Why the HE** aren't people on this board up in arms over T. Boone Pickens greenwashing a plan to tear apart the lower Midwest's underground and above-ground environmnent? Plutonium Page? Jerome de Paris? Devilstower? Swarm of lesser-known contributors?
I first read about the name T. Boone Pickens here.
I was perplexed to see a headline stating that Barack Obama had met with T. Boone Pickens over a policy issue. I thought, "What's he doing? Just listening to all sides, even if he figures he won't agree? He can't possibly agree with whatever water-related issue Pickens is lobbying him about."
I was horrified, 2 days later, to see T. Boone Pickens advocating a wind energy plan called the "Pickens Plan" and realize that Barack Obama had probably met with him over wind energy, not water--that is, as an ally, not a foe.
What the heck?!
I thought to myself: "You don't give free, valuable s**t to your foes. They use their new riches to lobby other people to give stuff you don't want them to have."
And that's just what I thought at Senators & Representatives.
But the same goes for the grassroots left--I was horrified again, when I searched this page to see what people had written about Pickens, to see that a major grassroots left event outside the DNC will feature him as a speaker, promoting this plan.
Think about it. How did we end up ruining our soil for food-growing even faster than before, after we'd already found 2/3 of it was crap in the 1930's? By giving big agribusiness companies what they needed to become ginormously huge when they argued that giving them what they were asking for would make more food available for everybody.
Likewise, you'd better bet your britches that if we give T. Boone Pickens what his business needs to go from big to ginormously huge (the wind power, of course, won't make his business ginormously huge--but the water privatization rights he'll get as he lobbies Congresspeople more effectively WILL), we'll be suffering for it down the road.
Not to mention, the Pickens Plan itself--through right-of-way for wind energy transmission lines--would grant him right-of-way for a pipeline from the Aquifer to Dallas that, as far as I can tell, he currently hasn't been able to get. (The articles are hazy on what exactly has made him unable to eminent-domain the property from his property to Dallas on the basis of a water pipeline alone.)
Just as the majority of Americans have no access to food raised in healthy ways thanks to selling out to a liberal-washed line from Big Ag, if we let our policymakers sell out to a greenwashed line from Big Water, the majority of Americans will, in a decade or few from now, have no access to healthy water.
So what's with all the silence?
Riot over the Pickens Plan--don't support it!