A chink in the armor may have been found

The recent Occupy movement has meant more to me than just financial reform. It has exposed to the public the incredible greed of corporations and wealthy individuals, and an inhumane lack of compassion on part of the government and private sector for those that are most vulnerable, those that are caught in the circles and tentacles of poverty and injustice and degraded environments. I hope you see the threads and connections, too. It is hard to deny the omnipresence of corporatism in our lives. Our conversations are mediated through their gizmos, our politicians are influenced by their monies, our food is "produced" in their labs, our life savings are eaten up in instants.

In class one day, Professor Parson, the most brilliant person I have met, was talking about an experience that he has had several times over. He has the in in policy circles; he has the in on meetings in which the head honchos of major corporations, these powerful, rich people, get together and discuss policy issues regarding the environment. After days of discussion, many of them end up hanging their heads in defeat, saying, "We just need to educate the next generation to make better choices."

I am a student (and employee?) at the University of Michigan. Each year, a couple of large student groups and the Career Center in the College of Engineering hold Career Fair--a two-day long event that brings recruiters to campus. You see tons of engineering students, dressed up in business-casual attire, lined up waiting to be told impersonally to apply for any positions "on the company website." You can assume who is doing the recruiting...all the big guns--defense contractors, oil exploration corporations, mining companies.

And so it is particularly defeatist, ironic, and hypocritical of these very rich men and corporations, who (corporations are people, too, right?) have their sway in policy circles, to say that we should leave it to the next generation to solve the myriad of issues that face us. But, it is true that the lifeblood of these large corporations is the young; corporations prey on the young to continue their legacies, to continue to buy their products. The young can be lured by six-figure salaries and quick repayment of their debts. Having been through an undergraduate engineering degree at the University of Michigan, I know that engineers are not made to think about the consequences of engineering. And so, many undergraduates may have never heard about Engineers Without Borders, or the phrase "appropriate technology." Indeed, the government-industry-military-university complex does not train these engineers to be activists. Rather, they train them to be passively engaged in violent and Earth-raping activities.

Furthermore, the way large bureaucracies are set up, there is very little individual blame or responsibility put on engineers. Write Martin and Schinzinger in their book Ethics in Engineering,

Large-scale engineering projects involve fragmentation of work. Each person makes only a small contribution to something much larger. Moreover, the final product is often physically removed from one's immediate workplace, creating the kind of "distancing" that [Stanley] Milgram [who conducted the famous experiments in which he concluded that people are willing to abandon personal accountability when placed under authority] identified as encouraging a lessened sense of personal accountability. (pg. 94)

Such lack of accountability allows young people to easily convince themselves that what they are doing is benign, and allows their moral compasses to be swayed by hierarchy. While talking about corporatism and having dinner with Rebecca the other night, we talked about the chink in the (corporate) armor that Professor Larimore had brought up in August. She said, "Corporations feed on young people. They are always looking for new, young recruits." There are many reasons why, it seems.

It is ultimately clear to me that these corporations must be brought down, or at least their structure--where they are no longer allowed and privileged and encouraged to endure forever--must be restored to "the original definition...as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures," as Scott Russell Sanders writes in his essay, Breaking the Spell of Money, in Orion.

But I really do think Rebecca has found one of the weaker spots of corporatism--the need for new blood.

The chink in the armor

A profound and powerful corporatism is driving our world. We rely on corporate boardrooms for most every aspect of our lives. Even "public goods", ones that not all of fully support, like defense and military spending, are influenced heavily influenced by corporations. They are growing ever more powerful, and the government is relying ever more on them. Take for example the public-private partnerships that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson hails as the next big step in the quest for more efficient cars. Or the American Insurance Group, which our government called "too big to fail."

How is it that these social constructions, corporations, have become so powerful? I do not claim to know much about this. But no one can deny their power, so much so that many "environmentalists" think that working through the corporate world can yield larger changes than work through the policy world. This may be true, but it does something that I feel can be dangerous - it further legitimises their existence. Furthermore, I am always skeptical of the benevolence of entities that exist to make a profit. (Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary,  has defined a corporation as "ingenious device to obtain individual profit without individual responsibility.") Corporations as they stand must be taken down. As Scott Russell Sanders has written, "We need to restore the original definition of a corporation as an association granted temporary privileges for the purpose of carrying out some socially useful task, with charters that must be reviewed and renewed periodically by state legislatures."

At brunch yesterday morning celebrating Krista and Serge's wedding, I was in the company of some very astute people, and Professor Emeritus Ann Larimore (of Women's Studies and Geography) was one of them. (I am growing heirloom tomatoes in her front garden.) She has been highly involved in politics and activism, and thinks deeply about issues of justice and environment. She said, "There is a question that I have been asking for about five years now, a question that I do not have an answer to, and a question no one has been able to answer. With corporations, where is the chink in the armor? Is it possible to take them down?" Corporations have continued to find chinks in the legislative and regulatory armor of the government. There has to be a chink in their armor. We must take the metaphorical sword to them. We must.

As I wrote about yesterday, our individual activism must be projected outwards to coalesce into something social, something bigger than ourselves. I would be fascinated to see how our anti-corporate individual actions can form a movement big enough to find the chink in the armor, bigger than boycotts, bigger than buying local, more fundamental and more powerful than government regulation. Thoughts?

Money - Skewing value

While many may feel that a monetary value assigned to something is an accurate reflection of its worth, especially in relation to other things, it is not difficult to see that this is patently untrue. Until recently, our society placed little value on those features of our world that provide us sustenance, all in the name of a mythological progress. And when we do try to value, we have a tendency to undervalue.

On the other hand, the values that different people attain through the same monetary value are very different. A one thousand dollar diamond is worth close to nothing (if not having a negative "value") to some, while the prestige of having such a rock on your finger is worth those one thousand dollars and even more. It is not difficult to see then that people can resort to unseemly acts for prestige and power. Money, as a recent comment on a previous post suggested, turns hegemonic, wielding an influence over our lives that is intoxicating.

Furthermore, as is mentioned in this episode of This American Life, and in the essay by Scott Russell Sanders in Orion, money itself hinges on a social compact of its value. How we've allowed something fictional such as money guide our behaviour, rule our emotions, and physically affect the real world is puzzling. We have allowed it to dictate environmental and social outcomes, rather than allowing the reality of our existence, and that of the world, to temper its value.

I wonder about scenarios in which we decide whether or not money is able to be used as a medium of exchange. Rather than predicate our behaviour on the guarantee that money will transfer hands, could we  predicate our behaviour on the guarantee that we preserve and nurture what sustains us, and relegate money to being a token of appreciation?

Money - Scott Russell Sanders on the paradoxical nature of money

For today, I wanted to share with you a paragraph of an essay I just read by Scott Russell Sanders, called Breaking The Spell Of Money, in Orion Magazine. I encourage you to read the whole essay, eloquently and thoughtfully written, by clicking here.

"The accumulation of money gives the richest individuals and corporations godlike power over the rest of us. Yet money itself has no intrinsic value; it is a medium of exchange, a token that we have tacitly agreed to recognize and swap for thins that do possess intrinsic value, such as potatoes or poetry, salmon or surgery. Money is a symbolic tool, wholly dependent for its usefulness on an underlying social compact [emphasis added]. It is paradoxical, therefore, that those who have benefited the most financially from the existence of this compact have been the most aggressive in seeking to undermine it, by attacking unions, cooperatives, public education, independent media, social welfare programs, non-profits that serve the poor, land-use planning, and every aspect of government that doesn't directly serve the rich. For the social compact to hold, ordinary people must feel that they are participating in a common enterprise that benefits everyone fairly, and not a pyramid scheme designed to benefit a few at the very top. While the superrich often pretend to oppose government as an imposition on their freedom, they are usually great fans of government contracts, crop subsidies, oil depletion allowances, and other forms of corporate welfare, and ever greater fans of military spending."