[Mb-civic] Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-08/04parenti.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Why the Corporate Rich Oppose Environmentalism August 08, 2005
By Michael Parenti 

In 1876, Marx's collaborator, Frederich Engels, offered a prophetic
caveat: "Let us not . . . flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our
human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on
us. . . . At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside of nature--but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to
nature, and exist in its midst. . . ."	With its never-ending emphasis on
production and profit, and its indifference to environment, transnational
corporate capitalism appears determined to stand outside nature. The
driving goal of the giant investment firms is to convert natural materials
into commodities and commodities into profits, transforming living nature
into vast accumulations of dead capital. 

This capital accumulation process treats the planet's life-sustaining
resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, forests, fisheries, ocean
beds, rivers, air quality) as dispensable ingredients of limitless supply,
to be consumed or toxified at will. Consequently, the support systems of
the entire ecosphere--the Earth's thin skin of fresh air, water, and top
soil--are at risk, threatened by global warming, massive erosion, and
ozone depletion.  An ever-expanding capitalism and a fragile finite
ecology are on a calamitous collision course. 

It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state
of denial about this. Far worse than denial, they have shown utter
antagonism toward those who think the planet is more important than
corporate profits. So they defame environmentalists as "eco-terrorists,"
"EPA gestapo," "Earth Day alarmists," "tree huggers," and purveyors of
"Green hysteria" and "liberal claptrap."  

The plutocracy's position was summed up by that dangerous fool, erstwhile
Senator Steve Symms (R-Idaho), who once said that if he had to choose
between capitalism and ecology, he would choose capitalism. Symms seemed
not to grasp that, absent a viable ecology, there will be no capitalism or
any other ism. 

In July 2005, President Bush finally muttered a grudging acknowledgment:
"I recognize that the surface of the Earth is warmer and that an increase
in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem."  But
this belated admission of a "problem" hardly makes up for Bush's many
attacks against the environment. 

In recent years, Bushite reactionaries within the White House and
Congress, fueled by corporate lobbyists, have supported measures to 

(1)	allow unregulated toxic fill into lakes and harbors, 

(2)	eliminate most of the wetland acreage that was to be set aside for a
reserve, 

(3)	completely deregulate the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)
that deplete the ozone layer, 

(4)	eviscerate clean water and clean air standards, 

(5)	open the unspoiled Arctic wildlife refuge in Alaska to oil and gas
drilling,

(6)	defund efforts to keep raw sewage out of rivers and away from 
beaches,


(7)	privatize and open national parks to commercial development, 

(8)	give the remaining ancient forests over to unrestrained logging, 

(9)	repeal the Endangered Species Act,

(10)	and allow mountain-top removal in mining that has transformed
thousands of miles of streams and vast amounts of natural acreage into
toxic wastelands.

Why do rich and powerful interests take this seemingly suicidal
anti-environmental route?  We can understand why they might want to
destroy public housing, public education, Social Security, and Medicaid.
They and their children will not thereby be deprived of a thing, having
more than sufficient private means to procure whatever services they need
for themselves. 

But the environment is a different story. Do not 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
somewhat better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to
food that is organically raised and specially prepared. The nation's toxic
dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swanky
neighborhoods. The pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and
gardens. Clearcutting does not desolate their ranches, estates, and
vacation spots. 

Even when they or their children succumb to a dread disease like cancer,
they do not link the tragedy to environmental factors---though scientists
now believe that present-day cancer epidemics stem largely from human-made
causes. The plutocrats deny there is a serious problem because they
themselves have created that problem and owe so much of their wealth to
it.

But how can they deny the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by
ozone depletion, global warming, disappearing top soil, and dying oceans?
Do the corporate plutocrats 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 at stake for them is something more
immediate and than global ecology. It is global capital accumulation. The
fate of the biosphere seems a far-off abstraction compared to the fate of
one's immediate investments. 	

Furthermore, pollution pays, while ecology costs. Every dollar a company
spends on environmental protections is one less dollar in earnings. It is
more profitable to treat the environment like a septic tank, to
externalize corporate diseconomies by dumping raw industrial effluent into
the atmosphere, rivers, and bays, turning waterways into open sewers. 

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 means billions in
profits. Ecologically sustainable forms of production directly threaten
those profits.	Immense and imminent gain for oneself is a far more
compelling consideration than a diffuse loss shared by the general public.
The social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against
the personal profit  that comes from harvesting the timber. 

This conflict between immediate personal gain on the one hand and
seemingly remote public benefit on the other operates even at the
individual consumer level. Thus, it is in one's long term interest not to
operate an automobile that contributes more to environmental devastation
than any other single consumer item (even if it's a hybrid). But again, we
don't live in the long run, we live in the here and now, and we have an
immediate everyday need for transportation, so most of us have no choice
except to own and use automobiles. 

Mind you, we did not choose this "car culture." Ecologically efficient and
less costly mass transit systems and rail systems were deliberately bought
out, privatized and torn up, beginning in the 1930s in campaigns waged
across the country by the automotive, oil, and tire industries. These
industries put "America on wheels," in order to maximize profits for
themselves, and to hell with the environment.

Sober business heads refuse to get caught up in doomsayer "hysteria" about
ecology. Besides, there can always be found a few stray experts who will
obligingly argue that the jury is still out, that there is no conclusive
proof to support the alarmists. Conclusive proof in this case would come
only when the eco-apocalypse is upon us. 	Ecology is profoundly 
subversive
of capitalism. It needs planned, environmentally sustainable production
rather than the rapacious unregulated free-market kind. It requires
economical consumption rather than an artificially stimulated,
ever-expanding, wasteful consumerism. It calls for natural, relatively
clean and low cost energy systems rather than high cost, high profit,
polluting ones. Ecology's implications for capitalism are too challenging
for the capitalist to contemplate. 

The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon
which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with
the fate of humanity. 

The struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a
fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists. The present
ecological crisis has been created by the few at the expense of the many.
This time the plutocratic drive to "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate"
may take all of us down, once and forever.

Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights) and
The Assassination of Julius Caesar  (New Press), both available in
paperback.  For more information, visit his website: 
www.michaelparenti.org. 


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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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