Blah, blah, blah

A few pies to the face greeted Thomas Friedman - New York Times columnist - as he was preparing to give the keynote address on Earth Day before a packed auditorium at Brown University.

His talk - titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” - was about how corporate environmentalism (which would give corporations ownership of our common resources and legal rights to pollute our air and water under the facade of conservation) can restore the United States to its “natural place in the global order.”

“Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a surprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas.”

That’s a very successful pieing. You can see Friedman flustering as he visibly debated himself about whether to continue with the speech.

He decided to go back and clean up before delivering his address.

And his lecture made the reasons for the pieing — his racism and imperialism — all the more apparent.

For example, two of his talking points:

• “He used two hands to graph the price of oil against the freedom of the people in the country selling it, which he argued is an ‘inverse correlation.’”
• “We’re going to get really super-efficient at raping the natural world,” he said during the lecture, adding that clean, cheap energy can become “a license to buy a Hummer and drive it through the Amazon.”

Right, corporations are kicking families from their homes and communities, destroying the farmland and natural environment to produce pseudo-fuels known as biofuels — e.g., corn ethanol — for fucking hummers that CEOs can then drive over the ruin they caused — a purely callous final insult.

———-

The Guerrillas also threw leaflets to the audience, stating:

Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face…

* because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet

* for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.

* for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged

* For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of “green” - the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

* for his pure arrogance.
On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists — we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s “Green” as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.

One student was apprehended by police after a professor - the organizer of the event - chased her down and did what he called “a citizen’s arrest.” Another student got away. The school has not yet meted out punishment.