http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24232
Profit Pathology and the Disposable Planet
by Michael Parenti
Global Research, April 8, 2011
Some years ago in New England, a group of environmentalists asked a
corporate executive how his company (a paper mill) could justify dumping its
raw industrial effluent into a nearby river. The river - which had taken
Mother Nature centuries to create - was used for drinking water, fishing,
boating and swimming. In just a few years, the paper mill had turned it into
a highly toxic open sewer.
The executive shrugged and said that river dumping was the most
cost-effective way of removing the mill's wastes. If the company had to
absorb the additional expense of having to clean up after itself, it might
not be able to maintain its competitive edge and would then have to go out
of business or move to a cheaper labor market, resulting in a loss of jobs
for the local economy.
Free Market Uber Alles
It was a familiar argument: the company had no choice. It was compelled to
act that way in a competitive market. The mill was not in the business of
protecting the environment; it was in the business of making a profit, the
highest possible profit at the highest possible rate of return. Profit is
the name of the game, as business leaders make clear when pressed on the
point. The overriding purpose of business is capital accumulation.
To justify its single-minded profiteering, corporate America promotes the
classic laissez-faire theory, which claims that the free market - a
congestion of unregulated and unbridled enterprises all selfishly pursuing
their own ends - is governed by a benign "invisible hand" that miraculously
produces optimal outputs for everybody.
The free marketeers have a deep, all-abiding faith in laissez-faire, for it
is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being
held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like
greedy, spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government
(some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks,
plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to
entire regions and pocket obscene profits.
This corporate system of capital accumulation treats the Earth's
life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, foliage,
forests, fisheries, ocean beds, bays, rivers, air quality) as disposable
ingredients presumed to be of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified
at will. As BP has demonstrated so well in the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe,
considerations of cost weigh so much more heavily than considerations of
safety. As one Congressional inquiry concluded, "Time after time, it appears
that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the
company time or expense."
Indeed, the function of the transnational corporation is not to promote a
healthy ecology, but to extract as much marketable value out of the natural
world as possible, even if it means treating the environment like a septic
tank. An ever-expanding corporate capitalism and a fragile, finite ecology
are on a calamitous collision course, so much so that the support systems of
the entire ecosphere - the Earth's thin skin of fresh air, water and
topsoil - are at risk.
It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of
denial about all this. Far worse than denial, they have shown outright
antagonism toward those who think our planet is more important than their
profits. So, they defame environmentalists as "ecoterrorists," "EPA
Gestapo," "Earth Day alarmists," "tree huggers" and purveyors of "green
hysteria."
In an enormous departure from free-market ideology, most of the diseconomies
of big business are foisted upon the general populace, including the costs
of cleaning up toxic wastes, monitoring production, disposing of industrial
effluence (which composes 40 to 60 percent of the loads treated by
taxpayer-supported municipal sewer plants), the cost of developing new water
sources (while industry and agribusiness consume 80 percent of the nation's
daily water supply) and the costs of attending to the sickness and disease
caused by all the toxicity created. With many of these diseconomies
regularly passed on to the government, the private sector then boasts of its
superior cost-efficiency over the public sector.
The Superrich Are Different From Us
Isn't ecological disaster a threat to the health and survival of corporate
plutocrats just as it is to us ordinary citizens? We can understand why the
corporate rich might want to destroy public housing, public education,
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Such cutbacks would bring us closer
to a free market society devoid of the publicly funded "socialistic" human
services that the ideological reactionaries detest, and such cuts would not
deprive the superrich and their families of anything. The superrich have
more than sufficient private wealth to procure whatever services and
protections they need for themselves.
But the environment is a different story, is it not? Don't wealthy
reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet
as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized food and breathe the same
toxified air? In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They
experience a different class reality, often residing in places where the air
is markedly better than in low- and middle-income areas. They have access to
food that is organically raised and specially transported and prepared.
The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near
their swanky neighborhoods. In fact, the superrich do not live in
neighborhoods as such. They usually reside on landed estates with plenty of
wooded areas, streams, meadows and only a few well-monitored access roads.
Pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clearcutting
does not desolate their ranches, estates, family forests, lakes and prime
vacation spots.
Still, should they not fear the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought
on by global warming? Do they want to see life on Earth, including their own
lives, destroyed? In the long run, they indeed will be sealing their own
doom along with everyone else's. However, like us all, they live not in the
long run, but in the here and now. What is now at stake for them is
something more proximate and more urgent than global ecology; it is global
profits. The fate of the biosphere seems like a remote abstraction compared
to the fate of one's immediate - and enormous - investments.
With their eye on the bottom line, big-business leaders know that every
dollar a company spends on oddball things like environmental protection is
one less dollar in earnings. Moving away from fossil fuels and toward solar,
wind and tidal energy could help avert ecological disaster, but six of the
world's ten top industrial corporations are involved primarily in the
production of oil, gasoline and motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution brings
billions of dollars in returns. Ecologically sustainable forms of production
threaten to compromise such profits, the big producers are convinced.
Immediate gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a
future loss shared by the general public. Every time you drive your car, you
are putting your immediate need to get somewhere ahead of the collective
need to avoid poisoning the air we all breathe. So with the big players: the
social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against the
immense and immediate profit that comes from harvesting the timber and
walking away with a neat bundle of cash. And it can always be rationalized
away: there are lots of other forests for people to visit; they don't need
this one; society needs the timber; loggers need the jobs, and so on.
The Future Is Now
Some of the very same scientists and environmentalists who see the ecology
crisis as urgent rather annoyingly warn us of a catastrophic climate crisis
by "the end of this century." But that's some ninety years away, when all of
us and most of our kids will be dead - which makes global warming a much
less urgent issue.
There are other scientists who manage to be even more irritating by warning
us of an impending ecological crisis and then putting it even further into
the future. "We'll have to stop thinking in terms of eons and start thinking
in terms of centuries," said one scientific sage who was quoted in The New
York Times in 2006. This is supposed to put us on alert? If a global
catastrophe is a century or several centuries away, who is going to make the
terribly difficult and costly decisions today whose effects will be felt far
in the future?
Often, we are told to think of our dear grandchildren, who will be fully
victimized by it all (an appeal usually made in a beseeching tone). But most
of the young people I address on college campuses have a hard time imagining
the world that their nonexistent grandchildren will be experiencing thirty
or forty years hence.
Such appeals should be put to rest. We do not have centuries or generations
or even many decades before disaster is upon us. Ecological crisis is not
some distant urgency. Most of us alive today probably will not have the
luxury of saying "Apres moi, le deluge" because we will still be around to
experience the catastrophe ourselves. We know this to be true because the
ecological crisis is already acting upon us with an accelerated and
compounded effect that may soon prove irreversible.
The Profiteering Madness
Sad to say, the environment cannot defend itself. It is up to us to protect
it - or what's left of it. But all the superrich want is to keep
transforming living nature into commodities and commodities into dead
capital. Impending ecological disasters are of no great moment to the
corporate plunderers. Of living nature, they have no measure.
Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune.
There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven
onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold. So, the money
addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a
thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to
resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other
human consideration.
They are more wedded to their wealth than to the earth upon which they live,
more concerned about the fate of their fortunes than the fate of humanity,
so possessed by their pursuit of profit as to not see the disaster looming
ahead. There was a New Yorker cartoon showing a corporate executive standing
at a lectern addressing a business meeting with these words: "And so, while
the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we
believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented
opportunities for profit."
Not such a joke. Years ago, I remarked that those who denied the existence
of global warming would not change their opinion until the North Pole itself
started melting. (I never expected it to actually start dissolving in my
lifetime.) Today we are facing an Arctic meltdown that carries horrendous
implications for the oceanic gulf streams, coastal water levels, the
planet's entire temperate zone and world agricultural output.
So, how are the captains of industry and finance responding? As we might
expect: like monomaniacal profiteers. They hear the music: ca-ching,
ca-ching. First, the Arctic melting will open a direct northwest passage
between the two great oceans, a dream older than Lewis and Clark. This will
make for shorter and more accessible and inexpensive global trade routes. No
more having to plod through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn. Lower
transportation costs means more trade and higher profits.
Second, they joyfully note that the melting is opening up vast new oil
reserves to drilling. They will be able to drill-baby-drill for more of the
same fossil fuel that is causing the very calamity descending upon us. More
meltdown means more oil and more profits; such is the mantra of the free
marketeers who think the world belongs only to them.
Imagine now that we are all inside one big bus hurtling down a road that is
headed for a fatal plunge into a deep ravine. What are our profit addicts
doing? They are hustling up and down the aisle, selling us crash cushions
and seatbelts at exorbitant prices. They planned ahead for this sales
opportunity.
We have to get up from our seats, quickly place them under adult
supervision, rush the front of the bus, yank the driver away, grab hold of
the wheel, slow the bus down and turn it around. Not easy, but maybe still
possible. With me, it's a recurrent dream.
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