Month: May 2022

By Jill Langlois • May 26, 2022 from Yale Environment 360 / Explore /Search /About via thefreeonline.com

The Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, has been battered in recent years by agricultural development, drought, and fire. Dredging the rivers will destroy the water levels and everything will burn.

Now, a push to turn the region’s key river into a waterway for soybean-laden barges threatens to alter the natural flows of this iconic ecosystem.

It takes 14 hours for Lourenço Pereira Leite to reach his fishing spot.

He and his brother-in-law chug along in a simple one-engine motorboat, towing their traditional fishing canoe behind them.

They’re in the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, traveling on its main body of water, the Paraguay River. At almost 47 million acres, the Pantanal is 10 times the size of Florida’s Everglades and flows across Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil.

The vast wetland, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is made up of more than 1,200 rivers and streams rushing into the region from the eastern Andes.

After winding along 150 miles of the Paraguay River’s deep curves, Pereira Leite and his brother-in-law arrive at Pacu Gordo, a campsite in Brazil among the lush green trees along the river’s edge. They tie up their boat and set up a makeshift cage around the area where they plan to sleep — protection from the Pantanal’s abundant jaguar population. The fishermen will spend two weeks along the river, targeting the prime species — pacu and pintado — that will fetch the highest price.

A third-generation fisherman, Pereira Leite is part of a group known as ribeirinhos, traditional people who live on a river’s edge and support themselves with sustainable fishing and small-scale farming.

When he was younger, Pereira Leite, now 52, was able to reach his quota of 275 pounds of fish per week in a fraction of the time and much closer to his home on the periphery of Cáceres, a city of almost 95,000 in the heart of the Pantanal.

But the arrival of large-scale ranching and farming, infrastructure development, drought, and severe fires in 2020 are steadily taking bites out of the Pantanal, threatening the ribeirinhos and their way of life. He fears his three children will be unable to carry on his traditional fishing lifestyle.

Now a new threat is on the horizon. With the rapid growth of industrial soybean farming in the Pantanal, a proposal to build a commercial waterway has been revived, with three ports — coupled with major dredging and course-alteration projects — planned for the Paraguay River.

One of those planned ports, known as Barranco Vermelho and located in Cáceres, has already received a preliminary license from the Environmental Council of Mato Grosso state, the first step in the permitting process that would allow the port to be built.

The construction of a second port in Cáceres is also planned, as well as another in the nearby city of Corumbá. All three are being privately funded.

Continue reading “A Waterway Project in Brazil Imperils the Vast Tropical Pantanal Wetland”

Another great exposé of the 100% embedded corruption of Corporate USA, although lacking in any clue about how to fix Predator Capitalism

by Ralph Nader at Dandelion Salad via thefreeonline May 28, 2022

“economic impact of corporate crime is at least twenty times greater than all other criminal offenses combined,” Corporate Crime in the U.S.

Is Corporate Criminal Law Heading for Extinction?

Crimes without criminals was not a subject for study when I was in law school. The two were seen as part of the same illegal package.

That was before notorious corporate lawyers and a cash register Congress combined to separate economic, health and safety crimes from corporate accountability, incarceration and deterrence.

Lawlessness is now so rampant that a group of realistic law professors, led by Professor Mihailis E. Diamantis of the University of Iowa Law School, claim there is no corporate criminal law.

I say “realistic” because their assertion that corporate criminal law, does not in fact, exist is not widely acknowledged by their peers.

Most North Americans know that none of the executives on Wall Street who are responsible for the lies, deception, and phony investments they sold to millions of trusting investors were prosecuted and sent to jail.

“They got away with it,” was the common refrain during the 2008-2009 meltdown of Wall Street that took their economy down and into a deep recession that resulted in massive job loss and the looting of savings of tens of millions.

Continue reading “Stop Capitalist Impunity! / U.S. Corporate Crime is 20 times greater than all other crime combined- Ralph Nader”

from alethonews.com by Alastair Crooke at Strategic Culture Foundation | via thefreeonline

By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | May 30, 2022

Klaus Schwab, passionate for Ukraine, essentially configured the World Economic Forum (WEF) to showcase Zelensky and to leverage the argument that Russia should be kicked out of the civilised world.

Schwab’s target was the assembled crème de la crème of the world’s business leaders assembled there.

Zelensky pitched big: “We want more sanctions and more weapons”; “All trade with the aggressor should be stopped”; “All foreign business should leave Russia so that your brands are not associated with war crimes”, he said.

Sanctions must be all encompassing; values must matter.

Disquiet ran through the Davos set: The WEF is high-octane globalist, right? Yet this Schwab line suggests a de-coupling ‘on stilts’. It precisely reverses interconnectedness.

Plus, the western generals in charge are saying that this conflict may last not just years, but decades.

What will this signify for their markets in parts of the world that refuse action against Russia, the moneymen were wondering?

It is unlikely that this whiff of disorientation is what Schwab had intended.

Perhaps the latter was more aligned with Soros’ later intervention that a quick victory over Russia was needed to save the ‘Open Society’ and civilisation itself – and that this was intended as the WEF 2022 message.

Opinion | What Is America’s Strategy in Ukraine? – The New York Times

The Davos ‘greater disquiet’ emerged however, from an unexpected quarter. Just before the WEF began, the NY Times had run a piece from the editorial team urging Zelensky to negotiate with Russia.

It argued that such engagement implied making painful territorial sacrifices.

The piece attracted indignant and angry push-back in Europe and the West, possibly because – albeit couched as advice to Kiev – its target was evidently Washington and London (the arch belligerents).

Eric Cantor, a former whip in the U.S. House of Representatives (a legislator well versed on Iran sanctions), also at Davos, questioned whether the West would be able to maintain a united front in pursuit of such maximalist aims as Zelensky and his Military Intelligence Chief have demanded.

“We may not get the next vote”, Cantor opined (in wake of the $40 bn vote ostensibly earmarked for Ukraine).

Cantor said excluding Russia entirely would require secondary sanctions against other countries.

Continue reading “Disquiet at Davos and the Unsaid Fear of Failure – The First Shoots of a U.S. Ukraine Shift”