Editor’s: Trapped in a Tank: The Hidden Cruelty of the Tropical Fish Trade

The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution

By Spoorthy Raman / Mongabay

Although a superpower, the U.S. is under constant invasion — we’re not talking humans here but meek-looking plants and animals that have caused ecological havoc. Take, for instance, the tiny, nocturnal coqui frogs ( Eleutherodactylus coqui) in Hawai‘i that arrived from Puerto Rico in the 1980s and are now terrorizing the islanders with their deafening “ ko-kee” calls that can be as loud as a motorcycle engine. With numbers in Hawai‘i now surpassing those in Puerto Rico, the frogs have scrubbed the forest floor and treetops of vital pollinating insects, toppled property prices in prime real estate markets, and are hurting tourism.

Editor’s note: “Protest alone, disconnected from more substantive action, is akin to screaming in the wind. Protest is not resistance. Protest, whether conscious to it or not, often reinforces the belief that the system is fundamentally sound, and that with reform it can resolve the issue that sparked the protest. We must confront the truth: our system of governance is fundamentally flawed. It is corrupt, hierarchical, unfair, and thoroughly infiltrated by corporate power and special interests.”

Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money.  A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet.