Amazon and Boss Bezos Developing New Ways to Control and Abuse Workers
By Don Gross On Feb. 1, Amazon reported its highest ever quarterly profit, bringing in $1.9 billion in profit in the fourth quarter of 2017. The news came a day after it was reported that Amazon had patented wristbands that would track warehouse workers’ movements while they were on the job.
The stunning contrast between these two stories reinforces the fact that Amazon’s massive profits are created by the work of mostly low-paid warehouse workers and delivery drivers who work under slave-like conditions.
La cuenca del río Marañón, en la Amazonía peruana, ha recibido en 2016 al menos 9 derrames de crudo procedente de las roturas del Oleoducto Norperuano.
The indigenous peoples of Saramurillo (Peruvian Amazon) have held an Uprising for four months to stop the destruction of the environment and constant spills from the Petroperu pumping plant and the obsolete Norperuano Oil Pipeline. (en castellano abajo)
The whole community joined in the 2 month long river blockade in Saramurillo.
There is a corner of the Amazon where the environmental devastation generated by the oil industry have left all passivity behind. This place is called Saramurillo. Since the beginning of September 2016, there has been a rebellion and mobilization of the indigenous peoples affected by the consecutive spills suffered in their territories.
They left their communities and occupied the Petroperú pumping plant. They moved there to prevent their environmental exile, a destination that seemed to be written for them. After months being ignored, the Government agreed to a dialogue with the Resistance Platform. But the negotiation looked complex and tortuous.
GR: Growing global inequity is fueling resentment and despair. As inequity and the human population grow, resources decline, poverty spreads, and criminal destruction and harvest of wild plants and animals may increase.
The massacre, which began as a peaceful demonstration, ended with at least twenty-three police officers, five Indians and five civilians dead, and more than 200 people injured. Unofficial reports suggest that the death toll was much higher.
by Jan Rocha … via the ecologist with thanks.. Amidst the turmoil of the presidential impeachment, writes Jan Rocha, right wing members of Brazil’s Congress are set to pass new laws that would build new roads across the Amazon, open up indigenous reserves to industrial exploitation, and create a surge in carbon emissions from burning forests.
see also: US takes control of Brasil as Corrupt Left replaced by US Spies… Brazil’s new president is U.S. [+CIA?] informant http://wp.me/pIJl9-7UJ
The bill’s rapporteur is Senator Blairo Maggi, a soya magnate, who has cleared thousands of hectares of rainforest in his home state of Mato Grosso, and is tipped to be the minister of agriculture in the new government.
Anti-impeachment protests in Brazil.
Taking advantage of Brazil’s present political turbulence, as the battle to impeach President Dilma Rousseff reaches its climax, reactionary politicians are quietly rolling back environmental and indigenous protection laws in defiance of the country’s commitments under the Paris Agreement.
Neoliberal Capitalist Ecocide
Environmentalists say that if the bill known as PEC 65/2012, now at the Senate committee stage, is approved, it means that major infrastructure projects will be able to go ahead regardless of their impacts on biodiversity, indigenous areas, traditional communities and conservation areas.
Instead of a careful if somewhat slow licensing process which involves scientific assessments including biological, botanical, anthropological and archaeological studies, developers will merely have to present a proposed study of environmental impact to be allowed to begin – without actually having to carry out the study.
And once a project is under way it cannot be cancelled or suspended by the environmental protection agencies.
A chorus of protest – but who’s listening?
Environment organisations, both governmental and non-governmental, have protested strongly at the bill’s implications. For Marilene Ramos, the president of the official agency for the environment and renewable resources, IBAMA, (in Portuguese only) it means Brazil is going in the opposite direction to developed countries and will no longer be able to control infrastructure projects.
teleSUR EnglishIn just 24 hours, the senate-imposed government lead by Michel Temer has lead an assault on a decade of progressive policies. He has eliminated 9 ministries, and some 4,000 public sector jobs will be cut. https://www.facebook.com/telesure
Indigenous leader Nara Baré, of COIAB – the Coordination of Indian organisations in the Brazilian Amazon – said: “Brazil presented targets in Paris but doesn’t do its homework, protecting the forest and us who live in it.”
Carlos Bocuhy, the president of PROAM, an environmental NGO, says the effect of the bill will be to end environmental licensing: “It is completely absurd; it is as though the act of applying for a driving licence entitled you to drive a lorry.”
The Climate Observatory (in Portuguese only) sees the bill as “a bad joke”, even more so in a country that has just suffered the worst environmental disaster in its history, the bursting of a dam of toxic mud in Minas Gerais state on 5th November last year. The calamity destroyed all animal and plant life and a major river nearby, and could be the world’s worst disaster after Chernobyl.
Greenpeace director Marcio Astrini said of the bill that “if it becomes law, it will act as a factory of tragedies.”
Senators’ enormous personal stakes in environmental destruction
Its author, Senator Acir Gurgacz, has a personal interest: his family owns a transport company which would benefit hugely from the paving of the 900 km BR319 highway, linking two Amazon capitals, Porto Velho and Manaus.
At present the project cannot go ahead because IBAMA has embargoed the work, alleging environmental damage. The road runs through conservation areas, indigenous lands and areas of largely unspoiled rainforest.
The bill’s rapporteur is Senator Blairo Maggi, a soya magnate, who has cleared thousands of hectares of rainforest in his home state of Mato Grosso, and is tipped to be the minister of agriculture in the new government that will take over once President Rousseff is suspended from office this week.
Environmentalists are already expressing deep concern about the government planned by vice-president Michel Temer. They note that his policy paper, A bridge to the future, which laid out his plans for government, made no mention of the environment, climate change or the Amazon rainforest
Instead the big farmers’ and ranchers’ lobby, FPA, or Parliamentary Farming Front, presented the president-to-be with a ‘positive agenda’: a list of demands which included the abolition of the ministry of land reform, the halting and revision of the demarcations of indigenous reserves and quilombos (territories inhabited by the descendants of runaway slaves), and more funds for agribusiness, which already enjoys substantial subsidies.
Besides the bill to end environmental licensing, other damaging bills are in the pipeline.
Ignoring local wishes
One, known as PEC 215, has been doing the rounds in Congress for over 15 years, but with the imminent arrival of the new, pro-farmer government it is expected soon to be voted into law. If it is, it will mean that the power to decide further demarcations of indigenous areas – nearly 400 are under consideration – will pass from the executive to the Congress.
With both houses dominated by members of the rural lobby, this is regarded as tantamount to ending demarcations. Another 1,611 quilombo areas will also be affected. The importance of the indigenous and quilombo territories is that they tend to conserve forested areas, instead of clearing them for mechanised agriculture or cattle grazing.
By law certain areas contained within each rural property (which, especially in the Amazon, are often vast) must be left wild. But another measure on the table (bill 4508/16) will allow them to be used for cattle grazing.
Others will permit mining and hydroelectric dams in indigenous areas without any need for permission from their inhabitants. Reducing controls on pesticides – Brazil is the world’s biggest consumer – is yet another target.
The government of Dilma Rousseff has in no way been a model of protection for the environment and indigenous areas, but it seems that the government of Michel Temer is much much worse.
Jan Rocha is a freelance journalist living in Brazil and is a former correspondent there for the BBC World Service and The Guardian. She now writes for Climate News Network where this article was originally published (CC BY-ND).
In the summer of 2009, on a highway in Peru known as Devil’s Curve: everything went wrong. For months, indigenous groups had protested new laws by then President Alan Garcia opening up the Amazon to deregulated logging, fossil fuels, and other extractive industries as a part of free trade agreements with the U.S. But the protests came to a bloody head on June 5th when police clashed with activists, leaving at least 32 dead and 200 injured. Continue reading “53 indigenous on trial for ‘Save the Amazon’ massacre”
Right now the lower Las Piedras is not officially protected as a national park or reserve, and we are seeing a massive influx of logging, hunting, gold mining, and drugs—which is all rapidly deteriorating the ancient forest and incredible wildlife that exists in many places there.
Watching a new video by Amazon explorer, Paul Rosolie, one feels transported into a hidden world of stalking jaguars, heavyweight tapirs, and daylight-wandering giant armadillos. This is the Amazon as one imagines it as a child: still full of wild things.
In just four weeks at a single colpa (or clay lick where mammals and birds gather) on the lower Las Piedras River, Rosolie and his team captured 30 Amazonian species on video, including seven imperiled species. However, the very spot Rosolie and his team filmed is under threat: the lower Las Piedras River is being infiltrated by loggers, miners, and farmers following the construction of the Trans-Amazon highway.Continue reading “Saving las Piedras..jaguars, tapirs, monkeys and giant armadillos”
The Free 