Much of the power of corporations comes from their ability
to convince us we cannot live without the products or services they provide. As if the disappearance of any one of them
might immediately result in humanity being transported back to the dark ages (which,
by the way, may be where we are all headed in the not too distant future, thanks to corporations). Through the magical
wonder of advertising, the pixie dust of corporate propaganda is used to sell
us everything from sports cars to sunglasses.
By exploiting the inner void that
a consumer driven society helps to create in each of us - what Victor Frankl
referred to as the “existential vacuum” - the billion dollar marketing
industry pours into our longings the promise that they, through a dazzling
array of the most fashionable products available, can give us a life of love,
meaning, fulfillment, and happiness. None
of this is true, of course, because advertising is designed to play us all
like a flute. It is as easy as lying, because it is lying. It’s just lying that happens to be, as
H.G. Wells pointed out, legal.
Thankfully, however, those lies, and the billions of dollars
spent annually to manufacture them, have not been entirely wasted on people
like David Mamet. Mamet, who has only recently
been converted to the fold, admitted the error of his ways when he began to question his hatred for "the
Corporations.” As he put it, he
questioned “the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger
for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not
live." Christmas shoppers in Long
Island in 2008 would certainly agree.
They agreed so much with Mamet's sentiments, in fact, that they trampled
to death the Wal-Mart employee who tried to satisfy their “hunger for
those goods and services” by merely opening the store. No doubt the crowd was
driven into their frenzy by the same siren song of consumer-corporatism that
has made Mamet such a true believer of late in all the blessings that corporate
benevolence can bestow.
Mamet explains further that his change of heart came when he
realized that corporations are simply “legal persons” with as much "lust,
greed, envy, sloth, and their pals as people but none of the constraints.” Some
of these "legal persons" who have succeeded in seducing Mr. Mamet are more like vampires than actual people. DuPont, for example, was born in 1802,
Colgate in 1806, and Citibank has been around since the War of 1812. And where real people have a diffusion of
appetites that ebb and flow and often wane with age, corporations have
basically one appetite that grows exponentially by what it feeds on. They're
like Terminators, in other words, programed to chase forever the Sarah Connor
of their own self-interest. And they’ll
destroy everything and anyone to get what they want.
In addition to
virtual immortality, the corporate "person" that Mamet is so enamored
with has all the personality traits of a psychopath. According to the World Health Organizations
Manual of Mental Disorders, a corporation has "a callous unconcern for the
feelings of others; an incapacity to maintain enduring relationships; an
incapacity to experience guilt; failure to conform to social norms with respect
to lawful behaviors; and a reckless disregard for the safety of others." Indeed, if corporations are like the people
Mamet knows, he is either hanging out with serial killers or living in the
Twilight movies.
What Mamet has altogether missed while playing his lyre at
the knee of the corporate 'overmen,' is that many of the very "goods and
services" that he thinks people can't live without are producing a
world that people are finding increasingly impossible to live with. In fact, corporations are forever finding new ways - with true American grit,
determination, and know-how - to maximize their profits by poisoning everyone
and everything on the planet, from the biological to the global.
On the biological level, corporate overuses of antibiotics
in farming and livestock have contributed to the rise of super-resistant
bacteria strains that are becoming impervious to antibiotics. These new super-strains
threaten to make things as harmless as a scraped knee or common cold a struggle
between life and death. Corporations use
such antibiotics, “to varying degrees depending on” the “size and age” of
animals such as “cattle, pigs, and chickens — and, in other countries, fish and
shrimp.” These animals “receive regular doses to speed their growth, increase
their weight, and protect them from disease. Out of all the antibiotics sold in
the United States each year, 80 percent by weight are used in agriculture,
primarily to fatten animals and protect them from the conditions in which they
are raised.[i]
Protecting an investment in animals by
overusing antibiotics, however, is increasingly undermining our ability to
protect ourselves. Of course, animals
are corporate assets that affect a company's bottom line, while people, on the other hand, are expendable.
Luckily for Mamet and his conservative minions, attempts to
prevent such overuse of antibiotics - which would cut into their sacred earnings - have been
regularly thwarted by the agriculture
and veterinary pharmaceutical industries who claim that these “antibiotics have no demonstrable
effect on human health.” Ultimately, protecting the value of its animal assets
is a necessary thing for corporations to do in order to maximize their share prices, even if all the shareholders may eventually die as a result. What such a myopic view of
the bottom line has led few to ask, however, is “what multi-drug–resistant bacteria might mean for farm
animals” or the people who eat them. Instead, corporate executives were so busy watching their incomes float like a butterfly, they didn't really care about how their actions were impacting the bee.
Apparently no one bothered to explain the birds and the
bees to corporate America, especially the part about the bees. As a result, today the world suffers from Colony
Collapse Disorder, or CCD, otherwise know as "the vanishing of the bees."
While scientists are still trying to determine the root causes of that problem,
researchers have discovered that pesticides and fungicides being produced by
corporations are contributing to the collapse. According to the study in PLOS
One, for example, healthy bees that ate the fungicides – which were supposedly
harmless to bees – were actually three times more likely to become infected
with a parasite that's known to cause CCD. Since 2007, more than 10 million
beehives in North America have collapsed, putting more than $30 billion in U.S.
food crops at risk. In Japan and China, the effect of CCD has necessarily led
fruit farmers to pollinate their crops by hand.
Without bees, pretty soon we’ll all be running around like Oliver Twist
and his bowl of gruel: “Please Corporate
Sir, I want some more.”
As Beth Hoffman explained, “At the center of the debate is the
pesticide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s “Round Up.” Rather
than decreasing the amount of this pesticide, as Monsanto claimed it would, the
“total volume of glyphosate applied to the three biggest GE crops — corn,
cotton and soybeans — increased 10-fold from 15 million pounds in 1996 to 159
million pounds in 2012.”[ii] Just imagine that summer corn on the cob,
steaming hot, and lathered with melting butter and glyphosate. Now we just need a couple billion dollars to wash it all down.
Of course, that's just what these businesses have gotten. Such pesticides and herbicides have produced huge profits for the
agribusinesses that develop them Seed revenues, which have been genetically engineered to contain such herbicides and pesticides, have septupled (increased
seven fold) since 1998, increasing profits from 0.1 billion in 1998 to close to
$15 billion in 2012. Who needs bees when you're making billions?! [iii]
Moving up the scale from the biological to our
own backyards, we find thousands of “Superfund Sites” mushrooming around the country. A Superfund Site is just one way corporations
pass off the costs of the environmental damage they produce – what they refer
to as “externalities” – straight to their customers in the discomfort of their
own homes.
Corporations like GE use Superfund sites as dumping grounds
for their toxic waste, and are designated areas “contaminated with hazardous
substances,” and other "pollutants or contaminants." The term “Superfund” is itself the common
name for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and
Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA).
CERCLA was established with broad cleanup authority, to clean up
releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that may endanger
public health or welfare or the (natural) environment. This authority was given
primarily to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and states in reaction
to the Love Canal Disaster and what would come to be called the Valley of the
Drums.
The Love Canal Disaster
In the mid-1970s, “Love Canal became the subject of national
and international attention after it was revealed in the press that the site
had formerly been used to bury 21,000 tons of toxic waste by Hooker Chemical
(now Occidental Petroleum Corporation).”
In 1976, two reporters for the Niagara Falls Gazette, David
Pollak and David Russell, tested several sump-pumps near Love Canal and found
toxic chemicals in them. Michael Brown, “who then investigated potential health
effects by carrying forth an informal door-to-door survey in early 1978,” found
“birth defects and many anomalies such as enlarged feet, heads, hands, and
legs.” According to the EPA in 1979, “residents exhibited a "disturbingly
high rate of miscarriages.” The EPA also found that “Love Canal can now be
added to a growing list of environmental disasters involving toxics, ranging
from industrial workers stricken by nervous disorders and cancers to the
discovery of toxic materials in the milk of nursing mothers." Oh joy!
The Valley of the Drums, on the other hand, is a 23 acre (9.3 hectare) toxic waste site in
northern Bullitt County, Kentucky, near Louisville, that was “named after the
waste-containing drums strewn across the area. It is known as one of the
primary motivations for the passage” of the CERCLA, or Superfund Act of 1980. There,
the EPA announced an emergency cleanup of more than 17,000 drums that [where]
allowed to be scattered there and of chemicals that had been dumped in open
pits.[iv]
The way that CERCLA is supposed to work in such situations is that the EPA “may
identify parties responsible for hazardous substances released into the
environment and compel those parties to clean up the sites, or it may cleanup”
those sites “itself using the Superfund (a trust fund) and cost recover from
responsible parties by referring such matters to the U.S. Department of
Justice.” Identifying the “parties responsible” is part of the “Polluter Pays
Principle,” which is the principle that says, if you’re the polluter, you
should pay – obviously.
The problem is that the U.S. EPA has observed that this
“polluter pays principle” has typically not been fully implemented in U.S. laws
and programs. During the 1980s, for example, the
Reagan administration's laissez-faire policies made the implementation of such
a principle largely ineffective. During Reagan's two terms, only “16 of the 799 Superfund sites were cleaned up,” and only
“$40 million of $700 million in recoverable funds from responsible parties were
collected.” Today, on the other hand, the problem is complicated by the fact that drinking water and sewage treatment services are subsidized,
and there are limited mechanisms in place to fully assess polluters for
treatment costs.
Since 1980, the EPA has put 1,600 sites on its priority
list. Nationally, however, the EPA has identified some 47,000 hazardous waste sites in
the United States. As Superfund approached its
30-year anniversary, it was struggling to maintain funding, as it has since 1995,
when its dedicated tax expired. The fund's balance shrank from $4.7billion in
1997 to $173million in 2007, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office
report in July.[v]
The effect of that reduction amounts to an increase in taxes on everyone else,
since it is their tax dollars that must now be stretched further to cover the
reduction. This is like reducing the number of trash collectors while increasing
the amount of trash to be collected.
Nor is such dumping limited to America. Corporations are equal opportunity destroyers
of environments and echo systems both at home and abroad. On
the other side of the globe, for example, we can see how increasingly impossible it is
becoming for people in the Niger Delta to live in the world corporations are helping to shape. This is because the
Niger Delta in Nigeria has become an environmental disaster zone
after fifty years of oil exploitation. By some estimates, "one and a half
million tons of crude oil have been spilled into the creeks, farms and
forests" there while "the natural gas contained in the crude oil is
burnt off in gas flares" thereby emitting as much greenhouse gases as 18
million cars." Such gas flares end up "releasing toxic substances
into densely populated areas."[vi]
According to a recent Greenpeace report, "although Shell operates in more
than 100 countries, 40 percent of all its oil spills happen in Nigeria. With the government of Nigeria content to
look the other way, Shell reported double its 2007 number of oil spills in the
country in 2008, and double the 2008 number in 2009. One estimate stated that "some
13 million barrels of oil have been spilled in the Niger Delta since Oil
exploration began in 1958. This is the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez every
year for 50 years"[vii]
All of this corporate destruction, however, pales in comparison to the worst of all – the destruction
of the planet itself. That destruction has long been coupled with the drum
beat of denial that echoes with the regularity of minting money. The global warming deniers have lobbied hard
to keep corporate earnings higher by putting every living thing on the planet
at higher risk. The Kyoto Protocols, for example, which were designed to
decrease the emission of carbon monoxide and other greenhouse gases
contributing to climate change, were successfully blocked by American corporate
interests as soon as Clinton signed the agreement in 1997. The US Senate refused
to ratify the Protocols because of the "potential damage to the US
economy" that compliance might produce. Never mind the "potential
damage to the" planet and everything on it that noncompliance may produce.
The Senate also failed to ratify because the agreement
excluded countries like India and China from having to comply with its
emissions standards (so much for being a world “leader," America). Likewise, the Bush administration objected to
signing the protocol for similar reasons, as George W. Bush "claimed that
the cost of following the Protocols requirements will stress the economy."
And since Bush was busy lying to America so he could flatten two whole countries in order to find one man and dethrone another, there was no time
or money left to clean up the planet. All that Bush cared about instead was playing
war and pushing through tax cuts for his buddies, tax cuts even his own economic advisers
called “a terrible idea.”[viii]
Between the diabetes and the cancer, and the bankruptcies
and the bailouts, I’m having a hard time determining which "goods and
services" Mamet is referring to exactly, that he thinks we "can't
live without." If you're not getting trampled to death trying to buy those
"goods and services" or poisoned to death by the environmental
pollution that results from making and shipping them to Wal-Mart, the items
themselves might kill you. One pharmaceutical company, for example, reportedly
paid $80 thousand in fines for knowingly releasing to the public a drug it knew was
deadly. Sugar, tobacco, alcohol and high
fructose corn syrup, for that matter, are certainly not items people add to their diet in order
to improve their figures or their health. On the other hand, an ever growing
array of anti-depressants are now marketed to improve our mental health by increasing our suicidal tendencies. I feel happier already.
As time marches forward, and humanity marches off a cliff of its own making, the question is not whether people can live without the goods and services that many corporations provide, as Mamet contends, but whether there is anything on the planet that can survive the process by which those corporations provide such goods and services. Indeed, people applaud the rise of their investment portfolios even as the world is falling to pieces all around them as a result. The reckless pursuit of economic "growth" has led humanity to construct for itself an environmental guillotine, and chasing the holy grail of the former is only helping to ensure the latter will come crashing down on all of our heads soon enough.
[i] https://medium.com/p/892b57499e77
[ii] http://www.forbes.com/sites/bethhoffman/2013/07/02/gmo-crops-mean-more-herbicide-not-less/
[iii]
Id.
[iv] http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20081214/NEWS01/81214001
[v] http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20081214/NEWS01/81214001
[vi]
See the Documentary Poison Fire: Oil and Gas Abuse in Nigeria
[vii]
Power, Inc, by David Rothkopf page 321
[viii]
http://www.businessinsider.com/even-bushs-economic-advisers-thought-the-tax-cut-was-a-terrible-idea-2010-9
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