TOXICITY GOES LIVE…
Before there was The Writing On The Wal there was No Cleveland Walmart. And that blog was born out of the frustration with Cleveland’s soon-to-be-trounced mayor Jane Campbell’s midnight deal that had city council howling.
This morning one of the then yet-to-be-bloggers posts about how that project is coming to fruition. From Save Our Land:
Steelyard celebrates a first, as ToxiCity goes live — Interesting, long, PR-type, sanitized, Mary-Poppins-esque article today in the PD about the con perpetrated by Mitchell Schneider, our former one-term mayor Jane Campbell, and our city council on the people of the city of Cleveland.
There’s no talk here about the chicanery & obfuscation surrounding the economic-impact study, and its ultimate suppression. There’s no discussion of the environmental risk, and the fact that there is no evidence the risk was removed before everything was covered over.
There’s no hint that this is a last-stand effort for Wal-Mart, finally coming to our city to squeeze a few bucks out of the people it wouldn’t think of helping 20 years ago, clutching for straws as its own fortunes wane, with another Wal-Mart just opened within spitting distance, on top of another toxic waste dump on the edge of Garfield Heights.
Once again, Cleveland is stuck with something obsolete before it gets off the ground, thanks to the inside sneaky dealing of our politicians.
May 2005 isn’t really all that long ago, but in the blogosphere it seems forever.
The PBS show “Now” had an interview with Majora Carter an environmental activist in the south Bronx.
Here’s a link:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/304/index.html#carter
One of her targets for remediation was a local fertilizer company. One tactic was to buy stock in the firm. Her group bought 50 shares. This entitles them to present motions in the annual proxy and to speak up at the stockholder’s meeting.
I’m always surprised that more groups don’t take this route. Several pension funds have used their stock ownership to promote corporate governance issues, but other than that I haven’t seen much.
It’s worth watching the show or reading about her, she has had remarkable success in forcing NYC to be more “green” in a neighborhood mostly given up as hopeless. This is probably why she won a Macarthur award. Perhaps some other groups should study her techniques.
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