By
FRANK CARINI
Since
Gov. Gina Raimondo got elected, her administration and our “blue state
liberals” have clear-cut their way through Rhode Island.
They
have promoted the destruction of woodlands in
Johnston to make room for a corporate office park. Despite their vocal concerns
about climate change, they support the bulldozing of
an important section of forest in Burrillville to make way for a fossil-fuel
power plant and the expansion of natural-gas infrastructure.
They think
chopping down 20 acres of trees in
Hopkinton to make space for a travel plaza is a good idea.
The
passing of environmentally friendly bonds, the building of the nation’s first
offshore wind farm in Rhode Island waters, handing out grant-funding morsels
for environmental projects and a fractured system of protecting open space
doesn’t automatically make the Ocean State green or blue.
A job plan focused “on putting cranes in
the sky” isn’t particularly forward thinking, especially when much of the
encouraged development largely ignores the state’s many vacant office
buildings, big-box stores and
old mills and instead charges into the forest, chainsaws a blazin'.
Jobs
are important, but that doesn’t mean we should build stuff we don’t really need
in places that weaken ecosystems and jeopardize public health.
A progressive
state would focus on building stuff people want in places that make both
economic and environmental sense.
A liberal state wouldn't hand out tax deals like Halloween candy to corporations while throwing scraps to local businesses in the form of a hashtag for the nationwide campaign "Small Business Saturday."
The
day after Donald Trump was elected president, Raimondo told Rhode
Island’s climate council that the real-estate mogul’s win “puts an even greater
burden on states to take action and be creative.”
The
fact is we lost our way long before Trump was elected. Few in our government
truly care about environmental and social-justice issues. Most who claim they
do are just spewing greenhouse-gas emissions.
Progressive
politicians truly concerned about environmental protections and social injustices
were lost to a mass extinction that hit Washington, D.C., and our 50
statehouses hard.
Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump wasn’t a blow to liberals;
she’s only slightly more progressive than Jeb Bush. Both the Democratic
National Committee and its Republican counterpart put Wall Street ahead of Main
Street. Special favors trump local interests.
Government’s one-player game
enjoys scaring the masses and buttressing the military industrial complex.
It prefers building barriers, not consensus.
Here
in Rhode Island, many of the politicians with a D after their name are just
moderate Republicans riding donkeys, especially when it comes to matters of the
environment.
Raimondo and Nicholas Mattiello are hardly broad-minded when it
comes protecting natural resources and representing all constituents. Their
actions, not their words and campaign promises, speak for themselves. They are
bound by the wants and desires of corporations and special interests.
They are
hardly alone, both here and nationwide.
Issues
of public health, equal rights, income inequality, sacrifice zones and the
environment were long ago stuffed into the back of a figurative hearse. Big
Money rides shotgun.
If
any of those issues actually mattered to our elected officials, taxpayer-funded
law-enforcement officials, in riot gear and representing some two dozen
agencies, few of which have any jurisdiction, and goons hired by fossil-fuel
interests wouldn’t be blasting water cannons, firing rubber bullets, and
lobbing teargas canisters and stun and stinger grenades at protesters just
outside a North Dakota Indian reservation.
Since
April, the mostly peaceful and mostly Native American protesters have been
resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, concerned about
potential harm to sacred lands and natural resources, including drinking water.
Hundreds have reportedly been injured by the overzealous actions of law
enforcement. Recently, a 21-year-old white woman was injured and could lose an arm, after
"law enforcement" reportedly threw at least two grenades into a group
of protesters, one of which reportedly exploded on the woman's left arm.
Apparently,
the business interests of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, a Fortune 500
natural-gas and propane corporation with a reported net income of $313 million in 2015,
are more important than environmental and public-health concerns, especially if
the people most directly being impacted belong to a population that has been
slaughtered, lied to, abused, marginalized and ignored.
Concerned
Bismarck, N.D., residents, however, voicing their concern at public meetings
about the threat to local water supplies posed by the 1,172-mile-long
underground oil pipeline, managed to get the pipeline’s path altered. The
project was rerouted to go through Native American lands.
Indigenous people
weren’t offered the same public opportunities to voice their concerns. Bismarck
residents — 92 percent of
whom are white — who expressed their displeasure with the project weren’t fired
at by water cannons in freezing temperatures.
None lost an arm during a public
meeting.
During
the past seven months, D.C.’s out-of-touch politicians have said little about
North Dakota, ignoring both the brutality and the legitimate concerns being
raised regarding public and environmental health.
The issue — like the criminal
state of drinking water in Flint, Mich., 56.6 percent of its residents are
black — was barely addressed by the presidential candidates.
Few, if any,
elected officials have visited North Dakota to speak with the protesters, curb
the one-sided violence or help negotiate a compromise.
President Obama has said
little more than let’s allow the process to play out a little while longer.
President-elect Trump is an investor in Energy Transfer Partners.
For
Rhode Island resident Morgan Victor, a woman of color whose father is part
Wampanoag, the continued failures of government to protect all people and their
shared environment hits home hard.
She’s only 27, but the Providence College
graduate understands perfectly who our one-party system prefers: money over
people; private over public; white over brown or black; male over female; religious
belief over women’s health; bigoted bakers over gay couples; Christians over
Muslims.
“Politicians
aren’t working for us. I don’t have any faith in the government,” said Victor,
who works full time in Providence College’s Academic Media Services department
and part time for Crossroads Rhode Island’s Domestic Violence Program. “We’re
more concerned about protecting infrastructure and The Machine than protecting
people, the environment and water resources.”
Victor,
a member of the Rhode Island-based FANG Collective, spent three days in
September at one of the North Dakota protest camps, helping in the kitchen and
medical tent. She recently spoke to ecoRI News about her visit. She said watching
events unfold there was “draining.” She called the government’s response
“upsetting.”
“It
was painful to witness, but it’s not a new feeling,” she said. “It’s consistent
with what Native Americans have been fighting. The erasure of indigenous peoples
never stopped happening. The police are there to serve infrastructure, not
people. They’re literally attacking us for the fossil-fuel industry.”
It’s
the American Way. Greed over good government. Ideology over understanding. CEOs
over tree huggers. White power over colored protest.
During
a recent cable TV news program, a Wisconsin politician noted
that anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter protesters are just as “disgusting, for
different ways.” His ignorance and hatred is shared by many politicians, who
use soundbites, lies, fear and demonization to grab wealth, power and pussies.
The
law-breaking Bundy clan are called patriots. The white supremacists who support
Trump are called the alt-right and nationalists. One is even given a prominent
role in the Trump White House. Black Lives Matter protesters are referred to as
thugs and terrorists. The country’s first African-American president is blamed
for reviving racism.
Government’s
relentless assault on civil liberties is only equaled by its desire to exploit
people and the environment for private profit and career advancement. The
Democratic Party hasn’t spoken for liberals in quite some time.
It’s about time
for the alleged “Party of the People” to stop claiming to be progressive. Real
liberals wouldn’t sit by quietly and allow natural resources and ecosystems to
be plundered. They wouldn’t stand for the continued demonization and marginalization of
the country’s most vulnerable.
But
today’s so-called political progressives either look the other way or, much
more likely, help make environmental destruction and fear-mongering possible.
Two
parties playing some 126 million voters and continuing to expand power and
wealth for themselves, their families, their corporate friends and their good
buddies doesn’t paint a rosy future for the rest of us and the environment we
used to share.
Frank
Carini is the editor of ecoRI News.
