Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
Hi Keith and all of my fellow bio-dieselers! I joined your mailing list about a year ago.. After discovering journey to forever I have made it one of the most important missions in my life to get off of the fossil fuel drug. In the past year and a half I have built a straw bale bio diesel processing shop on my family land deep in the mountains of rural British Columbia, Canada. I have successfully set up a network of collection with 10 regional restaurants and have successfully made thousands of litres of clean-burning bio-diesel. I am currently trying to set-up a small co-op business here to provide fuel for green farmers in the area. I am also madly trying to pour a floor in my shop complete with in-floor heating pipes before freeze-up(which is happening SOON!) I am curious if anyone out there has ever tried to run Bio-Diesel in a hydronic in-floor heating system. It seems to me to be the perfect solution to using energy already consumed by the drying process to heat the facility. My biggest question is wether or not plastic pex water pipe is compatible with bio-diesel. Any leads on this subject would be greatly appreciated, Sincerely, The Dred Neck Dunster BC Canada V0J 1J0 From: Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Fri, October 22, 2010 5:45:56 AM Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill' This one still leaves me stunned. I've read it twice now, trying to imagine how it could possibly come to pass. Well, they think they own everything, and everyone, and certainly the law, whatever law. Even if they don't own it, they're usually in a position to bend it. It seems to me, that as a matter of basic equity in law, that a person (natural or otherwise) should not be able to invoke the legal system to its advantage unless it is equally answerable to the same body of law. How is it that trans-national corporations, that explicitly operate in the international realm, can be not answerable to international law? This might help: http://www.asil.org/files/insight100930pdf.pdf Still stunned. I'm not very surprised. Do you remember this? How to kill a mammoth, from Roberto Verzola, secretary-general of the Philippine Greens: http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg30628.html [biofuel] Mammoth corporations Economics, properly defined, is the study of human behaviour in the marketplace. IT is a BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE. Unfortunately, people are too often greedy and the economic models can predict behaviour by reducing humans to a collection of pecuniary interests. So, the problem is not to change economics. The problem is to change people's attitude. When that happens, the economist's models will fail. You can denounce economics all you want, but it is really human behaviour that is the problem. That is what we need to address. Pat Hi Pat. I have a different interpretation: it is true that people are occasionally / often greedy in varying degrees. However economists idealized this greed and made it the centerpoint of the ideal economic agent. Then society created a legal person in the perfect image of this idealized economic agent. This legal person is the corporation/business firm, the epitome of pure greed. Corporations (which I'd count as if they were a separate species) have domesticated many humans and forced them to act and think like corporations too. This is what we need to address. Roberto Verzola Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations? by Roberto Verzola Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to natural or legal persons. It should therefore be safe to conclude that such registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, organisms), but NOT natural persons, and therefore not humans. Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and reproductive capacity that corporations attained. It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to registered business firms, or for-profit corporations). Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. Therefore
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
- Original Message - From: Seth Macdonald [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: sustainablelorgbiofuel@sustainablelists.org Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 11:11:35 PM Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill' |SNIP |I am also madly trying to pour a floor in my shop complete with in-floor heating |pipes before freeze-up(which is happening SOON!) | |I am curious if anyone out there has ever tried to run Bio-Diesel in a hydronic |in-floor heating system. It seems to me to be the perfect solution to using |energy already consumed by the drying process to heat the facility. My biggest |question is wether or not plastic pex water pipe is compatible with bio-diesel. | |Any leads on this subject would be greatly appreciated, | |Sincerely, |The Dred Neck | |Dunster BC |Canada |V0J 1J0 http://cpm01.smugmug.com/Bicycles/buy-fresh-bike-local-2010/IMG0749/963631153_nZVUP-XL.jpg Hey Seth; What you see in this picture, is an experimental greenhouse soil bed heating system, which is based on the same concept as radiant floor heating. This system uses an oil burner converted to run biodiesel. It works. This system is installed at the Dickenson College Farm CSA, which grows the food for Dickenson College in Carlisle Pa, US. This is the website: http://www.dickinson.edu/about/sustainability/college-farm/ Jen Halpin is the farmer/farm manager, and her partner, Matt is the whacko who comes up with stuff like this. You can find her contact info on the website, and they may be able to share some clues with you. Good luck! Sounds like a fun project. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
Nine - an update on How to kill a mammoth. - K --0-- http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/10/25 Published on Monday, October 25, 2010 by TomDispatch.com Jurassic Ballot: When Corporations Ruled the Earth by Rebecca Solnit This country is being run for the benefit of alien life forms. They've invaded; they've infiltrated; they've conquered; and a lot of the most powerful people on Earth do their bidding, including five out of our nine Supreme Court justices earlier this year and a whole lot of senators and other elected officials all the time. The monsters they serve demand that we ravage the planet and impoverish most human beings so that they might thrive. They're like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, like the Terminators, like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that those were on the screen and these are in our actual world. We call these monsters corporations, from the word corporate which means embodied. A corporation is a bunch of monetary interests bound together into a legal body that was once considered temporary and dependent on local licensing, but now may operate anywhere and everywhere on Earth, almost unchallenged, and live far longer than you. The results are near-invincible bodies, the most gigantic of which are oil companies, larger than blue whales, larger than dinosaurs, larger than Godzilla. Last year, Shell, BP, and Exxon were three of the top four mega-corporations by sales on the Fortune Global 500 list (and Chevron came in eighth). Some of the oil companies are well over a century old, having morphed and split and merged while continuing to pump filth into the air, the water, and the bodies of the many -- and profits into the pockets of the few. Thanks to a Supreme Court decision this January, they have the same rights as you when it comes to putting money into the political process, only they're millions of times larger than you -- and they're pumping millions of dollars into races nationwide. It's like inviting a T. rex into your checkers championship -- and it doesn't matter whether dinosaurs can play checkers, at least not once you're being pulverized by their pointy teeth. The amazing thing is that they don't always win, that sometimes thousands of puny mammals -- that's us -- do overwhelm one of them. Gigantic, powerful, undead beings, corporations have been given ever more human rights over the past 125 years; they act on their own behalf, not mine or yours or humanity's or, really, carbon-based life on Earth's. We're made out of carbon, of course, but we depend on a planet where much of the carbon is locked up in the earth. The profit margins of the oil corporations depend on putting as much as possible of that carbon into the atmosphere. So in a lot of basic ways, we are at odds with these creations. The novelist John le Carré remarked earlier this month, The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done -- dare I say it -- in the name of God. Corporations have their jihads and crusades too, since they subscribe to a religion of maximum profit for themselves, and they'll kill to achieve it. In an odd way, shareholders and god have merged in the weird new religion of unfettered capitalism, the one in which regulation is blasphemy and profit is sacred. Thus, the economic jihads of our age. They Fund By Night! In the jihad that concerns me right now, most of the monsters come from Texas; the prey is in California; and it's called our economy and our environment. Four years ago, with state Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, we Californians decided we'd like to cultivate our environment for the benefit of all of us, human and biological, now and in the long future. They'd like to pillage it to keep their profit margins in tip-top shape this year and next. The latest tool to do this is called Proposition 23, and it's on our ballot on November 2nd. It is wholly destructive, cloaked in lies, and benefits no one -- no one human, that is, though it benefits the oil corporations a lot. (You could argue that it benefits their shareholders, but I'd suggest that their biological and moral nature matters more than their bank accounts do and that, as a consequence, they're acting against their deepest interests and their humanity.) When he signed AB 32 into law, Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, who's totally weird, termed out, but really good on climate stuff, said: Some have challenged whether AB 32 is good for businesses. I say unquestionably it is good for businesses. Not only large, well-established businesses, but small businesses that will harness their entrepreneurial spirit to help us achieve our climate goals. Using market-based incentives, we will reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. That's a 25% reduction. And by 2050, we will reduce emissions to 80% below 1990 levels. We
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
I suppose there is a rich irony to the fact that I, as a general supporter of small actions, incremental change and the precautionary principle, find that in this case I want to see a dramatic change on a large scale. I recognize the value of small actions, symbolic or pragmatic. Still, there are days I grow frustrated by what I perceive to be the slow pace of change in the desired direction (where 'desired' is purely my personal stance on matters). Oh yes, me too! Sigh... I'm sure we're not alone in that. Well, enough of my personal angst (for now). Seeing as I already provide no business to Shell (to the best of my knowledge and direct control), trying to affect their nourishment via that channel isn't going to have much effect. Still, it's the legal precedent I find most troubling - definitely a shift in the wrong direction. It's obscene. Cabranes calls himself a judge? Of what, exactly? Of how much corporate graft will land up in his pocket? Keith, thanks for the link to the Gutenberg 'Wealth of Nations'. Curiously, I don't think I have yet read the entire piece, although I do have a copy in my ever-expanding reading pile. :-) I think the whole of Wall Street joins you in never having read the guy they quote so often to justify their corporate crime spree. He's a nice read, is Adam Smith. Best Keith Darryl On 22/10/2010 12:01 PM, Keith Addison wrote: :-) It certainly does make the brain hurt. I do remember that thread. I don't think corporations are entitled to 'human' rights, generally because they are not human, and can't be subject to human penalties (e.g., imprisonment). That made the practicality of making corporations answerable to the law difficult, but the concept was that they were not beyond the reach of the law. However, to my mind, this latest item is a quantum leap beyond that, because it codifies that the corporations are beyond the reach of the law (scofflaws), while still allowed to use the laws for their own interests (not outlaws). The parallel that comes to my mind is the divine rights of kings. Where do we find the line that separates the beneficial corporate entity (e.g, the shoe repair shop in my community), from the the trans-national like Shell (subject of the original post in this thread)? We've been through that before too. Weren't you just telling me that small is beautiful? Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced---profits are privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not, to present low and middle income taxpayers. -- tvoivozhd, Homestead list IMHO if you can attach the word community or local to a business description, it's misleading to call it a corporate entity, though it may be accurate. How do we get the laws changed to bring the corporations to heel, when it appears that they own the legal system? How do we starve the mammoth, when our senior governments are fixed on feeding them (remember 'too big to fail'), while allowing allowing actual organic species to go extinct? That's the problem, Wall St owns Washington. (And the Pentagon likes it that way.) Adam Smith believed an efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Some notes (also in the archives I think): Going back two centuries, economists have worried about what Adam Smith described as the tendency of chieftains in a market system ''to deceive and even to oppress the public.' People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices (Wealth of Nations). He said businessmen always yearn to escape from price competition through collusion. He didn't like corporations and governments either. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.' Adam Smith commented in 1776 that the only trades that justified incorporation were banking, insurance, canal building and waterworks. He believed it was contrary to the public interest for any other businesses or trades to be incorporated and that all should be run as partnerships. **Smith believed the efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Such owners normally share in the community's values and have a personal stake in the future of both the community and the enterprise.**
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
|- Original Message - |From: Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] |To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org |Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2010 5:22:20 AM |Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill' | |Keith, thanks for the link to the Gutenberg 'Wealth of Nations'. |Curiously, I don't think I have yet read the entire piece, although I do |have a copy in my ever-expanding reading pile. | |:-) I think the whole of Wall Street joins you in never having read |the guy they quote so often to justify their corporate crime spree. |He's a nice read, is Adam Smith. Yeah, I personally *love* the way folks spout off Smith, having, if they payed any actual attention to him at all, payed attention ONLY to the Wealth of Nations work, completely ignoring ALL of Smith's other companion work. That Wealth of Nations is so widely considered, and Theory of Moral Sentiments is so wholly ignored, says pretty much everything there is to say about *most* folks who will use Smith to cite or argue. You haven't even read the half of it is my only rejoinder. Of course, those that are actually familiar with both works, often hold different views than those who have only read the one. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
Hi Chip and all |- Original Message - |From: Keith Addison [EMAIL PROTECTED] |To: biofuel@sustainablelists.org |Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2010 5:22:20 AM |Subject: Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill' | |Keith, thanks for the link to the Gutenberg 'Wealth of Nations'. |Curiously, I don't think I have yet read the entire piece, although I do |have a copy in my ever-expanding reading pile. | |:-) I think the whole of Wall Street joins you in never having read |the guy they quote so often to justify their corporate crime spree. |He's a nice read, is Adam Smith. Yeah, I personally *love* the way folks spout off Smith, having, if they payed any actual attention to him at all, payed attention ONLY to the Wealth of Nations work, completely ignoring ALL of Smith's other companion work. ... and most of The Wealth of Nations too. That Wealth of Nations is so widely considered, and Theory of Moral Sentiments is so wholly ignored, says pretty much everything there is to say about *most* folks who will use Smith to cite or argue. You haven't even read the half of it is my only rejoinder. Of course, those that are actually familiar with both works, often hold different views than those who have only read the one. I hope this doesn't put me in Wall Street, but I've never read The Theory of Moral Sentiments, just bits and pieces. For all my wanderings in 2nd-hand bookshops, I've never been confronted by a copy, or I'd have bought it. So I just did some online wandering at Alibris, and bought both books. Gutenberg's great, but sometimes (or often) what you want is a real book you can hold in your hand. Er... http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/moral.html The Theory of Moral Sentiments Thankyou Chip. All best Keith ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
This one still leaves me stunned. I've read it twice now, trying to imagine how it could possibly come to pass. Well, they think they own everything, and everyone, and certainly the law, whatever law. Even if they don't own it, they're usually in a position to bend it. It seems to me, that as a matter of basic equity in law, that a person (natural or otherwise) should not be able to invoke the legal system to its advantage unless it is equally answerable to the same body of law. How is it that trans-national corporations, that explicitly operate in the international realm, can be not answerable to international law? This might help: http://www.asil.org/files/insight100930pdf.pdf Still stunned. I'm not very surprised. Do you remember this? How to kill a mammoth, from Roberto Verzola, secretary-general of the Philippine Greens: http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg30628.html [biofuel] Mammoth corporations Economics, properly defined, is the study of human behaviour in the marketplace. IT is a BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE. Unfortunately, people are too often greedy and the economic models can predict behaviour by reducing humans to a collection of pecuniary interests. So, the problem is not to change economics. The problem is to change people's attitude. When that happens, the economist's models will fail. You can denounce economics all you want, but it is really human behaviour that is the problem. That is what we need to address. Pat Hi Pat. I have a different interpretation: it is true that people are occasionally / often greedy in varying degrees. However economists idealized this greed and made it the centerpoint of the ideal economic agent. Then society created a legal person in the perfect image of this idealized economic agent. This legal person is the corporation/business firm, the epitome of pure greed. Corporations (which I'd count as if they were a separate species) have domesticated many humans and forced them to act and think like corporations too. This is what we need to address. Roberto Verzola Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations? by Roberto Verzola Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to natural or legal persons. It should therefore be safe to conclude that such registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, organisms), but NOT natural persons, and therefore not humans. Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and reproductive capacity that corporations attained. It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to registered business firms, or for-profit corporations). Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. Therefore they easily survive better in the economic competition. It is profit that keeps corporations alive. They are genetically programmed to maximize the flow of profits into their gut. To extract profit from their environment, corporations transform everything into commodities and then make profits by selling them or renting them out. Corporations can transform practically anything into a commodity, including corporations and profits themselves. Today, corporations are the dominant species on the planet. They have taken over most social institutions and other niches that humans have originally created for themselves. The physical reach of the biggest corporations span the entire globe. The term globalization can mean, without exaggeration, the global rule of corporations. The non-stop transformation of the natural world - the ecological base of human survival - into commodities for profit-making has, in fact, become a threat to the survival not only of human beings but of many other species. In the same way that we learned to domesticate plants and animals, corporations have learned to domesticate humans. Much of today's educational process is a process of corporate domestication, reinforced subsequently by corporate-controlled media. Corporations have perfected the art of training humans, using carrot-and-stick methods, to keep them tame and obedient. Of course, some humans have remained wild
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
I do remember that thread. I don't think corporations are entitled to 'human' rights, generally because they are not human, and can't be subject to human penalties (e.g., imprisonment). That made the practicality of making corporations answerable to the law difficult, but the concept was that they were not beyond the reach of the law. However, to my mind, this latest item is a quantum leap beyond that, because it codifies that the corporations are beyond the reach of the law (scofflaws), while still allowed to use the laws for their own interests (not outlaws). The parallel that comes to my mind is the divine rights of kings. Where do we find the line that separates the beneficial corporate entity (e.g, the shoe repair shop in my community), from the the trans-national like Shell (subject of the original post in this thread)? How do we get the laws changed to bring the corporations to heel, when it appears that they own the legal system? How do we starve the mammoth, when our senior governments are fixed on feeding them (remember 'too big to fail'), while allowing allowing actual organic species to go extinct? Darryl (off to think about smaller things for a while, this is making my brain hurt) On 22/10/2010 8:45 AM, Keith Addison wrote: This one still leaves me stunned. I've read it twice now, trying to imagine how it could possibly come to pass. Well, they think they own everything, and everyone, and certainly the law, whatever law. Even if they don't own it, they're usually in a position to bend it. It seems to me, that as a matter of basic equity in law, that a person (natural or otherwise) should not be able to invoke the legal system to its advantage unless it is equally answerable to the same body of law. How is it that trans-national corporations, that explicitly operate in the international realm, can be not answerable to international law? This might help: http://www.asil.org/files/insight100930pdf.pdf Still stunned. I'm not very surprised. Do you remember this? How to kill a mammoth, from Roberto Verzola, secretary-general of the Philippine Greens: http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/msg30628.html [biofuel] Mammoth corporations Economics, properly defined, is the study of human behaviour in the marketplace. IT is a BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE. Unfortunately, people are too often greedy and the economic models can predict behaviour by reducing humans to a collection of pecuniary interests. So, the problem is not to change economics. The problem is to change people's attitude. When that happens, the economist's models will fail. You can denounce economics all you want, but it is really human behaviour that is the problem. That is what we need to address. Pat Hi Pat. I have a different interpretation: it is true that people are occasionally / often greedy in varying degrees. However economists idealized this greed and made it the centerpoint of the ideal economic agent. Then society created a legal person in the perfect image of this idealized economic agent. This legal person is the corporation/business firm, the epitome of pure greed. Corporations (which I'd count as if they were a separate species) have domesticated many humans and forced them to act and think like corporations too. This is what we need to address. Roberto Verzola Prehistoric peoples could kill mammoths; how about corporations? by Roberto Verzola Most legal systems today recognize the registered business firm as a distinct legal person, separate from its stockholders, board of directors or employees. In fact, laws would often refer to natural or legal persons. It should therefore be safe to conclude that such registered business firms or corporations are persons (ie, organisms), but NOT natural persons, and therefore not humans. Other social institutions have been created by humans (State, Church, etc.), but they have never quite reached the state of life and reproductive capacity that corporations attained. It would be very useful to analyze corporations *as if* they were a different species, and then to extract ecological insights from the analysis. (By corporations here, I am basically referring to registered business firms, or for-profit corporations). Corporations are born; they grow; they might also die. They can reproduce and multiply, using different methods, both asexual and sexual. We have bacteria within our bodies as if they were part of us; corporations have humans within them. Their genetic programming - profit maximization - is much simpler than human genetic programming, humans being a bundle of mixed and often conflicting emotions and motives. Corporations' computational capabilities for such maximization easily exceed most natural persons' capabilities. Therefore they easily survive better in the economic competition. It is profit that keeps corporations alive. They are
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
:-) It certainly does make the brain hurt. I do remember that thread. I don't think corporations are entitled to 'human' rights, generally because they are not human, and can't be subject to human penalties (e.g., imprisonment). That made the practicality of making corporations answerable to the law difficult, but the concept was that they were not beyond the reach of the law. However, to my mind, this latest item is a quantum leap beyond that, because it codifies that the corporations are beyond the reach of the law (scofflaws), while still allowed to use the laws for their own interests (not outlaws). The parallel that comes to my mind is the divine rights of kings. Where do we find the line that separates the beneficial corporate entity (e.g, the shoe repair shop in my community), from the the trans-national like Shell (subject of the original post in this thread)? We've been through that before too. Weren't you just telling me that small is beautiful? Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced---profits are privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not, to present low and middle income taxpayers. -- tvoivozhd, Homestead list IMHO if you can attach the word community or local to a business description, it's misleading to call it a corporate entity, though it may be accurate. How do we get the laws changed to bring the corporations to heel, when it appears that they own the legal system? How do we starve the mammoth, when our senior governments are fixed on feeding them (remember 'too big to fail'), while allowing allowing actual organic species to go extinct? That's the problem, Wall St owns Washington. (And the Pentagon likes it that way.) Adam Smith believed an efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Some notes (also in the archives I think): Going back two centuries, economists have worried about what Adam Smith described as the tendency of chieftains in a market system ''to deceive and even to oppress the public.' People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices (Wealth of Nations). He said businessmen always yearn to escape from price competition through collusion. He didn't like corporations and governments either. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.' Adam Smith commented in 1776 that the only trades that justified incorporation were banking, insurance, canal building and waterworks. He believed it was contrary to the public interest for any other businesses or trades to be incorporated and that all should be run as partnerships. **Smith believed the efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Such owners normally share in the community's values and have a personal stake in the future of both the community and the enterprise.** In the global corporate economy, footloose money moves across national borders at the speed of light, society's assets are entrusted to massive corporations lacking any local or national allegiance, and management is removed from real owners by layers of investment institutions and holding companies. His account of policy-making in England says that the principal architects of policy - in his day the merchants and manufacturers - make sure that their own interests are most peculiarly attended to, however grievous the effect on others, including the people of England, but far more so, those who were subjected to the savage injustice of the Europeans, particularly in conquered India, Smith's own prime concern. All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. (The Wealth of Nations) Whenever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred of the poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many... (The Wealth of Nations) Guess: how many times does Adam Smith mention the invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations? Once. And he doesn't think much of it. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/3/0/3300/3300-8.zip It's the same old answer: localise. Think globally, act locally. A hell of a lot of people are
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
I suppose there is a rich irony to the fact that I, as a general supporter of small actions, incremental change and the precautionary principle, find that in this case I want to see a dramatic change on a large scale. I recognize the value of small actions, symbolic or pragmatic. Still, there are days I grow frustrated by what I perceive to be the slow pace of change in the desired direction (where 'desired' is purely my personal stance on matters). Well, enough of my personal angst (for now). Seeing as I already provide no business to Shell (to the best of my knowledge and direct control), trying to affect their nourishment via that channel isn't going to have much effect. Still, it's the legal precedent I find most troubling - definitely a shift in the wrong direction. Keith, thanks for the link to the Gutenberg 'Wealth of Nations'. Curiously, I don't think I have yet read the entire piece, although I do have a copy in my ever-expanding reading pile. Darryl On 22/10/2010 12:01 PM, Keith Addison wrote: :-) It certainly does make the brain hurt. I do remember that thread. I don't think corporations are entitled to 'human' rights, generally because they are not human, and can't be subject to human penalties (e.g., imprisonment). That made the practicality of making corporations answerable to the law difficult, but the concept was that they were not beyond the reach of the law. However, to my mind, this latest item is a quantum leap beyond that, because it codifies that the corporations are beyond the reach of the law (scofflaws), while still allowed to use the laws for their own interests (not outlaws). The parallel that comes to my mind is the divine rights of kings. Where do we find the line that separates the beneficial corporate entity (e.g, the shoe repair shop in my community), from the the trans-national like Shell (subject of the original post in this thread)? We've been through that before too. Weren't you just telling me that small is beautiful? Small-scale capitalism works out fine, but as scale increases the departure from real capitalism becomes more pronounced---profits are privatized, but costs are socialized. The attendant repair and maintenance are left to succeeding generations if possible, if not, to present low and middle income taxpayers. -- tvoivozhd, Homestead list IMHO if you can attach the word community or local to a business description, it's misleading to call it a corporate entity, though it may be accurate. How do we get the laws changed to bring the corporations to heel, when it appears that they own the legal system? How do we starve the mammoth, when our senior governments are fixed on feeding them (remember 'too big to fail'), while allowing allowing actual organic species to go extinct? That's the problem, Wall St owns Washington. (And the Pentagon likes it that way.) Adam Smith believed an efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Some notes (also in the archives I think): Going back two centuries, economists have worried about what Adam Smith described as the tendency of chieftains in a market system ''to deceive and even to oppress the public.' People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices (Wealth of Nations). He said businessmen always yearn to escape from price competition through collusion. He didn't like corporations and governments either. He viewed government primarily as an instrument for extracting taxes to subsidize elites and intervening in the market to protect corporate monopolies. Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.' Adam Smith commented in 1776 that the only trades that justified incorporation were banking, insurance, canal building and waterworks. He believed it was contrary to the public interest for any other businesses or trades to be incorporated and that all should be run as partnerships. **Smith believed the efficient market is composed of small, owner-managed enterprises located in the communities where the owners reside. Such owners normally share in the community's values and have a personal stake in the future of both the community and the enterprise.** In the global corporate economy, footloose money moves across national borders at the speed of light, society's assets are entrusted to massive corporations lacking any local or national allegiance, and management is removed from real owners by layers of investment institutions and holding companies. His account of policy-making in England says that the principal architects of policy - in his day the
Re: [Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
This one still leaves me stunned. I've read it twice now, trying to imagine how it could possibly come to pass. It seems to me, that as a matter of basic equity in law, that a person (natural or otherwise) should not be able to invoke the legal system to its advantage unless it is equally answerable to the same body of law. How is it that trans-national corporations, that explicitly operate in the international realm, can be not answerable to international law? Still stunned. Darryl On 20/10/2010 3:15 PM, Keith Addison wrote: A judge in the Manhattan-based federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that transnational corporations who participate in gross human rights abuses cannot be held responsible for torture, genocide, war crimes and the like because, as corporations, their activities fall outside the jurisdiction of international law. [Should that who be that, or not? - K] http://towardfreedom.com/africa/2149-nigeria-shell-oils-license-to-kill Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill' Tuesday, 19 October 2010 15:39 Abena Ampofoa Asare Source: Pambazuka News Last month, Judge José A. Cabranes of the Manhattan-based federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a judicial opinion that sent international lawyers, human rights advocates and African environmental activists reeling. Cabranes ruled that transnational corporations who participate in gross human rights abuses cannot be held responsible for torture, genocide, war crimes and the like because, as corporations, their activities fall outside the jurisdiction of international law. The Pan-African Newswire described the court's opinion as a corporate licence to kill. Judge Pierre Leval, also of the Second Circuit, issued a dissenting opinion describing the Cabranes ruling as an unprecedented 'blow to the efforts of international law to protect human rights'. The plaintiffs in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell) were the relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dr Barinem Kiobel and other Ogoni leaders imprisoned, tortured and executed in mid-1990s Nigeria. Their crime was protesting the environmental devastation associated with Shell's long tenure in the region. The Niger Delta violence, culminating in the execution of Saro-Wiwa, a non-violent playwright, businessman and organiser, exposed the brutal overlap between big oil's financial imperatives and a military dictatorship's state repression. The tragedy of the Niger Delta forced the world to acknowledge the human costs of doing business as usual in the midst of a military dictatorship. 'This is it,' Saro-Wiwa wrote just months before his death, 'they [the Abacha dictatorship] are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.' This lawsuit against the Dutch, British and Nigerian holdings of Shell Petroleum was thrust before the Manhattan federal appeals court under the Alien Torts Statute (ATS), an extraordinary 1789 law which allows non-citizens to file lawsuits in US courts for serious breaches of international law. As a puzzling relic of the first Congress, the ATS lay mostly dormant until the 1980s when creative lawyers began using the statute to bring cases of international human rights abuse to trial in the US. Since then, American federal court judges have been urged - unequipped and often unwilling - into debates about international human rights law as ATS lawsuits on South African apartheid, Bosnian genocide, chemical warfare in Vietnam and other atrocities appeared before their courts. Last month, the Second Circuit's foray into the murky waters of international law via the Shell suit led to the shocking assertion that there is 'no historical evidence of an existing or even nascent norm of customary international law imposing liability on corporations for violations of human rights'. Another Second Circuit judge, Pierre Leval, violently disagreed with Cabranes's 'illogical' and 'strange' misreading of international law. In a separately issued opinion, Leval described international law as explicit in condemning human rights abuse and silent on the issue of corporate civil responsibility. Silences in the law, Leval argued, must not be interpreted to undermine the spirit, intention and norms of the law - particularly when the stakes are so high. This new precedent, Leval warned, would 'offer to unscrupulous businesses advantages of incorporation never before dreamed of Š businesses will now be free to trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despot's political opponents, perform genocides or operate torture prisons Š ---all without civil liability to victims'. Leval condemned the Cabranes ruling as a boon to corporations 'who earn profits by commercial exploitation or abuse of fundamental human rights', by allowing them to 'successfully shield [their] profitsŠ. simply by taking the precaution of conducting the heinous operation in the corporate form'. If the Shell
[Biofuel] Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill'
A judge in the Manhattan-based federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that transnational corporations who participate in gross human rights abuses cannot be held responsible for torture, genocide, war crimes and the like because, as corporations, their activities fall outside the jurisdiction of international law. [Should that who be that, or not? - K] http://towardfreedom.com/africa/2149-nigeria-shell-oils-license-to-kill Nigeria: Shell Oil's 'License to Kill' Tuesday, 19 October 2010 15:39 Abena Ampofoa Asare Source: Pambazuka News Last month, Judge José A. Cabranes of the Manhattan-based federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a judicial opinion that sent international lawyers, human rights advocates and African environmental activists reeling. Cabranes ruled that transnational corporations who participate in gross human rights abuses cannot be held responsible for torture, genocide, war crimes and the like because, as corporations, their activities fall outside the jurisdiction of international law. The Pan-African Newswire described the court's opinion as a corporate licence to kill. Judge Pierre Leval, also of the Second Circuit, issued a dissenting opinion describing the Cabranes ruling as an unprecedented 'blow to the efforts of international law to protect human rights'. The plaintiffs in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell) were the relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dr Barinem Kiobel and other Ogoni leaders imprisoned, tortured and executed in mid-1990s Nigeria. Their crime was protesting the environmental devastation associated with Shell's long tenure in the region. The Niger Delta violence, culminating in the execution of Saro-Wiwa, a non-violent playwright, businessman and organiser, exposed the brutal overlap between big oil's financial imperatives and a military dictatorship's state repression. The tragedy of the Niger Delta forced the world to acknowledge the human costs of doing business as usual in the midst of a military dictatorship. 'This is it,' Saro-Wiwa wrote just months before his death, 'they [the Abacha dictatorship] are going to arrest us all and execute us. All for Shell.' This lawsuit against the Dutch, British and Nigerian holdings of Shell Petroleum was thrust before the Manhattan federal appeals court under the Alien Torts Statute (ATS), an extraordinary 1789 law which allows non-citizens to file lawsuits in US courts for serious breaches of international law. As a puzzling relic of the first Congress, the ATS lay mostly dormant until the 1980s when creative lawyers began using the statute to bring cases of international human rights abuse to trial in the US. Since then, American federal court judges have been urged - unequipped and often unwilling - into debates about international human rights law as ATS lawsuits on South African apartheid, Bosnian genocide, chemical warfare in Vietnam and other atrocities appeared before their courts. Last month, the Second Circuit's foray into the murky waters of international law via the Shell suit led to the shocking assertion that there is 'no historical evidence of an existing or even nascent norm of customary international law imposing liability on corporations for violations of human rights'. Another Second Circuit judge, Pierre Leval, violently disagreed with Cabranes's 'illogical' and 'strange' misreading of international law. In a separately issued opinion, Leval described international law as explicit in condemning human rights abuse and silent on the issue of corporate civil responsibility. Silences in the law, Leval argued, must not be interpreted to undermine the spirit, intention and norms of the law - particularly when the stakes are so high. This new precedent, Leval warned, would 'offer to unscrupulous businesses advantages of incorporation never before dreamed of businesses will now be free to trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despot's political opponents, perform genocides or operate torture prisons ---all without civil liability to victims'. Leval condemned the Cabranes ruling as a boon to corporations 'who earn profits by commercial exploitation or abuse of fundamental human rights', by allowing them to 'successfully shield [their] profits. simply by taking the precaution of conducting the heinous operation in the corporate form'. If the Shell ruling stands, ironically, the legacy of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other activists who gave their lives fighting for corporate responsibility would now be attached to a legal decision shielding transnational companies that trample human rights. Central to this legal controversy is a question that should not be lost in the crossfire: What does international law and custom prescribe for transnational corporations implicated in gross human rights abuse? Months before this ruling, legal experts at a Northwestern University roundtable triumphantly
