Karthik Subbaraj Quotes

The perpetrators of the actual bad stuff that does real and lasting harm to people, like leakage of industrial chemicals into water systems, seem to get not so much as a second glance; the bloviation from media pundits and think tanks creates false problems that waste time and energy debunking.

In some cases, it's not just about cleaning up the factories. It's about cleaning up the nearby rivers and lakes that have been tainted with heavy metals.

Even while we busily attend meetings, contribute money and perform our assigned tasks, we suspect that we may be helping to create a force that is inimical to many values we hold dear.

Too often, governments are quick to use excessive force and even pervert the course of justice to keep oil and gas flowing, forests logged, wild rivers dammed and minerals extracted. As the Global Witness study reveals, citizens are often killed, too - especially if they're poor and indigenous.

You can’t imagine what it’s like to live in one of the nine counties effected in West Virginia …what it’s like to not have any water except to flush commodes and put out fires….It has devastated this area … everything is closing … no restaurant is allowed to open…, the people are in their homes, the schools are closed. You’re not supposed to take showers and certainly not supposed to drink the tap water…. I smelled it and tasted it, and I knew something was very wrong.

Flint is to the lead issue what Three Mile Island was to nuclear power. People are stepping back and thinking, 'There still is lead in my home?'

Look, I'm not a water expert. I'm not a scientist. But I've been to Flint. I've seen what's happening. We have a third-world situation still going on in the United States of America. That's the truth.

I wish I could do more in Flint but they estimated the amount that it would cost to fix Flint and it would be a little over $1 billion and I'm definitely not a billionaire. It's extremely heartbreaking the way the city is being treated in my opinion.

Over the years, Chevron has behaved in a way that reinforces the worst stereotypes about large corporations: it has cynically avoided responsibility for its past and watched in indifference as more people become sick and die because of its failure to deal with its legacy environmental issues.

Let freedom ka-ching...Corporations do everything people do except breathe, die and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs in the Hudson River.

There are many who condemn my crew and I for taking the law into our own hands and for taking on the barons of corporate profit.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

Industries who profit by the rape of our environment see to it that legislators friendly to their attitudes are elected, and that bureaucrats of similar attitude are appointed.

In all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering

Mercury is a dangerous toxin. It needs to be reduced.

The coal industry held the title deed to the future and devoured the land, people, and culture with a Satanic appetite.

The world petroleum story is one of the most inhuman known to man: in it, elementary moral and social principles are jeered at. If powerful oil trusts no longer despoil and humiliate our country it is not because these predators have become human, but because we have won a hard-fought battle which has been going on since the beginning of the century.

This is America. We don’t disparage wealth. We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we certainly believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset – and rightfully so – are executives being rewarded for failure, especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, many of whom are having a tough time themselves.

The Western capitalist system is sunk to its neck in human problems. Despite the copious wealth that it has at its disposal, it is completely incapable of establishing social justice.

As far as the Congress is concerned, we condemn any attempts to oppress the Dalits in strongest terms. If there are parties trying to fan the OBC-Dalit divide in Tamil Nadu, we need to collectively condemn them.

It was really my experience at Standing Rock that was pretty pivotal for me because I saw how corporations were literally militarizing themselves against American citizens so that they could kind of maximize their profit margins on fossil fuels.

Too many members of Congress seem willing to give corporate polluters, many of whom happen to be major political donors, a free pass to poison the air.

I don't know how we will ever have the moral authority to deal with social welfare if we can't deal with corporate welfare.

At Standing Rock, we experienced, first-hand, people coming together in their communities and trying to use the levers of representative democracy to try and say, 'We don't want this in our community; we don't want this in our backyard,' and corporations using their monetary influence to completely erode that process.

For decades, Big Oil ravaged our environment. They knew what they were peddling was lethal, but they didn't care. They used the classical Big Tobacco playbook of denial, denial, denial, and all the while, they did everything to hook society on their lethal product.