Sunday, April 1, 2007

An Amusing Sensibility

I can't get past this paragraph in the latest battle over this Sunroad building being constructed near Montgomery Field, a commuter airport in the busy commercial district of Kearney Mesa here in San Diego. Home to Cubic and Titan and many other corporations, Sunroad has risen like a blight on the airport.

Despite FAA objections, but with the support of unnamed City planners, the building continues to reach skyward, 180 feet, alas the FAA has a limit of 160 feet, but nobody seems to care. Read the article, it gives a pretty good rundown of the machinations of business getting what they want despite governmental objections, but take especial stock of this graph and my bolded part:

Those permits were issued before the FAA was made aware of the building and declared it a hazard. City building officials have said they had no indication before the FAA's declaration that a tall building near the airport would be dangerous.

No idea at all!

The problem here is twofold, one that the City Planners are entrenched conservatives who have always favored business over the public and the community, and secondly that business is a part of the community peripherally at best. You can see that play out time after time, when Ford plays town after town against each other for the latest factory, when a Circuit City devastates their workforce with their disgusting job cut/pay cut proposal, when Blackwater tries to run roughshod over some tiny little mountain/border community in order to build a "training" facility, one that would sure make privatizing the Border patrol all that much easier.

Yes, it's as old as civilization, the dangerous overreaching always laying in wait to seize advantage and accumulate the wealth of the community for its self. Which is why we must oppose it, to restore balance and equilibrium. At all levels of society. From DC to SD to NOLA and all points in between.

4 comments:

Seven of Six said...

Duckman, My brother in law works for Blackwater in Iraq. Works the firing range. He mentions that he will probably do one more, 6 month tour. My wife's sister has her hands full with an autistic teen and another son 11. Like anyone else they are just trying to pay bills, get out of debt and provide the best medical care for their family. Expensive and no easy task.
He is right of center politically, she is left of center.

Duckman GR said...

I hope your brother-in-law finishes up and comes home whole and well in body and mind. My issue has always been at the corporate level, at the level of accountability, not at the level of people working.

I understand the roll that a Blackwater fills, I'm not so naive to think that there isn't a need for police and armies, not at all. The problem is that corporations somehow or other have managed to place themselves outside of the Constitution, and I think that the Constitution is much more than a document of law.

I think it attempts to codify some very basic principles that aren't unique to America, but that were first given a promenent place in American society.

Nobody has the right to violate my person, my security, my being. And if I lived in a vacuum that would be the end of it. But since we interact with all sorts of people operating under the same impression, conflicts arise at various levels.

So we have to put things into some sort of order to minimize those conflicts, and that's just what the Constitution does, and that is just what Corporations undo, because their fundamental principle is not being secure in one's person, but in being secure in itself under specific circumstances, being profitable, that then become superior to the more fundamental rights of people.

If my security requires me to sue a corporation for polluting my air, and that threatens their profits, then their profit, in the corps eyes, becomes superior to my fundamental right to security.

So where in the Constitution does it say that profit is a superior right over my well being? I think the courts would have to decide that, yet the corporations with their access to "profit" already, can bury me in the courts, making my rights disappear under their profit.

Does that make sense?

Seven of Six said...

I'm with you all the way Duckman.

He's using them, then getting out. Unfortunately, I worry bu$h may want them to do something more radical. Like fight Iran.

My sister in law was just out here and we talked about the situation. They don't discuss the job much, just the priorities; money, taxes, etc.

What's weird is that the friend who got him the job is now hunkering down in the mountains of Colorado, getting ready for Armeggedon. He's gone off the grid, using only cash and such. He's the smart one.
That's scary! What does he know that we don't?

Duckman GR said...

Maybe he's just seen too much, in general.

Good luck to them all.