Our Leaders: Environmentalism Costs Money and Jobs

It was coal mine safety I remember they said so long ago

Which would maybe protect us just a little

But they would cost so much and take away so many jobs

to clean up the air and remove the lead from our gasoline

would be overly expensive and result in widespread unemployment

those who warn us of losing jobs and growing poor

are often those who gladly, in point of fact,

send our jobs away offshore, executing an old formula for more fat bonuses

Now they say they cannot afford to control emissions

on your favorite SUV

for clearly neither they nor we are responsible for atmospheric conditions

and requiring some sort of mileage standards

for their blimpy behemoths

is tantamount to a denial of our precious civil rights

we must let the coal-fired power plants exhaust mercury into our children’s brains

for upgrading them would provide but marginal benefit, just to a few

and would cost millions and throw many out of work

we must always remember the main point in this corporate-funded debate:

it is about jobs for the people and wood for deserving foreign consumers

not about some non-voting birds or non-interest bearing old-growth forests

let the market decide the fate of the cetaceans and the wandering albatross

bycatch regulation would make seafood more expensive and

rob the automated factory fishing fleet, portrayed in corporate publicityas the noble, independent fisherman, of its ancient livelihood

depriving the petro-chemical industry of the profits

derived from fertilizers and insecticides

under the flimsy guise of protecting farmlandmight make our factory bread more expensive and cost corporate farmers their lands

cleaning up the exhaust of those mighty diesel trucks

to possibly prevent unproven lung disease in our little children

would clearly be cost ineffective and steal more of those precious jobs

joining in the effort to reduce greenhouse emissions

could potentially damage our powerful, but sensitive, economy

and certainly would cost too much money and put many people out of work

forcing consumers to pay more for gasoline

to increase efficiency fix the roads and reduce our dependence on terrorist havens

would surely be quite expensive and bring about even more unemployment

the destruction of the panoramic beauty of the Grand Canyon

is a smaller price to pay than

the huge costs and potential job losses required to stop the massive nearbycoal-fired power plants from polluting once-pristine Western air

we must ease bureaucratic restrictions on mining, drilling and development

which are stifling entrepreneurship

thus enabling Big Oil to export our Energy Independence
and to provide employment for all our citizens who seek it

if we do not unlock petroleum resources in every corner of our great land,

following the mantra of accessibility and multiple use,

gasoline must grow ever more expensive and threaten our very way of life

making rules to curb urban and exurban sprawl created by outside investors

stifles free enterprise, denies local control and limits property rights

makes housing less affordable, thus curbing all of our opportunities for employment

permitting giant hog farms to foul our groundwater with their untreated wastes

keeps the price of pork quite low for the American consumer

and gives a few of the ex-small farmers steady jobs suffocating in the smelly mess

forcing developers to rebuild abandoned and outdated suburban shopping centers

is not nearly as cost-efficient compared to bulldozing formerly open space

and would surely raise rents for store owners and reduce their hiring rates

allowing citizens to cheaply purchase exported American drugs via Canada

could pose serious health risks and threaten the noble BigPharma research process

which could only make medications more expensive and send more jobs overseas

for at the end of another day of the greedy and self-serving

who anonymously risk their egos to grow rich in the corporate shadows

what better way to cow working consumers and government officials than

to threaten them with higher prices and the loss of their precious jobs

What We Take Away, The Children Cannot Even Miss

Take away the cooling shade beneath those great old trees

I’m sure I can find a place to rest somewhere beside the roaring highways

Take away the moonless nights when the Milky Way appears in all its glory

Maybe I can sleep beside those dumpsters out behind every convenience store

Take away the quiet that was the always natural state of things

I will drift off to the angry bellowing of monstrous trucks and childish motorcycles

Take away the open spaces where the buffalo and the Indian once roamed

Perhaps I can still walk with the great spirit thru the coal mines and across the oil fields

Take away the woody lakes where I swam in soft, clean water

I will cleanse myself in the rivers where many others wash and drink and piss and dump

Take away the little stores owned by the people from my own town

Certainly corporate wisdom will always provide for me all that I could ever need

Take away the need for kids to run all day in the woods when the leaves are turning

Let them come of age supine upon our couches, totally immersed in vapid electronics

Take away the jobs we did with our hands and with our brains

We will gamble away our futures, high on homemade or prescription drugs

Take away our fathers off to jail and let our mothers work the streets high on Crank

We can find our own way alone until Jesus introduces us to a new family, in prison

Take away the smell of moist soil and thick sweet grass

I will breathe deeply of the fumes coming off the thousand passing vehicles per hour

Take away the songbirds that often woke me on those childhood summer mornings

Let our children wake to the sounds of airplanes and angry traffic

Take away the merciful thunderstorms that cooled us as we worked hot summer afternoons

I can stay inside, in dank and mold-ridden, fully air-conditioned comfort

Take away that wondrous smell of a healthy forest after a generous rain

Let me partake in the odor of stale urine as I walk dark alleys filled with trash

Take away the families living on the same farm for many generations

We will surely prosper with ConAgra and Monsanto acting as stewards of our bountiful lands

Take away the trails we took up through the beech trees behind the lake

Put up million dollar ‘cottages’ for colonies of loudly-vapid salesmen from far off cities

Take away the glaciers that stored our water high up on Andean and Himalayan peaks

Bring the malaria and dengue fever far north so that we all may share

Take away the good for sleeping quiet of the middle of the night

Get drunk and loud and leave butts and broken bottles strewn upon the ground a 2AM

Take away the roadside stands selling tomatoes, watermelons and peanuts

Bring in the food from soulless factories in dirty semis roaring down the rundown interstates

Take away the sleepy pre-dawn hour with its birds and growing colors

Turn on bright lights and television and drive away sipping coffee, prattling on your phone

Take away the leopard frogs we could hear in every marsh and pond

Not to worry, whatever killed them off probably won’t bother our kids at all

Take away the children happily riding bicycles to their schools

Let paranoid mommies secure them in SUVs idling obesely in long lines at the bus stops

Take away those costly engineers and instead breed salesman and accountants

We can find our truth and guidance in simplified versions of a modern bible

Take away our veneration of education, determination and hard work

The illiterates can all play basketball, do hip-hop or star in the latest, short-lived extreme sport

Take away any dignity and all sense of purpose from our once-revered elders

We can all eventually totter off to drugged care by immigrants, mumbling incoherently to ourselves

Take away the long and killing, cleansing frosts that we knew from cold winters past

We’ll have more time for outdoor wreckreation, absorbing carcinogenic UV rays

Take away the language that bound us together from coast to coast and north to south

I will fear and mistrust those l aughing among us whom I cannot understand

Take away the habitat which sustains our beloved charismatic mega-fauna

Let the peasants squat in the remaining dirt, carrying dirty water and cooking out of cans

Take away our privacy, give us all IDs and secretly spy on the kids library internet

Inflate the insane terrorists and whip up a righteous fear to keep us all in line

Take away the ancient spring time clock of the birds and bugs and trees

The rats, flies, roaches, cats, dogs and goats will prosper - For a while…

Take away any part of the landscape from which you might wring a quick and dirty buck

We can camp among the invasive species as they slowly reclaim our mindless waste

Take away the dignity everyone should obtain from their life’s work

Reduce us all to a never-ending search for the cheapest, quick and dirty labor solutions

Take away the haunting memory of a loon’s cry on a northern lake

Tumble a thousand advertising images together incessantly in our minds

Take away the things we learned staring for hours out slow-moving open car windows

Give us DVDs with sweet and salty grab-its in our $50k SUVs, just like we have at home

Take away the father I never knew from my teenage, bastard mother

I will take my first term in jail to perfect my craft, as soon as I come of legal age

Take away the family doctor we could afford with our own checkbooks

Let us die pointlessly in our own wastes of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and hypertension

Take away the home-cooked meals we shared every night, gathered with our families

We can grab something supersized on the way, stuff it down in the car and toss the waste

Take away the animals from which the native people drew their spirits

They can find their paths to modular welfare homes in financed pickups they cannot afford

Take away the vision of the new moon and a million stars in the night

We can wonder at the beauty of all the city lights that destroy our natural rhythms

Take away the roadless places from which we drew comfort at our jobs

We can still envision the West as it was…watching those old cowboy movies

Take away my need to think for myself and nourish me with sound bites

I will continue to believe in that wondrous and eternal Morning in America

Take away the Spring floods and build backlit fountains at desert gambling casinos

Bury me in the once good silt gone toxic that now threatens your magnificent dams

Take away the so-called frozen wastes that we once called the Arctic

The Inuit can work in tourism, development and, maybe e-commerce customer support

Take away the mighty and warm-blooded giant bluefin tuna

Let them make their sushi from muddy pond carp, filthy tilapia and poisoned farmed catfish

Take away the incredible biodiversity we never had time to even catalog

Let China and India take great pride in competing to be the world’s most populous lands

Take away these things very slowly and it will not be so very painful

Take away all these things and those who might follow us will not be able to miss them

So We Chose To Be Like This?

So we save the jobs, cut the trees and extinguish the spotted owls

When the old growth is all cut and exported what jobs then remain

If we saved the trees and retrained a few lumberjacks right now

Maybe there would be some tourist jobs in the old growth along with the owls

So we spend a couple trillion to secure democracy and oil in the middle east

When the fields are tapped and sent to China what will Big Oil then provide us?

If we spent a quarter of that money to develop energy independence

Maybe we could abandon the Sheiks and Imams to the biting flies of their stinking desert

So we tithe without question a half a trillion every year to the god of war

Why then can’t we prevail against their homemade IEDs and crude truck bombs?

If we took three quarters of that budget for education, infrastructure, health and the old

Maybe we would actually be ready to meet any real challenger who might arise

So we go ahead and tap our arctic wilderness for a small petroleum reserve

When we consume all of what little there is today, it’s just gone forever

If we simply waited while technology got better at doing more with less

Possibly they could drill cleaner and safer sometime when we really need it

So we spend more every year on prisons for petty minority drug users and hookers

What value flows to society for the costs of their miserable upkeep

If we legalized and regulated, taxed and collected fees instead

we might even spend more on schools and put the pimps and pushers out of business

So we open up the forests to entrepreneurs and activities of any stripe

When it’s all built out, what then will we turn our holy bulldozer crusade against?

If we preserve what rightfully belongs to generations yet to come

Maybe they can tap potentials that we have never even dreamed of

So we conglomerate and merge and automate and globalize to the limit

When every worker toils for pennies, who then can afford the flood of goods?

If we lower the human population and use resources more efficiently

Maybe we won’t all have be reduced to a miserable common denominator

So we open a Wal*Mart close to everyone in this exceptionist land of ours

Local businesses are buried beneath their semis stuffed with imports

If we have to pay a little more than for their asian knockoffs and cheapened generics

Perhaps our towns will retain a bit of diversity and a few real jobs

So we ban sex education, contraception, abortion and preach solemnly of abstinence

Since our children learn so very little as it is, why would that ever work?

If we implanted contraceptives in all those first-time unwed mothers and irresponsible dads

Maybe we could end the multi-generational cycle of babies born on welfare

So we embrace religion in government and let them interpret our Father’s intent

Are we more righteous than those who rule thru the violent twisting of the Koran?

If we leave religion out of both government and foreign policy

Maybe we could live more peacefully with those we will truly never understand

So we made the jobs so bad that we wont take them but those despicable illegales will

How can we stop them breeding and staying and bringing in their friends and families?

If we make every job simply decent, then none would remain beneath us

Maybe we could retain our own standard of living, our language and our traditions

So we plunge bravely on under the aegis of faceless corporate supply side economics

Creating an angry, armed mob of outsourced techies and the proudly-ignorant poor

Perhaps formulaic slash and burn capitalism is not really the way to a free market utopia

Possibly there’s a steady-state economy in which overpaid sociopathic CEOs have no place

So they continue reducing issues to clever sound bites and catchy slogans

That way our political leaders on either side have no need of an educated population

If we send the spin doctors back to hyping products instead of selling the issues like dish soap

our brave leaders would have to learn to speak to us for themselves

so we wait until the price of oil makes it too expensive to drive to work

then they tell us it’s just a simple matter of consumer supply and our demand

they could see the supply was running low but demand just kept on increasing

but they never did a thing and now their powerful petro-donors reap a fortune

so we closed all the factories and outsourced all the engineering overseas

put the customer support in India and got all the latest numbers on computer

we invested only in the marketing and sales machines here at headquarters

but now the buyers realize our wondrous brand is simply more cheapass chinese shit

so we keep repeating that ours is The Finest Healthcare System In The World

but the admin costs, infant mortality and life expectancies don’t bear it out at all

though the money we spend tops everybody but we actually cure less but pay far more

and 50 million have the right to choose any ER they wish for their family healthcare

so we let em churn worthless home loans OKd just by greedy salesmen

and gave em cash back at closing to re-supply their credit cards

now we see they’re too big to fail so we must bail them out

once again the wisdom of unregulated free market solutions is revealed

so we react only when issues turn to crises but population keeps on increasing

muddling through with the quick and dirty, blind luck and the just for now

mortgaging the planet’s future behind winking smirks and infallible personal saviors

until it’s too expensive, widespread and complicated for us to do anything at all...

A Manifest Destiny...Of Mass Destruction

There were these great hardwood and evergreen forests standing undisturbed for millennia

We invented clear-cutting efficiency and the gasoline-powered chain saw

The land we found was full of life and a thousand kind of plants

We created lawns of over-watered, chemically treated, heavily fertilized bluegrass

The rivers teemed with spawning salmon on both wild and lonely coasts

We built dams and cut down the trees that sheltered their tiny fry, and they disappeared

The buffalo, grizzly, wolf and elk roamed the plains in uncounted numbers

We devised agribusiness to monocrop and to hold our livestock as deathcamp prisoners

The land held great wealth in silver, gold, oil, iron and coal

We gave the greedy and shortsighted free rein to gouge it out and walk away for 7 cents an acre

Snow fell white and pure and lay undisturbed all Winter in the mountain valleys

We turned it black with exhausts and the oil spilled on our great roads

Aquifers deep within the earth stored up clean water for a million years

We pumped it out in a heartbeat to irrigate subsidized crops for cows & snack foods

Sometimes the smoke from great unchecked fires blanketed the land for weeks

Now every day we belch out more toxic, climate-changing gases in unimaginable volumes

Songbirds in their millions greeted each and all the spring mornings

There are many now who have never heard them and so, cannot ever miss them

The skies were darkened by flights of uncountable passenger pigeons over billions of acres

We wiped out these so-called free goods as a cheap and easy to obtain food source

Men lived in tiny bands whose small household messes soon healed over as they moved on

Now billions squat in their own wastes under thick, toxic clouds of their own making

A group could strike out on its own to lands where no one had ever lived

We installed roads leading to identical strip malls from sea to shining sea

Every spring the gentle showers would slowly wake the land from a long winter

During such rains now, a bolus of coal-fired acid rain poisons the lakes and stunts the trees

A myriad of frogs croaked from a million scattered wetland patches

Today a tiny fraction still linger, many sporting exotic deformations

Grasses, flowers, field mice and hawks lived in many meadows

Weeds, broken glass, rats and cockroaches share empty lots with drunks, prostitutes & addicts

The great cats padded along in their mystical silence throughout the world

Now we require the use of the entire habitat that once sustained them

The cetaceans with their huge brains flourished in the oceans for a million years

Fifty thousand dolphins are sacrificed as our factory fishing bycatch, every season

Orangutans spent untold generations adapting to their remote jungle habitat

Today we just cut the trees down right out from underneath them in their so-called preserves

In the past the wolves would howl and the loons would cry out in the stillness

Now we roar on by in our loud trucks with 150 decibel music blasting, tossing out burger wrappers

It used to be that our numbers made sense in terms of what the earth could bear

Now the researchers say our population will stabilize at around 10-12 billion immortal souls

Every parent could believe his child’s life might be better than those who came before

More and more grow up condemned to mine garbage and carry water in dirty plastic buckets

The sun was cool in spring and one could count upon a dark freezeup every November

Now each year is right up among the very hottest that man has ever witnessed, but we don’t care

There was a time before plastics when we already had electricity and running water

Today there are electronic chips implanted in our beloved pets and spyware on our phones

Just a little while ago my own grandmother rode in a horse-drawn wagon

Now you can make a reservation to travel as a tourist into space

As children we rode three across hating the back seat of that hot old sedan

Now our kids must have varied snacks, video games, DVDs and personal air conditioning

Man witnessed the parade of the charismatic late Pleistocene megafauna

Now we are told that we are responsible for the latest in earth’s great mass extinctions

The lakes were filled with fish and there was always a chance of hooking an even bigger one

The government now warns against their consumption due to the pollution of our waters

The great eastern forest stretched from New York to Chicago

Now the trees and wildlife survive there merely at our decorative pleasure

Man and the bonobo evolved together sharing 98% of their DNA and homelands

Today we eat them even as we destroy their remaining jungle habitat

Giant bluefin tuna raced with warm blood throughout the worlds oceans

Now, even as we catch the last of them, their market price just keeps on going up

Old growth forests sheltered complete ecosystems for ten thousand years

Our technology replaced them with sterile single species tree farms

Galileo was absolved by the church for his heretical notions regarding the universe

Our evangelical zealots engage in a religious debate over evolution, without science

Oral traditions and rights of passage guided young men to adulthood in the tribe

Our fatherless youth must invent a directionless but violent culture on their own

Children learned the phases of the moon, the constellations and the useful plants

Now they clamor for fast food and the latest in couch-based electronic entertainment

Just yesterday one-income families with children could afford a small summer cottage

At this time speculators from far-away cities have driven up all the prices

In the old days family farms dotted the plains for hundreds of miles

Modern agribusiness has consolidated its holdings for industrial efficiency

We paddled the lakes in rowboats and canoes, murmuring and laughing

Now jetskis and speedboats whine and smoke from late morning right through the long twilights

Previously there existed a social contract between workers and their company

Today the corporation discards people as quickly as their useless and polluting byproducts

In the past the New World was filled with natural mysteries and untapped potential

We have successfully built an unbroken network of convenience stores and fast food outlets

The old folks helped stitch the children into the tapestry of their families

Now the elderly are seen as useless, drooling fools to be ignored, swindled and locked up

We minded our own business until called upon in times of great world crises

We protect our freedom and democracy thru preemptively defensive wars of liberation

Left alone, rivers meandered, sheltered fish, birds and frogs and left rich farming sediment

Now channelized, they provide no shelter for anything but trash and their runoff fouls the sea

The grasses, swamps and woodlands caught and held the precious rainwater

Acres of concrete now drain their oily burdens straight into vile but pathetic creeks

Every small town had its own hardware, grocery, pharmacy and feed stores

Merged and downsized corporations provide for our every modern need, straight from China

Bakers, butchers and small marketplace vendors were part of our everyday lives

Super stores stock shrink-wrapped factory feedlot steaks shipped inside dirty semi-trailers

Polar bears and seals shared the dance of life for thousands of generations

As we melt the ice, the bears must disappear right along with their prey

Tigers stalked for eons in the shadows of the volcanoes on the cold Kamchatka peninsula

The last of their penises are downed in expensive oriental soups as a purported aphrodisiac

Humans thrived while covered by a multiplicity of microfauna

Now household sanitizers speed the evolution of disease organisms & autoimmune disorders

For uncounted lifetimes worms, bacteria, plant detritus and silt tended to the soil

Pesticides, fertilizers, pivot sprinklers and massive machinery are now its uncaring stewards

For eons the earth and its atmosphere danced out their many graceful, interlocking cycles

In a hundred years we have altered the CO2 balance, along with the entire climate

Men took creatures as guiding spirits and thanked them for their sacrifices

We assume a dominion which permits atrocities on any and all animals, with our god’s blessing

In a delicate choreograph, chicks hatched just as their insect food appeared

With spring arriving earlier every year, the insects have gone and baby birds must starve

For centuries tropical mountain glaciers have served as natural reservoirs for the people below

With their melting people will go thirsty during the long and hot dry seasons

Coral reefs sheltered ecosystems for millions of underwater generations

Dynamite, cyanide, high temperature and UV rays have devastated them

Fetid swamps were known to reek with highly poisonous, miasmatic vapors

The cities built in their drained places fill infants brains with mercury and lead

Man was viewed as the measure of all things during the Age of Reason

We now rely upon faith-based initiatives to light our paranoid and superstitious way

Astronomers have mapped the universe and can see 14 billion years into the past

11% of our population cannot find our country on a globe of the earth

Our forefathers were amazed at the teeming schools of cod in the Atlantic

experts wonder if there yet remains even a viable breeding population

The mighty Colorado crossed the desert and fertilized the diversity of its delta

Now it is sucked dry in the desert, leaving behind only salt, chemicals and fertilizer

The Grand Canyon offered awe-inspiring, crystal clear, panoramic vistas

Nearby coal-fired generation plants now obscure the view on a quite regular basis

For centuries the Anasazi lived in cliff dwellings and grew enough food to live

Now the water is all spoken for and the great droughts that doomed them have returned for us

The Kwakiutl people competed to give away more than their neighbors at their potlatches

Our government subsidies the poor, enabling them to care for the needs of the rich for very little

The orcas and cetaceans have longer histories and brains as large as our own

Studies have shown that we have contaminated their blubber and their milk with our toxics

The Plains Indians were marvelously transformed all too briefly by Spanish horses

Electricity, running hot water and the automobile have also only briefly been part of our lives

We conquered, tamed, surveyed, cleared, settled and developed the New World

But, we lecture the Third World on their sacred duty to preserve their precious natural heritage

The press as the fifth estate was admired for its ever-vigilant role in democracy

The government and the press now produce ‘news’ stories that are shown without attribution

Scientists spoke slowly and carefully, always admitting to a measured uncertainty

Now pundits urge a small leap of faith to the literal truth of scripture and their fake news

We created the worlds first national park, the clean air act and banned DDT

We disavow global warming, drill in all wilderness areas and ignore coal-fired mercury and lead

30 million or 99% of native peoples perished in a brave conquest of the Americas

Yet all of our recrimination is targeted at shaming the Europeans over the Holocaust

Great storms came in off the pacific for millennia and gentle trade winds kissed the Caribbean

Presently, smog from china and sandstorms off Africa sullies their cars and lungs

Over thousands of generations the indigenous discovered medicinal plants

Big Pharma patents these as profitable drugs and keeps all the profits as the forests disappear

During a process of millions of years organic material was converted into fossil fuels

Every day we litter a blizzard of petroleum-based packaging and walk away without a thought

The bible provides rich examples of a broad and humane philosophical wisdom

We pick and choose our quotes to justify our venal and self-serving philosophy

A myriad of species from mammals to bacteria intertwined in the wondrous web of life

A leveraged corporate oligarchy of producers and suppliers greedily noses us all into poverty

Humans spoke with thousands of languages each supporting a different culture

Advertisers and politicians use Spanish as a sales tool and we all text in a pidgin English

Get Rich Quick...Destroy The Future

Help me make sense of this thing called progress that you say we are making

Take me with you as you run all the oh-so complex numbers of your pathetic spreadsheets

I want to fully experience the passion of your flag-waving, gun-toting workers

Let me feel their heartfelt patriotism and deep pride in bulldozing one more unprofitable meadow

Explain how the same smash and grab formula works identically from coast to coast

Tell me of your vision for a future…beyond this next development

Help me understand why your plans always seem aimed at producing more filthy gridlock

How is getting rich quick and getting out fast yielding our planet a sustainable future?

Give me the wonder drug that removes this dystopian vision from my mind

Do you really prefer cheap modular strip malls, concrete and asphalt to trees and farms?

How does it feel to replace a climax forest with low-bid, manufactured housing?

Help me understand why building cheaper and faster really makes things better for us all

If you really are leaders why do you piously intone that you only give the people what they want?

How did the pursuit of happiness twist into this wanton, greedy, institutionalized devastation?

How good does it feel buy their land after your speculation has jacked up the property taxes?

You claim to lead us on, so please just stop for a moment...and tell us where are we going

Help me understand the master plan behind your next quarterly profit projection

Help us going forward as we try to build upon your deconstructionist legacy

Why do the young feel empty and alienated, suffocating in your sterile planned communities?

How can a lasting society be founded upon short-term, individual blind greed?

Paint me the bigger picture that I might draw comfort from your self-professed competence

Show me it’s not just about your fragile ego and the striking of meaningless Big Deals

Explain how God created man apart to set us upon the world like starving mad dogs

Why must your expensive, over-fertilized landscapes look so very artificial?

Rationalize and defend this hideous half-urban, fake-rural sprawl

Why must we totally shatter balanced ecosystems just to build places to live?

Show us the bright and lasting vision behind each one of your fabulous but disposable works

Help me understand the pride you feel in your ever-increasing, cancer-like metastization

Outline the moral principles underpinning a life given over to real estate speculation

Prove that pursuing greed auto-magically brings a happiness that is worth other’s dying for

Show me how it’s always morning in America in your vision of an ever brighter future

Tell of your boyish pride in ordering about the huge trucks, mighty bulldozers and dirty men

Don’t you just pave the way for Wal*Mart and McDonald’s to finish the evisceration?

Then, you make even more money selling off the failing small family businesses

When there’s nowhere left to build must they all become ‘Sales Associates’?

Say again how very much you love this place even as yet more ground is broken for your profits

Where are you as the filthy illiterates you hire are leveling the young boys forts?

Isn’t Las Vegas actually the finest example of your true beliefs and your real legacy?

You gushily pimp natural beauty but ignore the noise and traffic of the sprawl you create

Explain how irresponsible quick money serves your True Conservative vision of a proper society

Why must the same tacky shit be ‘Coming Soon’ to every brand new street corner?

Help me to see myself in this mirror which you have shattered all over the broken ground

How do you sell off ancient wetlands destroyed forever in a month with a bright smile?

Are you demonstrating your deep wisdom with these new clothes and cosmetic surgery?

Why must you look out over endless roofs to newly-cleared prairie and salivate with anticipation?

Describe how your grasping avarice is simultaneously patriotic, religious and fulfilling

Do you feel safe hiding behind the perverted gospel of man’s greedy dominion over the earth?

Tell of your earnest but frustrating efforts to find dependable and cheap but illegal labor

Teach me how you routinely fail to mention known deal-breaking issues to prospective buyers

Grant me the unquestioning blind faith in your own avarice that fuels your febrile industry

Show me how you plead ignorance and forget to get back to me on important questions

Bring me up to speed on the new extra charges presented straight-faced at the hurried closings

Tell me about the deserved survival of the greediest and smarmiest and the most ruthless

Write down all the details so that those to come can marvel at your wisdom...and avoid it

Make the simple case again for jobs and money overriding their supporting natural systems

Create the soothing street names that support the mirage of our instant family values

Get your indoor tan, watch your diet and keep your tinted windows all the way up

Ignore the oily burden that your new parking lots flush into the streams you had channelized

May you find the real meaning to all your deals, as you lay dying in your own wastes

Yes, and may they bulldoze your graves, as well, making way for more new convenience stores

Demean, Diminish, Disgrace, Dishonor

Not to be confused with Reusing, Refurbishing, Repurposing, Recycling

Subverting simple will to faith with the worn-out fictions of intolerant religions

Casually exterminating the bluefin tuna, albatross, dolphin, cod and salmon as mere bycatch

Pumping the sales of cheap imports via artificial guilt created solely for phony merchant holidays

Posting warning signs but not cleaning up the poisoned waters of our lakes and rivers

Letting advertising and entertainment set a totally vapid national agenda

Shaking our heads without taking meaningful action as each new genocide unfolds

Forever fighting wasteful wars and urging our inexperienced youth on to a tragically-false glory

Watching fresh water dwindle and being horribly polluted while letting our population swell

Witnessing our casual gases ending snowfall and spreading hot deserts to our doors

Stockpiling chemical and bio-weapons in case our many nukes are not quite enough

Plowing under fertile farmland for cheap strip malls, offices and ‘convenience stores’

Going it fumblingly alone in ill-conceived, immoral wars with no plan for the peace

Finding false virtue in the long hours but never asking about the meaning in the work

Spending more on building prisons than on maintaining our children’s schools

Wiping out the bears and tigers for some horrid oriental impotence fantasy

Destroying the orangutan’s habitat to ship ancient hardwoods off to Japan forever

Finding our Bonobo brethren in the local meat markets, shot with AK-47s

Discovering lots of our dioxins and PCBs in the rich milk of mother seals

Squabbling over destroying the 2% of old-growth forest that has somehow escaped us

Allowing coal-fired mercury and diesel emissions to poison the infants in mother’s wombs

Wasting money and alienating societies with a ridiculous and failed war on drugs

Nurturing the tragedies of tobacco, alcohol and gambling to retain their tax revenues

Furthering ignorance by portraying creationism as a scientific theory & climate change as bunk

Spending so goddamn much public time on the very private issue of abortion

Letting teenaged grand-daughters of under-aged mothers raise more babies all alone

Cutting every social program but preserving generous tax cuts for the rich

Wiping out the last amazon aborigines through slash and burn by the poor from city slums

Erecting trophy homes while the poor subsist on castoffs and live under cardboard

Allowing faceless and amoral global corporations to dictate domestic and foreign policy for profit

Perpetually stalling socio-environmental progress with the same phony jobs and money mantra

Watching corporate chains put an end to small business by abusing Chinese workers

Outsourcing CEOs signing off on 14 hour peasant work days at poverty wages and calling it progress

Taking pride in corporate agriculture and ignoring its subsidized price fixing

Coating our fields with poisons, fertilizers and fossil water while abusing disposable illegal labor

Fighting emission and fuel regulations instead of engineering better vehicles

Cynically labeling energy efficiency and recycling as small virtues of dubious social value

Backing self-enriching dictators if they allow multinationals to drain off their resources

Clucking self-righteously at grinding poverty which we view as ordained by our own one true god

Allowing immigrants to Balkanize us by providing their old languages in our ads and government

Estranging ourselves from our European brethren and ancestors, to our own great loss

Enriching fracking petro-giants as supplies dwindle without seeking out alternatives

Being required to piously intoning “God Bless America” after every carefully scripted speech

Finding childish pleasure in ATVs, Jet Skis, Snowmobiles and loud truck mufflers

Scoffing with macho disdain at geeks who read, write, solve and contemplate

Actually feeling real anticipation over a media sports event or some reality tv show finale

Twisting tired and worn-out biblical fairy tales into a self-serving, literal truth

Worshiping a system that raises prices with scarcity and thus encourages extinctions & shortages

Selling the fantasy that a negative savings rate allows you to continue to live beyond your means

Regurgitating sound bytes instead of considering issues for ourselves

Preaching that the “jury is still out” on global warming as well as evolution

Feeding cattle grain they cannot digest while people starve and farmland disappears

Not even realizing the vast unsustainablity of our self-destructive lifestyle

India pridefully becoming the most populous nation even when most live like dirty urban rodents

Inflating profits, lying to investors, stealing fortunes and then having folksy memoirs created

Not speaking up at all as the country plunges blindly into a dark night of ignorance and poverty

Lacking any awareness of the worldwide die-off of say, the amphibians and songbirds

Convincing deadended peasants to crusade by pitting one imaginary spiteful god against another

Institutionalizing constant and expensive warfare instead of actually seeking to eliminate it

Glorifying the conquest, subjugation, extermination & destruction of the New World

Vilifying only the losers of every war for their hideous crimes against humanity

Exporting intellectual jobs while pricing higher education out of reach

Gutting pristine mountain habitat for the benefit of the recreation & tourist industries

Attaching narrow-minded evangelical moral strictures on aid to people of faraway cultures

Passing bans on drug re-importation at lower prices over phony, soundbite safety issues

Not creating a moon landing effort for clean energy independence but bailing out the venal bankers

Disabusing world accord via mouthing the transparently stupid lies of industry donors

Melting tropical glacial water reservoirs without the slightest care or regret

Extending the deserts and letting the good topsoil blow across the emptied seas

Labeling any who criticize our doctrines as unpatriotic cowards who undermine our efforts

Spending more on so-called ‘defense’ than the rest of the world combined

Falsely portraying a greedy bulldoze and unplanned sprawl ethic as healthy economic progress

Somehow honoring as patriotic those imported plastic flag decals that adorn our obese vehicles

Allowing amoral agribusiness giants to treat gentle domesticated lifeforms as factory raw materials

Praising free elections in districts illegally re-drawn to ensure your own perpetual control

CEOs defaulting on pension plans and thus earning fat bonuses from the temporary stock rise

Workers expecting more for doing less every year and learning nothing new on their own time

Guiltlessly sticking to bad decisions made in private talks with our personal saviors

Settling issues through simply remaining doggedly on the scripted message of our donors

Explaining mass extinctions and global warming as simple geologic-scale variations

Pushing to get the government out of the so-called ‘business of habitat preservation’

Trusting that billions of selfish, isolated decisions will somehow result in an optimal world

Gutting the land, poisoning the water and selling off resources just to get rich quickly

Violating personal liberties freely on the basis of terrorism and national security

Destroying a society and then telling its people that it’s now their problem to solve

Exporting all kinds of weapons and raw materials but no factory goods

Replacing a heritage of wide open spaces with coast-to-coast, cloned corporate strip malls

Remaining silent, getting by, being comfortable and not making waves

Forgoing savings, abandoning our parents and drugging our children

Calling endless angry repetition of fictional corporate sound bites a reasoned debate

Leaving a lesser world in the filthy wake of our short-sighted and greedy, so-called progress

A Common Sense Conservative Prayer

Help us to sleep well that we may pursue our greed with all our strength, in thy name

Bless that which favors our agenda over attempts we deem to curb our selfish freedom

Allow us to politically debate scientific evidence to advance profit-based corporate beliefs

Keep the underclass engaged with alcohol, tobacco, opiates, Meth, gambling and TV

Let us shoulder our exceptionism and export our culture and beliefs to the rest of the world

Free us from these unconstitutional restrictions on our speculatively-leveraged private property

Give us the strength to subdivide and bulldoze in the name of god and country

Bind us with the belief that blind greed always leads unerringly to a brighter future

Help us always find the cheapest and quickest way to profit and bear no future responsibility

Invite them to get the hell out if they do not like things the way they are here

Let us chant our mantra of rigged free trade in cheap imports and outsourced careers

Keep us steady on the course of hyper-consumption for its own holy sake

Find moral strength from sloganeering and mental nutrition in regurgitated sound bites

Realize for us the foolish paralysis which comes from thinking too deeply

Help us enrich society, one identical suburb and shoddy strip mall at a time

Absolve us with the belief that we cannot make any real difference, in any case

Give us gas for our giant, inefficient vehicles and we will not ask its source

Grant us zoning variances that we may further our Ponzi development schemes

Assist us in selling thy beauty even while our bulldozers roar in the background

Help us paint our opposition as weak, tired, whining yet fanatical squishes

Permit our CEOS to gate themselves safely away from that which they have created

Ensure that the pursuit of material goods is the only path marketed to self-actualization

May we overcome fuzzy notions of some sustaining biosphere for it threatens all our progress

Convince the unbelievers that golf courses are wondrous natural wetland sanctuaries

Spin as thy mysterious wisdom the fostering of poverty and ignorance across many generations

Help us to stay on message and to tightly control the flow of our clever propaganda

Assist us in inflaming hatred of the evil socialists who still sinfully oppose us

Give us the strength to ignore world opinion by granting us a blind righteousness

Lead us in our holy struggle against those hypnotized by an infidel religious fanaticism

Help us spread democracy even as we crown a comically-implausible God our own making

Allow us to ignore malaria, AIDS, cholera and dengue fever in the poor

And let us mostly research profitable cures for such as impotence, obesity, wrinkles and stress

Give us the wisdom never to question the suffering you allow us to cause on a daily basis

May we accept as your inscrutable will the natural disasters that devastate heathens everywhere

Remind us of our chosen status that we might ignore the plights of others without remorse

Let us know that God is love as we go forth with a curse on our lips and weapons in hand

Reveal to us after personal consultation in prayer, decisions that reflect thy will on policy issues

Grant us thy certainty such that we shall never need admit of any mistakes

Give us a bogeyman that we might continue scaring the people and enriching the arms peddlers

Help us slash entitlements to pay for tax cuts to the rich as well as to increase arms spending

Make us believe in our right to treat animals as mere units of factory raw material

Engender in us a smirking scorn for such silly issues as sustainability and habitat destruction

Bring us faith against global warming scams and calming beliefs about toxic pollution hoaxes

Reward us with great bonuses for eliminating jobs, benefits and pensions via

Let us cast off proposed regulations by intoning of their terrible costs in jobs and money

Take the future in thy hands that we may grab all that we can right now

Give us our daily factory white bread by the dirty truckload in throwaway plastic

Load us up with caffeine and sugar as we seek your everlasting peace

Fill us with desire for new automobiles and real estate speculation

Help us to spend far more than we will ever earn, without any guilt whatsoever

Entrust our parents to uncaring temp workers in corporate-owned nursing homes

Commit our children to day care with diseased illegales, even before they can speak

Blind us to the mass extinction we are bringing down all around and upon ourselves

Remove the dirty waters and the filthy air from any list of important issues

Grant us a comforting, rock-solid faith on metaphysical matters it unnerves us to consider

Help us relax using social media displacement activities right on through our own passing

Keep us so very busy that a sideways glance at a sunset is hardly noticed and quickly forgotten

Build a real scorn for the ancient history that took place all of 10 to 15 years ago

Nurture our pride in the ignorance of the technologies which we so depend on

Let us take for granted the hot water, lights and warmth of our homes

Stop us from ever questioning the madness of runaway military spending

Assist us in calling for better education while profitably outsourcing the jobs of the educated

Keep us calm, knowing you make the decisions and that our fate is simply your will

Grant us the right to belittle rigorous science using dumbed-down theology and corpro donations

Praise family values while allowing generations to grow up with ignorant mothers and no fathers

Blind us to our own hypocrisy that we may trumpet our beliefs free of guilt

Help them to realize that we alone are your chosen people, created in your image

Show us how to leap in faith over frightening cosmic mysteries to safe scriptural regulations

Let us expect our politicians to talk like preachers and never actually answer real questions

Satisfy us with a proud illiteracy and let us call simple arithmetic ‘doing the math’

Steer us away from genetic research and towards mandatory christian prayer in our schools

Bring back the sanctity of marriage and let thy word, as we interpret it, guide the courts

Fill us with the absolutely overriding importance of abortion as a public policy issue

Help us to cast conservation as a rather silly and unimportant virtue, of dubious value

Foster our soulful distinction from all other animals and thusly, our dominion over the earth

Give us the ability to ridicule that which we do not agree with or simply do not understand

Keep our mouths, eyes and ears shut until it makes no difference any more

Teach us to take refuge in mind-numbing, expensive and time-wasting wreckreation

Make us view Hitler as evil but our extinguishing 30 million Indians as our sacred Manifest Destiny

Help us build expensive prisons rather than taxing and regulating soft drugs

Let us spend billions on homeland security but be unable to evacuate cities from disasters

Content our children with prescription drugs, fatty foods and video games

Ensure that stock buybacks temporarily increase our stock price which yields us more fat bonuses

Guide us in extinguishing species by guaranteeing that their price increases with their scarcity

Fill us with a disdainful pride in the knowledge that we humans alone possess everlasting souls

Help us rip off original ideas to turn into mass marketing schemes for our corporate profits

Preserve the sanctity of intellectual property but only for we, the non-producing middlemen

Let us scoff at sustainable economic practices and greedily pile immense debt upon the future

Give us rich oil fields but not the vision to seek profitable, sustainable alternatives

Permit us to cast our own greedy desires as simply one small part of your slowly-revealed plan