Today is the Day of Remembrance for the Japanese American community. 81 years ago today, when I was just a boy of four, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, setting in motion the evacuation of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast and our long years of internment inside ten barbed wire prison camps.

We must never let such a thing happen again in America, and and we must strive everywhere to prevent the forced relocation and mass incarceration of innocent people. #NeverForget #NeverAgain

Good video by Robert Reich detailing how the Norfolk-Southern Train derailment/disaster was caused by or at the very least exacerbated by corporate greed. To save money, they decided not to upgrade their ancient braking systems. Then they were willing to spend millions lobbying regulators and congress to further weaken safety regulations. They made their trains longer and reduced the number of engineers on each train. How can two engineers run a train over a mile long?! They also got rid of the people who were tasked with maintaining the video systems used to catch train/axle fires. They stripped it to the bone to make is as profitable as possible and then they spend billions over the last decade on stock buybacks to further enrich their executives and shareholders rather than investing in upgrades that could have prevented this tragedy. There is no other name for it: GREED!! As a country and a planet, we can no longer tolerate greed and the damage and carnage it causes as if it is just the way things are. Being profitable, successful, sharing profits with employees and taking care of their customers and the citizens they impact, is what they should have been doing. That is sustainable, yet what they have been doing is pillaging and stripping it to the bone to squeeze every penny they can out of it to enrich themselves. We can and must do better, especially in terms of holding parties like these accountable!

How Corporate Greed Destroyed a Small Ohio Town - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3quHjtfFVy0

#GreedKills
#GreedIsAntiSocial

I have a few readers, it seems, who are offended, even scandalized, each time I suggest there could be anything at all wrong with the good 'ol USA and its holy scripture, Capitalism.

So get ready, people, I'm doin' it again!

This time I'll refer you to an article on Medium which takes the recent rail disaster in Ohio as a starting point, and from there finds three overall lessons for us to learn...

Lesson 1: Capitalists don’t care about the biosphere

Lesson 2: Capitalists don’t care about people

Lesson 3: Capitalists don’t care about the future

It's a very good piece, and I hope you'll go there and read the whole thing.
https://sacredkarailee.medium.com/human-sacrifice-and-you-capitalisms-big-ask-221f1cba0ce8

Near the end, the author has this to say...
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Clearly, the mechanism for dealing with environmental contaminants is to diffuse them into the biosphere and let nature pick up the tab. That’s why they set the chemicals on fire in East Palestine.

They’re doing the same thing with ‘forever chemicals’. These chemicals cannot be degraded by biologic processes and simply accumulate in the environment to such an extent that it’s currently unsafe to drink ordinary rainwater.

We’re at the point where nature is simply overwhelmed by our civilizational overflows and is in the process of collapsing around us as a result.

How long can our civilization withstand the corrosion brought about by unfettered capitalism? How long must we be bound to laws which do not protect us, but which sacrifice us instead in an orgy of indifference, incompetence, and inequality?

#EastPalestine #Ohio #Chemicals #Pollution #AntiCapitalism