Apocalyptic Plutocracy:

The Rule of Wealth and Environmental Destruction

Copyright 2011, John Manimas Medeiros

 

Any political scientist, as well as high school and elementary school students, can tell you that the most fundamental principle of democratic government is "the rule of law." This means first that there is one law for all people, not a harsh and tightly enforced law for the poor accompanied by a forgiving and lightly enforced law for the rich. The rule of law also means that judgments and decisions are made according to the law whenever and wherever laws address the issues at hand. This is in contrast to a "rule of persons" where important decisions, judgments and policies would be made by a person in power, in accordance with that person's opinions, mood and attitude at the time. America's commitment to the rule of law naturally grew out of remembered outrage at the extreme injustices perpetuated on the people by a "rule of wealth" during the Middle Ages in Europe. During the second half of the twentieth century, and continuing into the twenty-first, the United States of America has experienced a gradual but clear creeping away from rule of law to rule of wealth, an extremely destructive rule of wealth or development of a corporate nobility.

When people read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in the early 1960s, her connection of a beloved anti-malarial pesticide (DDT) with the possible loss of raptors and songbirds, gave birth to the modern environmental movement. However, the majority of Americans talk and act like they still don't get it. Even some environmentalists talk and act as though destruction of the environment by "unintended consequences" is an occasional error, periodic quirks in an otherwise sound economic system and scientific society. My perception is that Carson's book does not describe for us an isolated incident, but the outline of a pattern of behavior in our modern industrial democracy which is able, in and of itself, to destroy human civilization. Let me describe that pattern in a few precise words.

 

The pattern occurred again when Thalidomide babies were born with flippers in place of arms. The pattern occurred again when the daughters of mothers who were prescribed diethylstilbestrol got uterine cancer at age seventeen. The pattern occurred again when the PCBs used to make transformers fire resistant where found in the bodies of seabirds, seals and polar bears. The pattern happened again when Karen Silkwood discovered plutonium contamination occurred as a result of the careless corporate practices of Kerr-McGee. The pattern occurred again when Erin Brockovich excavated the buried evidence that a corporation caused children to get lethal cancers because they decided that the company's storage pool of toxic chemicals did not need the recommended liner. The pattern has occurred hundreds of times - if not thousands -- and yet lawyers, members of Congress, state legislators, economists, scientists and even environmentalists talk and act as though all of these events are just a handful of "unintended consequences" and not results that should be expected and prepared for whenever "scientists" or chemical engineers make the claim that a manufactured chemical provides some benefit but otherwise does not cause any harm (if handled according to the instructions on the package). This pattern is not just bad law and bad politics and bad economics, it is bad science.

There is no such thing as a cause that has only one effect.

This is the fundamental scientific principle that explains the pattern described here. This is the fundamental principle of science that bad scientists practicing bad science have ignored or denied and which is now corroding the foundations of life on Earth. Here are three books, from among many more, that further describe the destructive force of practicing chemical technology without understanding, or without heeding this core principle of ecological science:

Our Stolen Future, by Theo Colborn, Diane Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers

Evolution's Edge, by Graeme Taylor

Six Degrees to a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas

The pertinent and honest research, not "redacted" by corporate lawyers or purchased politicians, shows that the source of the problem is not only bad science but also bad law. We have taken the concept of incorporation, originally intended to benefit society economically, and made it into the unelected entity that exercises economic control over the political process. In other words, democracy is now impossible because the mechanisms of government, the legislative branch as well as the judicial and the executive branches more indirectly, can be controlled entirely by corporate money and corporate influence over elections, the press, public discourse and public information. The people of America today are fighting to save their democracy. It is at risk from a "foreign power" that is not another nation but another idea -- the idea that the rule of law is not important, the idea that it is okay for the wealthy to be free of accountability for their actions because they are just the stockholders and officers and employees of a corporation. There are important details here that reveal how insidious the current pattern is. Watch, and prepare to be nauseated.

It is not just that the corporation has itself become the enemy of society by virtue of the "corporate veil" and the amazing ability of real persons to hide behind that veil, but because of other games that the plutocracy has invented that enable them to escape so completely from responsibility that they cannot even be found. Corporations noticed the pattern long ago, before Rachel Carson and others noticed. So, they set up escape routes. They saw that they could produce dangerous chemicals and destructive processes not only by accident, but also by careless science and bad science and by just behaving normally, that is, by placing their goal of material profit above all other goals. So, they discovered the extreme usefulness of treating any corporation like a rich man's toy, just like a yacht or a vacation home or a baseball team or any other "investment." Companies, or corporations, can be bought and sold, by holding companies or other corporations. Another arrangement that is perfectly legal is that a corporation can be bought and then dissolved, or have its assets divided up in either an organized or disorganized manner and distributed to several other previously unrelated corporations. Corporations can have affiliates or subdivisions or "parent companies" or subsidiaries. All of these seemingly logical and useful arrangements perfectly serve the purpose of mincing a corporation into tiny pieces and feeding it to ducks on a pond. Why would corporate executives, bankers and investors, the "most reasonable" and coldly practical of all people, do such a thing? Easy, because it is such an effective way of creating an impossible and intangible distance between environmental destruction and the persons who did it. It is all a method, a method that supports the rule of wealth and enables the rule of wealth to replace the rule of law. Many of the rich don't like the rule of law because it forces them to be restricted by the same rules of fairness and responsibility that are imposed on janitors, teachers, police officers, firefighters, factory assemblers, chambermaids, engineers, doctors, fry cooks, and dishwashers. The rich like their comforts, but they hate personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is just too much like work. It might be said that personal responsibility is the only real work, and the rich don't want real work. They want just play, play with money. They are also playing with the lives of others, and now they are playing with the lives of everything, with all of life on Earth. Many of them know this and want to make a change for the better, but they are trapped in the uniquely American religion which is American Materialism. They don't know how anyone in America can possibly succeed by saying that we have to be less selfish. Americans may be unable to do "less selfish."

So this is the story. This is how it happens and continues to happen. Don't believe me? Think I am being "judgmental." I challenge anyone to test my perception. Look at a significant number of environmental pollution problems, say ten; anything, plastics, medicines, herbicide, pesticide, hydrocarbon, cleaning agent, et cetera, et cetera. Say you choose ten such "events" or cases. Then look at how the "paper trail" is chopped up and lost. Look at how the company that makes the product when the problem is "first discovered" is three or four companies removed from those who own the patent, or from those who originally made the product when it caused harm. Look at how the companies that have been involved with the product no longer exist, or have been bought and sold and taken apart and the parts used to make other companies. Look how the executives, engineers and chemists and marketing vice presidents are either dead, or living abroad, or no longer in the business and might now be making pottery for an organic greenhouse. Look, and see, see the pattern that reveals the genius of the human mind. How creative and inventive we are, how shrewd and effective, when we build space ships, or sea ships, or undersea ships, or a tangled web of business deals that forms an impossible-to-penetrate blockade against connecting any environmental destruction with a responsible person. How does that work again? We, or someone, that is, someone who lives on Earth somewhere, made a decision that caused destruction of life, but we cannot find that person, or, to be fair, it is a sad and regrettable occurrence, but no one can be held responsible.

What is this new social and political and legal arrangement, my fellow citizen? Is it a form of modern insanity? Is it sin? Is it crime? No, it is legal. It is "apocalyptic plutocracy," the rule of wealth combined with the bad science that denies the fundamental principle of the living world:

There is no such thing as a cause that has only one effect.

Gaze upon the destruction of Life, environmentalist, and despair.

 

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