women after using them like they would to an object. Many men in the western world simply see their sexualities as a biologic need completely separate from the human desire to form an intimate bond that creates a family. This apathetic attitude towards women reduces them to less than animals. Wolves have better morality. As a result it is not surprising that many western men have become predators treating women with unspeakable cruelty. Serial killers who target unsuspecting young women, abduct, rape and kill many victims is largely a western phenomenon not imaginable in muslim countries in general.

The western world has invented an arbitrary concept of consent in order to further degrade and exploit women. The western world is often obsessed with explicit written or verbal rules without judging the context. The concept of consent in the west is no different. In the western morality a girl becomes ripe for abuse once she turns eighteen without regards to the context and the fact that no one in the right mind and circumstance consents to being violated, degraded, abused or exploited. Women under eighteen should certainly be protected even though they can make a good decision regarding many things in their lives, but once she turns eighteen, it does not mean society has no obligation to protect her from predatory individuals. Many young women over eighteen are not assertive enough. This is especially true if she is a young agreeable woman who isn’t mature enough, faces economic pressure which makes her vulnerable to abuse, is easily intimidated and can thus not stand her ground and say “No”. Such women can be tricked and badgered into consenting by unscrupulous individuals who wish to do harm. Thus the context in which consent is attained is more important than consent itself. Most people understand that consent can not be attained through threat of bodily harm, but often do not realize than when an individual is vulnerable they can easily buckle to pressure from a more powerful and intimidating person. Thus whether a woman has a guardian and someone to turn to for support is an extremely important element of consent. Vulnerable people often agree to do things that they would not agree to under normal circumstances. One of the biggest oppression of women in the western world is the lack of family support and financial support thus translating into the greater oppression of having to chase after money.

Where the west appears to given women many rights it is often incentives to break the family unit to make her more vulnerable and dependent on government, take her out of a secure home to exploit her and tax her labour. In the west a loving husband who raises his voice in disapproval out concern for his wife may find himself in jail, but a woman may have no recourse against a rapist abusive boyfriend. Western culture promotes promiscuity, divorce, barbaric sexuality, all in an attempt to break a home and make it difficult for a woman to form a stable marriage that can give her the security and comfort of home and family. Western feminism often degrades women’s roles as mothers which is often one of highest sources of respect in eastern cultures. In the name of liberation, western women are pressurized to display their bodies publicly and western men socialized to be over sexed brutes who view women as flesh and not full human beings with spiritual potential.

The global industry of sexual slavery and trafficking of women exists mostly because of market demand in western countries and their apathetic governments who treat non-citizen women as subhuman. The trafficking of women into destination countries which are often richer western countries is largely because of western market demand that treats women as sex objects. ‘Women of colour’ from countries with less economic opportunities are often especially degraded in such markets and not seen as human beings. This is part and parcel of the pornographic and prostitution industry as a whole. They are inseparable from one another. One promotes the other. The pornography industry promotes the ‘rape culture’ which in turn creates demand for sexual slavery of women. Trafficked women live in fear because even if they seek help from authorities and police, the law often simply treats them as illegal immigrants and deports them without providing any justice to her and capturing the criminals. This view of sorting human beings into categories of citizen and non-citizen creates a ‘slave class’ of people who have no rights.

The American government preaches women’s rights to poorer muslim countries with shameless hypocrisy as a pretext to military invasion, an excuse to put sanctions and reduce entire populations to economic slavery. People who live in the middle east and other muslim countries are not fools and see through this imperialist adventure of former western colonial powers that perpetrated slavery for centuries. America better get its own house in order and promote human rights within itself before preaching to others. A country that incarcerated more people than any other country should first deal with its own slave population. Many innocent people find themselves in jail in America’s racist and corrupt judicial system. Many are convicted of non-violent ‘crimes’. Sick people who are addicted to drugs by a government that actually pushes drugs are criminalized. Rape in American jails is an epidemic problem. America is one of the riskiest countries in the world for women in terms of the number of women being raped. America puts sanctions on poor countries that employ women in the garments sector in the name of ‘sweat shops’ but it is American and western companies that are the cause of this problem because they refuse to pay adequate prices for the labour of poor women in ‘economically developing countries’ who produce goods that are sold exclusively in markets in western countries.

Islamophobic Terrorism

Anders Behring Breivik was not muslim. In fact he was an anti-islamic extremist. Some muslims breathed a sigh of relief to know that, even though most terrorist shooters are not muslim. Many muslims have had enough of being viewed with suspicion, especially the ones that live in the western world. If Anders Breivik claimed to be muslim, that would have fanned the flames of hatred against muslims further and taken their demonization and vilification by the western media to a new level.

The good thing is that blue-eyed, blonde haired people will not be seen with suspicion and harassed more by governments as a result of Anders’ actions. Some may say that the Christian moderates have not spoken loud enough and condemned this terrorist action. Some may say that, the far right Christian ideology is what is responsible for this heinous crime. To them it should be said that Christians should not feel guilty for the actions of this terrorist. No man or woman or child is responsible for the sins of another. This novel concept in humanity has propelled humanity from the days of endless blood feuds to the establishment of the concept of justice and individual responsibility. Nobody is born in sin and nobody should be responsible for the sins of another. This belief is the difference between being civilized and living in the dark ages. People who are not civilized enough, judge entire communities by the actions of a few.

Terrorists like Andrew Breivik believe that some innocents would die as a result of the movement they want to start. They view these people as collateral damage and do not empathize with them. This is similar to the view of some governments such as that of America and Israel who believe that innocent human casualty is acceptable as long as their military and political goals are achieved. How else can anyone justify the war in Iraq for instance? But any true human who is a not a cold-blooded murderer feels that killing an innocent human being, is as if one has killed the entire humanity and saving a human being from death is like saving all of humanity. Empathy is the highest form of intelligence, and those who can not feel empathy are indeed inferior human beings, perhaps not human at all.

Lack of empathy for other human beings is what lead to the Holocaust in Europe during the second world war. This type of painting an entire community with a broad brush and marginalizing them and preparing for crimes against them is not new to Europe. Haters like Geert Wilders are not new. Even centuries ago during the Spanish Inquisition Europeans cleansed their continent of people who were seen as outsiders, by driving them out or putting them to death. European history has been written and re-written to hide these crimes. Many Europeans are beginning to find out about their true heritage (which is from all over the world) and the influence other cultures and even Islam has played in lifting them from the curse of the dark ages in Europe. One only needs to ask of what happened to muslim Spain? But Europe’s tolerance will once again be tested in this century. As more migrants come to Europe and live among Europeans the true colours of prejudice will be seen, and there will be ones who see the common humanity in all of us and welcome others with open arms. But there will be ones who are too consumed by hate, even in the guise of religion. People like Pastor Terry Jones and Pat Buchanan show us xenophobia, hatred and ‘Othering’ of fellow human beings will continue. Will these people take responsibility for encouraging people like Anders Breivik? They will not. For those who can not empathize with others, they just do not feel guilty. It is as if God himself has turned a switch in their heads and so they will never truly know what it is like to be human and feel the pain and suffering of others.

Citizenship is a right, not a privilege

Citizenship is a right not a privilege. To think of citizenship as  a privilege is to think of human freedom and human rights as privileges and not rights. This is similar to the thinking of slave traders, who believed freedom was a privilege and not the right of all human beings. Most governments today think this way.  Lets think about some of the problems in this world as a result of this type of thinking:

1) When citizenship becomes a privilege, then the right to vote becomes a privilege. This means excluding some people from the democratic process. These people are usually minorities and victims of racism to begin with, and by not having a voice and not being part of a political constituency they are even more easily abused by the ‘superior class’ who call themselves citizens. For instance, a Mexican ‘below minimum wage’ worker may have lived in the United States for more than twenty years but still has no rights, based on the exploitative label of being an ‘illegal alien’.

2) Countries that treat citizenship as a privilege like the United States, Canada and Australia will give citizenship based on birth but not to others who may have been living in those countries for decades. In a sense this is like racism, where one is considered to be a member of a certain ‘race’ by the circumstance of birth, not an earned distinction. This actually contradicts the thinking that ‘citizenship should be earned’, because birthrights are not earned. There is also a hypocrisy here; the majority of people in United States, Canada, and Australia did not have to earn their citizenship but neither did their ancestors. Even though the land was obtained by using violence against the aboriginals, the European settlers did not have to go through any selective and competitive immigration system. This selective and competitive immigration system was created only after these countries became established majority ethnically European countries that allowed ‘visible minorities’ to immigrate. Thus, these hoops and loops were created to ‘keep out the undesirables’, mostly ‘people of colour’ who are the bulk of immigrants that these countries receive currently. In other words, immigration is tightly controlled because it is no longer ‘white immigration’. So it is amply clear that, treating Citizenship as a privilege awarded to some by governments based on the ever-changing arbitrary criteria such as ‘skilled worker category’, is basically a remnant of a racist past, and a more sophisticated way of promoting racism.

3) When citizenship is no longer a right, countries no longer have to accept refugees, people fleeing from hunger, war, famine and other unfortunate circumstances. These people are often denied entry, at other times they are forced to live on the border in refugee camps for decades while having no rights of a citizen. Centuries ago, such people would have been absorbed into the local population but now because of immigration laws they are nothing more than a population of slaves living within a country in inhuman conditions and their rights not recognized, all under the notion that citizenship is not an automatic right. What is more baffling is that sometimes the country of origin will not accept them after many decades, thus making these people not citizens of any country at all. The government’s implication here is that since these people do not have citizenship they are not legally allowed to exist. This is the most fundamental violation of human rights, the assertion that a human being may be unworthy of living because it would be illegal for them to live anywhere.

4) Migrant workers are abused and exploited because they do not have citizenship. For instance, thousands of migrant workers come to Canada to work on farms. But, they can not form unions like regular Canadian workers. Sometimes they are abused by their employers, but are afraid to speak up because they may lose their jobs, following which they will be deported. Many people in many countries have to constantly live in fear of deportation or not being allowed to come back into the country, even after living in the host country for decades. In addition, they face restrictions on gaining a social security number, access to healthcare, prohibition from attending educational institutes, restrictions on movement, driving etc. In effect, lack of citizenship reduces these people to living the lives of slaves.

Governments of countries like the United States, Canada and other European countries love to lecture ‘third world countries’ on human rights, but what about their own violation of human rights. For instance, recently the Canadian government lectured Iran on human rights. While criticism of human rights in middle eastern countries is fair, this is often done with the intention of vilification rather than genuine concern. In this case, one should also consider the fact that Iran has more refugees living within its borders than any other country in the world. Iran is tag teamed on both sides by wars waged by the United States and Canada in Afghanistan. Yet while Iran takes refuges from both sides, how many Afghan refugees has Canada taken in? The answer is a miniscule number. So much for lecturing others on human rights. But we understand why countries like United States and Canada feel an obligation to lecture others. This is not about moral responsibility most of the time. Mostly it is that old European bias, the ‘white man’s burden’ way of thinking. The thinking that says, ”we people of European origin, with our superior culture and values, are in charge of the world, and must educate and civilize the savages of inferior Asiatic origin”.

We will see nationalism someday the way we see racism today

Some day when human civilization becomes more civilized and sees one another through more empathy than ego and pride, it will become clear that dividing people into nations with enforced borders (enforced through state sanctioned violence), claiming exclusivity over continental resources was not only unjust and anti-human but also the source for a great many wars. But for that to happen, most people who live in the form of sheep will have to wake up and revolt, the way people once rose up against slavery. The tyrant does not relinquish people’s right until treated with his own tool which is violence, in this case a violent uprising from the people.

Nationalism like racism is a power grab, creating groups of forced allegiance that are to override feelings of being human. The military draft forces one to partake in mass murder against one’s own human empathy by ‘othering’ of people who are labelled as foreigners. People have been severely punished for refusing to go to war, in other words punished for having human empathy and ethics.  Poor people are kept out of the boundaries of rich countries by ‘othering’ and dehumanizing them as ‘illegal aliens’. Nationalism like racism puts one group over another; countries with more powerful militaries that occupy a vast land oppress smaller countries that are powerless to fight back. They even whitewash history books. On the other hand, if a citizen from the ‘superior country’, often a ‘first world country’ sympathizes more with the plight of the oppressed outside the national boundary at the hands of the his government, he is labelled as a traitor. Governments are not ethical entities, but entities that arose out of a power grab, exercises of unchecked violence that will do anything to justify their existence in the current form.

Nationalism has many parallels with racism. Racism made it difficult to marry outside one’s arbitrarily defined ‘race’ often by passing anti-miscegenation laws. It is similarly difficult to marry outside one’s state, perhaps more difficult. Residency laws may prevent one from bringing their spouse into the host country. This is specially true if one is a citizen of a ‘first world country’ and marries a citizen of a ‘third world country’. In many cases the parent can be deported or refused future entry even if one has a child in the concerned country. Many times children of parents who are not both citizens will not be given full rights of a citizen, prompting many to not enter into such unions. This dilemma is the same dilemma as the ‘children of slaves’. Another parallel nationalism has with racism is that even after residing in a country for decades, one may not be allowed to vote or given many basic rights. This is just like slavery, where slaves were not allowed to vote. Even in multi-ethnic countries like Canada, there are many people living for decades in Canada who have no way of becoming a citizen, vote or have access to healthcare like other Canadians. They are not even considered ‘permanent residents’ as that does not depend on how long one lives in Canada, but a piece of paper issues by government based on certain economic and educational criteria usually obtainable by a more elite population.

Another parallel is that rich nations form ‘elitist rich man’s clubs’ and allow their citizens to travel freely to each others country’s but keep out people from the ‘third world’. For instance most western countries participate in a ‘visa waiver program’ that allows for instance a citizen of Germany to travel to the United States without a visa, only using a passport. This is one of the reasons why western countries in general get a lot of western tourists.  However, a mother in a ‘third world country’ wanting to see her ill child in Canada needs to go through all the hoops and loops only to find out she has been refused a visa after paying a prohibitively high application fee. This is nothing but ‘keeping out the undesirables’ and the fact that this still happens all the time in 2011 shows there has not been much progress in systemic racism. In addition, countries that are part of the ‘visa waiver program’ are almost all the same countries where most people are of European ancestry. Any reasonable person will see that this is nothing but a more politically correct form of racism. There are countless other ways in which nationalism is simply a more sophisticated form of racism.

 

Protecting ancient forests should be our top priority in the fight against environmental degradation

One of the problems with fighting environmental degradation is that the common person’s understanding of basic science is often not adequate in knowing whether the solutions being offered by governments, various organizations and even various corporations is just political talk, misguided policies or inappropriate priorities that will accomplish very little to nothing. This is clear if we look at and analyse some of the solutions offered.

1) One solution is the carbon tax. This solution has the potential to be hijacked by powerful global elites to tax everyone for things we need to do in our everyday lives. If the people can be assured that only the corporations would have to bear this tax and this tax will not be imposed on all individuals from a global government, can this idea be remotely entertained.

Another aspect is the oversimplification of the problem to making people think that carbon emission is our only major problem. This is not true at all; global air pollution involves gases of the combinations of NOx, COx, SOx, CHx and many others. And this does not even cover all the ways in which the planets ecosystems are being systematically destroyed by corporations and even governments that want to rapidly industrialize and follow the footsteps of America and Europe in their path to glory. (The problem is that superpowers like the USA have the unique history of destroying the natural ecological diversity of an entire continent and thus destroying the native/aboriginal way of life).

If carbon emission is being trumpeted as the major culprit, why not encourage something that takes the Carbon out of the air by photosynthesizing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, and making the air cleaner and in the process absorbing the sun’s energy (which is the reason natural global warming/greenhouse effect even happens) to make the environment cooler. We have such things and at one time in our planet’s history they used to cover vast areas of the earth’s surface. They are called ancient forests. Protecting ancient forests is our biggest assurance of mitigation against climate change. Forests not only restore oxygen in the air, they do many other beneficial things as far as environmental scientists are concerned.

Forests prevent soil erosion which in recent years has been a top concern among environmental scientists. This degradation of soil can lead to a barren planet where food can not be grown, leading to mass starvation. Preserving ancient forests is virtually our only way of protecting the diversity of species on the land of this earth. Breeding animals in captivity is a dead end, and no one can breed countless species that we don’t even know of. The only real way in which we harness energy on this planet, which gives rise to most life on earth is through ancients forests. Even the petrol that the modern civilization is addicted to is the liquified remains of ancients forests. The difference between a desertified planet and a livable planet is the preservation of forests.

2) Another solution offered is renewable energy technology and more recycling. While these should be done to reduce the damage done as a result of industrialization these technologies will never solve the problem because the major problem is unchecked consumption. The average North American consumes in the order of hundreds more times of energy than the average South Asian, so even reducing population will not address the major issue, which is the ‘product driven’, ‘high consumption lifestyle’ in the western world. Offering feel good solutions, saying that someday we will invent new technology to solve this problem is just that, ‘feel good solutions’. And of course, politicians like these type of solutions because it involves further meddling in the economy, creating a new industry, being able to say that new jobs are created and offer ‘feel good solutions’ that do nothing to address the real issues.

The day you hear politicians trying to protect forests from being destroyed by corporations in a serious way is when you know something surreal is happening. But, that is very unlikely. Governments are all too happy to hand over natural resources to corporations to mine everything to make a buck where it can be made (Canada for instance, despite being considered a developed country, runs like Saudi Arabia by trying to sell every natural resource, and has one of the largest logging industries). And of course the current economic model records this as a boost in GDP and economic growth which politicians are happy to report. And since politicians now micro-manage our economies through central banks you will now have a harder time separating them from corporate executives.

3) Another solution often offered in business schools by professors these days is that corporations are ahead of the game and are changing their ways. This solution is like waiting around for wildlife poachers to have a ‘change in heart’ while we must do nothing. These professors like to tout big terms like ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ or CSR as they call it. They talk of ethical responsibility of corporations all the while forgetting that there is no such thing. People have the responsibility to be ethical but a corporation is not a person, but of course that is where the business law professor will disagree, because according to law it is; absurd laws crafted by politicians in bed with corporate executives. Even if we accept that corporations must be ethical, these professors ignore that currently there is no such incentive model. The very same professor would agree that a corporation’s primary purpose is to make profit and its primary responsibility is to its shareholders who demand an increase in their share prices which is done by externalizing the costs. Milton Friedman once said that Corporations are amoral and incapable of being moral.

The fight against environmental degradation or climate change as it is often referred to as often gets hijacked by various special interest groups to further their interest. For instance, an automobile advertisement might talk about an environmentally friendly SUV, exploiting the common person’s ignorance of scientific facts, into persuading people to buy this vehicle. The truth is that no matter how friendly the company claims the vehicle is, it still has a large enough footprint that if everyone was to own such a vehicle, the results would be disastrous for the ecosystems and species that live on this earth.

Unless we the people take on this, ‘Battle against Climate Change’ personally, willing to do what is in our power to force change nothing constructive will happen. Governments are far to embedded with corporations to not cater to corporate profits. This is even truer in less developed countries where the battle is being waged, where politicians regularly get bought out by foreign and local corporations to side against native people. And native people are often fooled into believing that supporting all this infrastructure projects and corporate run industries will create more jobs and a better future for their children. By the time they realize this lie, twenty years will have passed, and they can no longer live of the land like their ancestors did because of the depleted natural resources, soil fertility and poisoned water. Then like all poor people they rush to the big cities looking for jobs, only to be exploited by the cruel industrialized world that even treats people like commodities. This is happening now in Africa and many Asian countries.