Montana Maven's
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BEFORE THE STORM, A FERAL GETS A DRINK.


Our Guest:
Today the Feral Cats welcome Kevin Danaher of the Global Exchange.  We'll be talking to him at the top of hour two i.e. 3:07 PM (MST).  We'll put away our doomists gear and take off the tin foil hats as we chat with him about the book he co-authored with Shannon Biggs and Jason Mark called "Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots."
  From Republican Farmers to Urban Environmental Justice Leaders,  this new book reveals unlikely Allies Supporting the Growth of an Ecologically Sustainable Economy.

Danaher has been described by the New York Times  as the "Paul Revere of globalization's woes." The book is about real success stories in the fight for economic fairness and sustainability in such "vital areas as water management, food, toxics, urban renewal, clean energy, and local politics.  The authors say that "The green economy is no longer some quaint sideline.  It is the most rapidly growing sector of the economy." 

Our Questions for Today:  Are People Created Equal or Not?  And Do You Believe that It's Best to Give Advantages to the Wealthy to Create More Wealth and That They Then Will Send the Elevator Back Down?

The Republican Debate or  Tax Cuts, Tax Cuts, Tax Cuts plus Guns, Gay Military Guys, and Guns and Immigrants , oh, and guns.

It'll be good to hear those stories of successes and people fighting the good fight, but it wouldn't be Citizens' Voice Talk Radio if we didn't stick on our tin foil hats and look for signals from the planet Xenon.  These days I'm wrapping my whole body in tin foil hoping for some sign that the space ships are coming to get us out of here.  You have only to watch the Republican debate this week to want to either gaze up at the sky waiting to be lifted up or burrow deep into your hole and curl up in a little ball.  Not one question was asked about healthcare.  Nothing on education.  Nothing on the housing bubbles burst.  But there were tons of questions on immigration and which one of the candidates employed illegal aliens and which ones were the most happy about tossing children into the street. 

The crazy question by the guys with the twitches about which one of the candidates believed every single word in the Bible was not only Funny Farm time, but unconstitutional.  Article VI of the Constitution not only puts the U.S. Constitution above state constitutions, but there also can be no "religious test" for national office.  In other words, the crazy guy with the Bible can make up his own mind about his own  criteria for a commander in chief and president of the United States, but the question was in appropriate in a public forum.  Each candidate should have raised a copy of the Constitution and said "This is the law of the land". 

If you believe that all people are created equal, then what happened?  More hints from Naomi Klein and Paul Krugman

There's a military war going on in Iraq which gets some media coverage, but the big war, the class war, the economic war on citizens here and all over the world goes unreported.  Norman Soloman writes a piece called "The Media and Class Warfare" on November 26th.  If you turn on the TV, you have 24 hours of mostly business news.  You have a whole channel CNBC devoted to Business and the woes of employers.  You have "Market Watch" on NPR.  But where is there any labor news?  Where are the stories about people like Kevin Danahar or Naomi Klein?   Naomi snuck on to Keith Olberman on Thursday night.  Keith tried to jam a discussion about one of the most profound books written in many years into 5 minutes and it was hard to follow, but at least she got a small hearing.   But criticisms of the behemoths of business that are devouring whole economies and spitting out workers and farmers left and right are rare. 

Naomi Klein's chapter on the Tsunami will probably have you throw up in your mouth a little bit.  It's called "Blanking the Beach".  Klein visits Sri Lanka 6 months after the Tsunami hit on December 26, 2004.  What she finds is that the Tsunami cleared away a whole bunch of beaches of fishing families with their annoying unsightly huts and their smelly fish.  What had made these beaches kind of funky and authentic were these fishing families.  The hotels there were middle class places with simple fair.  Within weeks of the devastation and deaths, the government declared a "buffer zone" and cleared the beaches for the development of swanky hotels and restaurants.  With the incredible increase in the super wealthy's wealth, it was much more desirable to build hotels where rooms go for $800 a night, not $80. 

Klein interviews a woman who delivered her baby the day after the wave hit.  She had made her way through water up to her neck dragging her two children to safety.  Now she lives in a camp;  a sweltering tin roofed barracks miles from the beach and miles from sight. Our charitable dollars at work.

Klein says that the reason that the hotel construction began so quickly was that the Washington financial institutions had already had a model.  Hurricane Mitch hit Central America in 1998 and in order to get aid, the governments of Honduras had to agree to privatize everything from their airports to their phone system. 
Plus, the U.S. sent in the same construction firms that had failed worked in Iraq until it was too dangerous.  CH2M Hill got 28.5 million in Iraq and now got another $48 million in Sri Lanka.  Meanwhile, only 1 million of the U.S. aid money was spent on the fishing people and that was to supposedly "upgrade" those temporary headquarters in the jungle while the beaches were  being improved with big hotels.

When Klein asked the USAID's Competitiveness Program Director...Do you love that name?....John Varley why more aid was going to the displaced tsunami survivors, he came up with this old chestnut:

Question:  How Long Are You Willing to Wait For the Elevator?

    

 

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