Confessions of an Economic Hitman

  

            Today, men and women are going into Thailand, the Phillipines, Botswana, Bolivia, and every other country where they ope to find people desperate for work. They got to these places with the express purpose of exploiting wretched people--people whose children are severely malnourished, even starving, people who live in shanty-towns and have lost all hope of a better life, people who have ceased to even dream of another day. These men and women leave their plush offices in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago, streak across continents and oceans in luxurious jetliners, check into first-class hotels and dine at the finest restaurants the country has to offer. Then they go searching for desperate people.
             Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena, and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing. Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.
            These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they pat each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricities of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.
           The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assures himself (or herself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world--or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future.

----From Confessions of an Economic Hitman--John Perkins pg 180-181

This book gives an inside look into the vast corporate empire running the globe. I highly recommend it for a better understanding of America's role in globalized business.

The Story of Stuff & a commentary on Deep Ecology

In the spirit of upcoming Earth Day, watch this short, informative video. Either we ditch capitalism or we ditch the environment....enjoy

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         Our definition of ‘the good life’ is reflected in policy, behavior, and social norms; and rhetoric defining ‘the good’ has always been a moral inquiry. One of the things that struck me most from reading about Deep Ecology was the synthesis of metaphysical and environmental discourse.

We cannot begin to reshift our understanding of nature until we understand ourselves. I appreciate Deep Ecology's emphasis on the interrelationship between the moral/spiritual realm and our overt behaviors towards each other and the environment. As quoted by Devall and Sessions, "spiritual growth, or unfolding, begins when we cease to understand or see ourselves as isolated and narrow competing egos and begin to identify with other humans from our family and friends to, eventually, our species,” (Devall & Sessions 435).

Expanding the realm of injustice to include the whole biotic community is a huge move. Doing this opens the space to address how the maltreatment of each other stems from our relationship with the environment.  A good friend of mine always posited that we treat mother nature in the same way we treat our women--we abuse, manipulate, objectify, compartmentalize, and find value only in superficial beauty. I think this idea is eloquent because it illustrates an axiom of deep ecology: that our social norms with regards to other humans reflects our norms with all other beings.

What we do to nature we inevitably do to ourselves. With the homogenization and loss of biodiversity, we are also promoting a monoculture society, in which everyone has the same gadget, hair-do, and Prius. Sometimes it seems like corporations are even trying to commidify  environmentalism into an industry of 'green-cool.' Not to say that the incorporation of sustainable ideas into the capitalist market isn't a huge step forward, but the promotion of ecology in this sense perpetuates a broken system.

            Our system is broken because it functions around the golden arrow of consumption. We have become a nation of consumers—this is our identity. Our value is measured and demonstrated by how much we consume. Because of the prime placed on novelty, almost 99% of the stuff we produce is out of vogue within the next year. We have converted the buying and use of goods into our new religious practices and seek to solace the deep existential angst by consuming more goods.

            Bringing it back to the quote mentioned above, our society defines the self in narrow terms—by virtue of the things we are consuming and whether or not those THINGS are the newest, best, shiniest, fastest, most popular things. And we are addicted because we are trained like rats in skinners box. We have been trained that always wanting more ‘things,’ is the moral good, because it is good for a productive economy.

            And we wonder why our nation is the fattest, saddest, sickest, most addicted, anxious, and violent on the planet—because our society aims at an illusory moral good. Just think of how our culture could be transformed if we defined ‘the goodlife’ in terms of spiritual satisfaction as opposed to a mass accumulation of material goods.

            I think what Deep Ecologists were trying to get at was that an economy which functions under the basic assumption of unlimited resources, aka capitalism, cannot only flourish for so long on a finite planet. While I can understand how people would see Deep Ecology as too radical, I appreciate the attention they call to systemic injustices and the call for aggravated action against top-down injustice. At this point what we need is a radical paradigm shift.  

References

Devall, B. & Sessions, G. Principles of Deep Ecology--from Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment. (2003). Thomson & Wadsworth. 

Naess, A. Ecology: The Shallow & the Deep. chapter from Green Critique.