Source: The Des Moines Register
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
8-10-22
“They can only use eminent domain if they can show it’s in the public interest, but it’s not in the public interest to ruin our farms,” Angela McKean, Iowa farmer.
Ms. Angela Mckean, whose family has farmed near Estherville, Iowa, for over 100 years, is one of many farmers who, along with environmentalist groups, are opposed to CO2 pipelines that are scheduled to be built across her land. The pipelines will carry carbon dioxide, produced by most of Iowa’s 42 ethanol plants, to places like North Dakota. Carbon is a by-product of producing ethanol which, until recently has been touted as the “green” alternative to fossil fuel. In the US, ethanol is derived from corn.
It all sounds very greenish, Carbon is captured at the source, in this instance the ethanol factory, then it is transported by these pipelines to places like North Dakota where it is injected in to rock formations undergound. It keeps it out of the atmosphere proponents boast. As we have learned from fracking, gas is used in this way to flush out any oil contained herein. That CO2 will be used for this is another reason the process is opposed by environmental groups who claim it is a subsidy for the fossil fuel industry while claiming to be an alternative.
Farmers like Ms., McLean are worried that the pipelines and their construction will “…..trample on property rights and delicate agricultural drainage systems , and are ill-conceived boondoggles aimed at harvesting government tax credits, not reducing heat trapping gases.” (Wall Street Journal 8-8-22.)
Critics also point out that the ethanol industry is not the environmental answer to fossil fuel production it was once thought as more and more corn is grown to produce more ethanol. This means more fertilizer use, more land taken up in the process and more pollution. This study, claims that ethanol is 24% more carbon intensive than fossil fuel. The ethanol Industry, some claim, is touting the process as safe as a means of self-preservation in the face of these findings.
“Not only are we subsidizing ethanol, but we’re subsidizing the factory farm industry,” says Food & Water Watch’s Emma Schmit. Cheap corn is part of why factory farms can raise livestock animals cheaply, often in cramped conditions, says Schmit. “Because it’s so cheap to feed these animals.” *
That farmers, Indigenous groups and environmental organizations are joining forces against corporations and defending the land and our food supply is very positive. But it is crucial that we learn from the past and correctly grasp the nature of the world as it is today and the phase through which we are passing.
Of course we should support regulation, but surely we have grasped by now its limitations. As a worker, I would be against eliminating OSHA* but workers cannot rely on OSHA to keep us safe on the job day in day out. Unionization and our collective power is what will do that.
Perhaps the reader might recall the horrific BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico that took the lives of 11 workers. We will not clearly understand the terrible effect of that spill for many years and the guilty parties and their mass media would prefer we forget it. It was not an accident or act of god as they often claim in the face of such disasters, but a failure of the so-called free market, of capitalism. In that case, the Minerals Management Service an agency of the Interior Department that was supposed to regulate deep water drilling, left the regulation up to the industry itself.
Back then I quoted the NY Times that said the Interior Dept investigation revealed that: “Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials several years ago to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week. The report said that investigators "could not discern if any fraudulent alterations were present on these forms." Inspector General’s Inquiry Faults Regulators, NY Times 5/24/2010 My added emphasis.
Now in the present case, the opposition to the pipelines do not trust that the representatives of the corporations will tell the truth. Richard Mckean presumably a relative of Angela McKean above, tells the Guardian that “Their side says whatever they want and does whatever they want…….The carbon capture companies have said these projects will be good for ethanol growers…….They’re pushing that this is going to be the salvation.”, “That’s not true.”
The companies have threatened eminent domain which is a US law that gives the government the right to take private property or land, with fair compensation, for a public project if it is in the public’s interest to do so. There have been attempts through the courts and the IOWA state legislature to block this law and a moratorium on it failed to pass the IOWA Senate in May of this year. But the healthy distrust and disdain that the farmers, indigenous and environmental groups have for the corporate mouthpieces lying to them, should be as strong if not stronger when it comes to the legislators of the two capitalist parties that they represent. The US body politic at the national and state level is dominated by politicians representing corporate interests. As Nancy Pelosi reminded a naïve young Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member at a public meeting in 2017, the Democrats “are capitalists, that’s just the way it is.”
When it comes to the living standards of working people, the environment, small farmers and indigenous people’s rights to land they’ve lived on for millennia, profits and the rights of capital come first. Susette Kelo and her neighbors in New London Connecticut discovered that when they opposed the taking of their homes in order to give the land to Pfizer. The Eminent Domain law was used there.
We witnessed a civil war in the Native American community of Standing Rock as they and their allies opposed the Dakota Access Pipeline that was built to transport oil from the Bakken fields in North Dakota to Southern Illinois. This was a huge battle in 2016 but the forces of the state and the oil industry responded with extreme violence. Pelosi responded to the young DSA member above saying that capitalism doesn’t always meet the needs it should and went on to argue how 40 years ago there was stakeholder capitalism that took all of society in to account but by 20 years ago it became shareholder capitalism. Blah blah blah; what nonsense. How ideologically bankrupt the political representatives of capitalism are today.
It is clear we cannot regulate these forces. Didn’t Theodore Roosevelt try that over 100 years ago?
We working people, small farmers (what’s left of them) the indigenous population that is still fighting a centuries old war with the US state, our communities, our unions and all the victims of the savagery of the market must join together to fight big business and it rapacious, violent and destructive quest for profits. Nothing is sacred to this social element but profit. The heads of organized labor are absent from these struggles in the main, they refuse to mobilize the potential power of 14 million members in organized labor and refuse to link our struggles with the ongoing struggles of small farmers, environmentalists, the unorganized and all marginalized people.
We live in a dictatorship of the corporations, of capital. Five or so banks control the finance industry. Four or five corporations control food production, agriculture, and the sickness industrial complex they call health care. Housing, is dominated by private equity companies, hedge funds and so on. The largest landlords are capital management companies. These industries that dominate the means of producing the necessities of human life should be taken in to public ownership, under the management and control of workers as consumers. Not the small farmer that is almost extinct, but the giant monopolies that possess more wealth than the GDP of many countries.
We have no political voice in the US.
United direct action on the ground, in the streets and workplaces, and the need for an independent political party representing all those that earn a living through wage labor and not the profit of capital, is a crucial and an inevitable outcome of the movement needed to free us from the clutches of these forces.
We are in late stage capitalism. The reforms that were possible in the post WW2 era that provided the material basis for the misnamed American Dream are no more and will not return. Like it or not we are faced with a battle, a battle for the survival of the human race in my opinion. There is no way out but to fight and we have the numbers and the power to win that fight and change the disastrous course capitalism has chartered for us.
* The bitter fight to stop a 2,000-mile carbon pipeline: US Guardian, 7-7-22
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