The Take Back St Louis ballot initiative has clearly
caught the attention of Peabody Energy, along with the 36,000 people who
offered their signatures. Coming from West Virginia, I’ve seen the devastation
left in the wake of the coal industry. Water is left undrinkable, properties
unlivable, and communities in ruin. Peabody Coal has had their opportunity to dispute
this in court but instead chose to settle on gag orders and feign altruism
through a shameless campaign of green washing across the metro area. It takes a
special anti-democratic corporation to silence cancer stricken communities of
Appalachia, to commit racketeering against the Dine (Navajo), and to dispose
of disabled retirees to enhance their portfolio- all the while pretending to
care about the ecosystem at the zoo, and environmental engineering on campus at
UMSL.
Despite the shady
economic engineering and criminal practices of our local coal baron, the one member
of the mining community we should really be watching right now is our dying
canary- the arctic ice and glaciers that are quickly melting in Greenland,
Alaska, and Antarctica. The only place that global warming is being debated
anymore is in Washington DC. Perhaps if we, too, ascertained the services of
lobbyists who frequent that revolving door between corporations and the capital
we could impel our government to face the truth.
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| Local lobbyists blasting away at environmental regulations. Source: lobbyingdisclosure.house.gov |
Targeting these green house tax incentives through
the Take Back STL initiative is part of a globalized moral imperative to
preserve the future of our world as we know it. Incentivizing carbon dioxide is,
no doubt, in direct conflict with every reflex, instinct and defense mechanism
built into the human genome. Maybe reaching a CO2 level of 400 parts per
million doesn’t raise the hair on our neck like a sudden drop of barometric
pressure, but the danger is far greater than any single storm on the horizon.
In addition to the warming arctic, the world has also
witnessed the recent mass extinction of millions of species, the over-wintering of
parasites and disease carrying insects, the slowing of jet streams, and the acidification
of our oceans. Meanwhile in St Louis, we’ve seen both record floods and record
low river levels over a four month span; we’ve seen record setting heat-waves and been surrounded by thousands of square miles of crop failure.
Because we live in a city with provisionally accredited
schools and an aging infrastructure, we should look at other communities to see
what those tax breaks have spelled out for their bottom line. For most of us, if
we are robbed of our ability to generate income we go broke- which is exactly
what happened to Detroit, Michigan. The corporate myth which dictates that you
can tax-break your way to prosperity is alive and well despite 30 years of
trickle-down economics and the resulting fiscal failure that tell us otherwise.
We can no more count on Chrysler to return a favor and bail out the city of
Detroit than we can count on Peabody Energy, a corporation that is
continuing the oppressive Bennett Freeze against the Dine people, to pay their fair share
in a city which is devastated by poverty and destitution.
Our city takes its name from a 13th century
French king who was a true servant to his people. St Louisans can no longer accept
that corporate welfare is given to those who strip our Earth, incinerate our
atmosphere, corrupt our water, and operate at the intersection of black lung
and manifest destiny. This ballot initiative will enable our city to choose the
sustainable future that the people of Germany and Spain have already determined
for themselves.
