I am grateful to Mr. Perkins for his illuminating books and speeches. He has provided what I hope will one day amount to a valuable service to humanity. But I am unable to get past the evil that he wrought in his prior incarnation as an "economic hit-man". What is an appropriate statute of limitations for the deliberate and ongoing damage, done to so many innocent lives? I am tormented by the legal impunity extended to those who have harmed so many people. The list of unpunished is too long.

Anger-driven Punishment-writ-large and meted-out by whatever New Authority's in ascendance, is always a dicey proposition, (cf: the murderous consequences most political and/or religious revolutions),but especially-so in a society like the present US, where what constitutes 'adult mass innocence' has become a moral quanta almost impossible for any sane legal or moral thinker to define.

I mean, haven't we, most of us USAan's, in fact welcomed and fed for generations the very capitalist 'you-can-have-it-all' self-hypnosis that's now proving to be not only a psychological/moral - but also a material/environmental - lie?
Haven't most of in the US, alive Today at least, preferred to allow our political and economic leaders to increasingly hypnotize us thus? And if you say not, then why haven't 'we' more vigorously challenged such bullshitting, ruinous leadership? It would be easy to do so, after all.

Unfortunately, there's no way around the fact that, although many corporate-empowered sociopaths act worse than most of We The People do or seemingly would, it's nevertheless precisely WTP, each in our own individual rationalizations and self-allowed addictions, who buy the Official Pigs' unsustainable visions of The Good Life, that propels The System.

Not to ramble on too much more, but: The point is that, when it comes to Punishment, it won't help matters one whit for us average folk to get vengeful toward those 'leaders' whose lies and maddness we've otherwise eagerly bought into and largely encouraged.

The thing is, for each of us to become just slightly more conscious, enough, at least, to stop hypnotically empowering the worser Pigs among us; motivated by the recognition that, as common human creatures, none of us in a Mammonated Kultur is all that psychologically far away from becoming, just like the Pigs, our Shadowed Self.

Specifically, assign "sustainability" criteria to an impartial third party reviewing service.

BP already claims to be as green as green can be in their expensive ads. "Beyond Petroleum" is their slogan, I saw the pitch today on a PBS advertisement. BP is sponsoring their news. BP also stands for Blackened Pelican and Blowout Preventer. What we're going to get, as long as we're in favor of sustainability, is multinational corps screaming at the top of their lungs with all of their money, "I'm sustainable!!! Look! I washed this little baby bird off, and then I donated $50 to cure cancer!"

Begging huge corporations for sustainable practices won't get us more than 1% to 2% of the distance that we want to go. Require that the good companies agree to third party auditing. Shop there, work for them, support their efforts.

In contrast, the truly bad actors are anti-consumer, anti-worker, anti-community, and should have no particular help to continue existing. No one should patronize them, people should politely stand outside the bad actors' doors to steer any remaining potential customers to the good stores with coupons, no local potential franchisee should cut a deal with the bums, no one should take a job with the bums, no one should invest in the high-risk gamblers' stocks, no one should sell land to them to build their stores or at least the road to permitting should be rough.

Not going to happen any time soon. The legions of Corp. robots won't allow it.

I wonder WHO or What, in a mass cognition-polluted, instant-gratification-cultivated, de-instinctualized culture like ours, would or possibly could be able to establish itself as an "impartial third party reviewing service" --regarding Sustainability...?

Achievement of a reality-based, mass political/economic consciousness -- one that adequately defines to each of us how each of us materially (and spiritually) relates to our fellows and the larger biosphere - would first need to be minimally in-place in a culture's common epistemology before such a referral "service" could even be generally wanted, let alone listened-to.

Such a vetted Sustainability Service, though, could arise, I think. But certainly not if we try to magically jump the steps needed to achieve it in the same way that we set up and swallow instantly new marketing proofs for the latest, Better Toothpaste.

One of our chief human problems as political dreamers in a cognitively incomprehensible and all-too-often physically nightmarish world, is our inclination to [therefore] easily settle for being plesantly hypnotized about our actual creaturily plight.

But it's arguable that our short and mysterious lives would be far less painfully dicey, and far more joyously deep, if we admitted our collective existential/cosmic plight honestly, among ourselves; created affirming power from the seeming outrage of our fitfull gropings; worked as Job #1 to become more honest with ourseves about our own flaws, and accepted similar reasonable flaws in our fellows.

Sorry if all this sounds like just more nostruming
I don't think it is.
I think the real way Ahead, the Only way Ahead for us humans, is to acknowledge that in an unknown and maybe Unknowable larger Universe, all we finally have is the becoming of a human-scale goodness to each other.
And who can say. Maybe from doing and being That Good Intent, some deeper Understanding will be granted us to us.

Boy, CD is attracting all the best anti-Empire people as its authors.

Welcome aboard, John, I loved 'Hitman' and now look forward to your "Secret History of American Empire".

Hell, CD could become the defacto 'anti-Empire' site of choice (no pun intended).

Best,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine