Aaron Swartz has written a nice article giving the story of the anti-environmentalist war on Rachel Carson.
More like this
The recent death of Aaron Swartz has provoked a lot of commentary on the web so I thought I would gather some of it here. This is by no means an attempt to be comprehensive as the amount of commentary has been truly vast.
(This post supersedes the previous post listing items related to the Aaron Swartz story. That post was from January 20, 2013.)
A few comments.
Many of you already know that Aaron Swartz, an online activist, committed suicide earlier this week. I didn't know much about him, but now I've learned two things.
Tim Lambert over at Deltoid links to this article, by Aaron Swartz, about the relentless right-wing smear campaign against Rachel Carson.
Tonight I happened to hear Naomi Klein discuss her latest book "The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Captalism".
This story fits all too neatly into her thesis that corporatists (such as AFM) use the suite of think tanks to create and disseminate ideas and talking points to weaken regulations and restrictions on corporations; to make environmentalists, labor rights activists and others look positively evil.
That they succeed so easily even in the MSM like NYT and WashPo is sickening and scary.
Astonishingly, Adam Smith himself predicted as much more than 200 years ago. Discussing the disputes between workmen and masters, Smith said: " the masters [desire] to give as little as possible [in wages]. . . The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily . . . In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, page 74.)
Adam Smith knew what dirty dogs the masters (corporatists) are.
Very good overview - thanks for linking it Tim.