Yesterday I saw an eagle. He was soaring over Route 1, along the Androscoggin River, between downtown Brunswick and Cook’s Corner. To see one is a rare gift.

When I was a pre-teen, you never saw eagles. They were near extinction.

This year, I’ve seen four eagles, including one night in April when I was sitting out on my deck overlooking Woodward Cove. Not more than 30 yards away from me was a large bald eagle, preening himself(?) in a tree. I watched  for nearly 15 minutes with binoculars ’til it was too dark to see him.

Don’t want to live in a world without bald eagles.

The reason that bald eagles have returned is that the Endangered Species Act did what it was intended to do—save the species under its care from extinction. It has done such a good job since being enacted—saving 99 percent of the species under its care from extinction that business interests in the U.S. want it relaxed and perhaps done away with: mainly so they can do what they do best—conduct America’s business, which is “bidness.”

Taxes on corporations continue to fall. (NY Times graph)

To talk with a businessman, you’d think that the “gooverment” was trying to put them out of business. The graph above shows something entirely different.

I found an address (?), delivered by Robert Monks at Harvard (?) that delineates the real crux of what’s wrong in America today—it’s the corporate takeover and subsequent greed of the overlords running things. Trump gets all the headlines, but business is the driver behind why for most, America is an ideal that’s long gone, if it ever existed

Here is Monks’ opening paragraph:

Thanks to the American corporations today are like the great European monarchies of yore: They have the power to control the rules under which they function and to direct the allocation of public resources. This is not a prediction of what’s to come; this is a simple statement of the present state of affairs. Corporations have effectively captured the United States: its judiciary, its political system, and its national wealth, without assuming any of the responsibilities of dominion. Evidence is everywhere.

I do not want to contemplate a world where bald eagles no longer exist.