The land around my house used to be ancient old growth forest. For thousands of years - until the late 1890's - this forest stretched for hundreds of miles from the alpine highlands to the shores of the ocean. In 1891 a corporation built a railroad up to this area. This railroad "opened up" the wilderness. In a relatively short time - from 1891 to the early 1900's - it was clearcut. The trees were sawed down by teams of loggers you can see in old photos standing proud around the gigantic trunk of some ancient giant. The logs were shipped by rail, which sometimes required an entire train for one tree, to the mills that sprang up around the railroad access. In no time at all the only ancient forest left standing was in small forgotten pockets that were either too inaccessible to log, too far from the railroad or simply overlooked.
When I walk on my land I see the stumps left over from this economic holocaust buried under the vegetation that has grown up in the past hundred years. They are decayed and hollow and often have bushes and small trees growing out of them. I try to imagine what things must have been like when they were part of a healthy and profoundly undisturbed wilderness. Like gravestones raised out of the ground by an artist who truly understood the meaning of tragedy they are silent witnesses to a beauty that could not defend itself from the crude and violent power of predatory corporations.
The bodies that once belonged to these stumps were long ago chewed up and digested for the profit extracted from such things as: a daily newspaper from 1899 long ago rotted at the bottom of a landfill which now has a parking lot built atop it, a rundown house being demolished by a trackhoe to make way for new development, an old pupils' desk from a 1910 schoolhouse rotting against a fence in an industrial park - no one remembers where they went and the money earned from their destruction has long ago dissolved into the great streams of profit which still insatiably demand more wilderness. These stumps, these gravestones, remain as quiet unassuming reminders that what happened, and is happening, was both a moral and spiritual tragedy,
To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price. Not surprisingly, therefore, if economic thinking pervades the whole of society, even simple non-economic values like beauty, health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be 'economic.'
(-E. F. Schumacher, "Small Is Beautiful")
Economists have a term to describe what happens to those who are left behind after these great machines of capitalism devours some natural resource - they call it an "externality." They talk about corporations "externalizing their costs." In other words, after extracting the maximum profit possible from a resource and showing little concern for how that extraction process affects those who must live with the consequences, the profits are deposited in the bank and they are off for other greener pastures to exploit. It is only with a huge amount of organizing, lawyer fees and public outcry that these corporations grudgingly agree to bear any of the costs for cleaning up their mess.
A corporation can "externalize" its costs of production by fouling the common air, water and land which they do not have to pay to clean up. Buy they also “externalize” by taking advantage of a “race to the bottom” whereby local and state governments compete with each other to give away their tax base in order to make attractive packages for building new factories, headquarters and other job generating facilities in their areas. What then happens is that all of the neighboring residents must pick up the tab for the impacts of those new facilities, even though they make in one year what those "externalizing" corporations spend in less than a minute for a Superbowl ad.
Many have spent a lot of time and energy attempting to add all these externalities up and find out just how much we all pay to subsidize the generation of corporate profits. A general estimate is that every year corporations externalize roughly 5 times the amount of their yearly corporate profits. What this all means is that we are impoverishing our communities, degrading our air, land and water and consuming the natural resources around us in order to subsidize the generation of corporate profits which amount to one fifth of the price we pay to enable those profits to be generated. This is like paying twenty dollars to set up a lemonade stand in our front yard and to clean it up afterwards so some wealthy stranger's kid can show up, sell his lemonade, earn four dollars and leave.
Yes, we are that stupid. We do it for "jobs" and "progress" and the American Dream which is skillfully sold to us by the best propagandists money can buy. It is woven into the most intimate and personal parts of our lives and colors our perceptions on levels we are often only dimly aware of. We reside in a vast image induced coma. How can an old stump in the woods compete with a multimillion dollar action adventure movie? Try and get a modern teenager to sit still in front of one of them long enough to tell the story of how it came to be.
But these stumps of mine are not externalities that can be measured in dollars and cents. Even if the companies that had hired the men to cut down the trees had also hired men to plant seedlings, the forest would be only a shadow of what it was before they came. Only after several hundred years (long after I am dead and completely forgotten) would it have returned to its original state. But they didn't hire men to plant trees; they left miles of stumps and other people came in and cleared the brush and laboriously pulled out the stumps for farms and pastures. And after the city grew and the farms and pastures became worth good money to developers they were sold and converted to vast subdivisions of homes for people who worked in the city and wanted to live out in the "country" where their children could be safe from city predators, the schools were good and they could play in the "woods."
My stumps are now in a patch of woods that has grown up since it was "externalized." There are Douglas firs which have reached a hundred and fifty feet in height and four feet in diameter and, unfortunately, are now worth money. Many years ago my neighbors, upon finding out how much they were worth, couldn't resist the temptation and clearcut their own properties. Money talks.
The patch of woods, in whose shadowy depths my stumps are concealed, consists of second growth cedars and Douglas firs interspersed with maples, alders, cottonwoods, vine maples, salmonberries, salal, Oregon grape, ferns and various lowlying plants. It is a tiny patch compared to the miles of subdivisions and strip malls which surround it. But it is one patch that will not fall to the short term greed that is consuming many stands of second growth trees in my neighborhood. It is a place I can come to and still appreciate the tragedy that happened so many years ago and is still happening today. Since I have a piece of paper that says it "belongs" to me, it is safe - as long as I live - from growth and progress.
One of the unplanned miracles of where I live is that I can look out over my tiny piece of land and see a vast expanse of green which extends all the way to the distant mountains. It is one of those accidents of location that makes it so I see no signs of those subdivisions and strip malls from my house; no signs of telephone poles, roads, cars, houses or any other appurtenances of human habitation. All that is concealed beneath green miles of scattered second growth Douglas fir and cedar and deciduous alders, maples and cottonwoods. In the winter, when only the evergreens remain leafed out I can see a neighbors shed and catch glimpses of other works of human hands around me. But in the summer I can pretend that I am alone in that wilderness of a hundred and ten years ago.
However, this pretense is only visual; my ears provide me with ample evidence of human activities. When I first moved here I was in the quiet of the countryside - I could, every once in a while, hear that unmistakable whooshing hum of tires on the road as one of my neighbors returned from work or an errand, but it was only for a minute and the silence always returned. Over the years, as development progressed, those whooshing hums became more and more frequent and I began to make out a distant, and constant, roar, like a far away river. The city was extending its grasp.
Cars belonging to the people who moved into all the new subdivisions being built upon the old pastures and farms whose owners capitalized on the huge prices developers were paying for their land brought their sounds of growth and progress to my quiet neighborhood. The schools became overcrowded, the police understaffed, the roads clogged and the developers left town to enjoy their profits in their fine homes in quiet unsullied countrysides, helicoptering over the traffic jams to their downtown offices far above the consequences of their profit generating activities.
Then, way off on Wall Street, a bunch of geniuses brought it tumbling down. The new subdivisions became ghost towns in various stages of development; weird vacant places with plotted squares of gravel roads and pipes sticking up in odd places. The developers sold their helicopters and banks began to fail. And the noise quieted down a bit.
Like the frog in a gradually warming pot, people were getting squeezed. Money started getting tighter and tighter. It was a delicate balance – a seized transmission or an unforeseen medical expense could easily tip them over into bankruptcy. Some got angry, some depressed, some drank. It was clear that no one powerful gave a shit about them. Just a bunch of fancy lies. Lying corporate advertising was no different than lying campaign ads.
The phrase “of the people, for the people, by the people” was one of the most infuriating lies. Just a sales pitch.
By definition “psychopaths” are:
predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse
Changing the wording a bit to read “satisfy their own selfish needs for profit” this is also a workable definition of a modern corporation.
It is clear that these “persons” are what matters to our elected representatives. They own the Republican party completely and most of the Democratic party. They have been given rights – squeezed from the 14th amendment by a court reporter and former corporate president – that should only belong to living, breathing citizens. They don’t need to breathe clean air, drink clean water. They don’t feel pain. They don’t need to eat healthy food. They don’t need medical care. They can’t be put in prison. And, worst of all, they live forever.
Since they care nothing about anything but profit, even though they can be (as psychopaths are) glib and charming mimics of human feelings, they are the greatest danger facing the planet today. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be shamed. They cannot be voted out of office.
If they didn’t own our government it would be easy to fix this problem. A “Duh” Law could be passed saying “corporations are not persons.” (It would be an easy bill to read.) This single law would pull the hanging thread and unravel the whole stinking sausage making machine that has put us all in the pot. Like frogs we sit in the pot while the psychopath gradually heats it up just enough to keep us in pain but not enough to kill us, because if we were dead we couldn’t buy stuff