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A Word from Richard Risemberg for April, 2003How to Fight a Corporate War
One answer, of course, is oil, and the Great Subsidy that US businesses enjoy thanks to the primacy of the dollar in the petroleum market, which means that countries need dollars to buy oil, from which follows that most countries are competing for dollars. It's a seller's market for dollars. We can buy products and services for below their labor value, and resources for below their scarcity value, because other countries need dollars to buy petroleum and will do anything to get them. Further, the US depends on oil--cheap oil means cheap transport, and only with cheap oil can such a redundant and inefficient economic system as ours survive. Once we've bought cheap tomatoes from Mexico, cheap roses from Ecuador, and cheap radios from China, we have to get them over here in oil-powered boats, and move them around a rather large territory in oil-powered trucks and trains. And we move our people primarily in cars--one engine per passenger--and in aircraft, which need plenty of oil. Another answer is the euro. If the oil-producing states were to change even partially to the euro as a petrocurrency, there would be less competition for dollars. Countries seeking euros for oil purchases would deal with the European Union, not the US. The US might have to offer better deals to labor- and resource-providing countries who were no longer slaves of the dollar. Iraq, as it happens, recently changed its policy of accepting oil payments in dollars. Up until the invasion, it was accepting them in euros. But the plan to invade Iraq was a dream of the corporate cult long before that happened. Iraq holds the world's second-largest oil reserves. And Iraq was to be an example to the world that the US will have its oil, and its dollar-based economic hegemony, by hook or by crook. Whether it be by assassinating elected social democrats and installing a brutal (but US-dependent) dictator, as we did in Iran in 1954, or by outright invasion, as we are doing now. It's not the concept of the US that's at fault. The Constitution is perhaps the most equitable and liberating political document the world has ever known, and it would be wonderful if we lived by it. But the "American Dream" has been perverted by a corporate cult that has imposed a regime of subservient consumerism as the spiritual law of the land, and that uses the United States as a base, much as al-Qaeda used a complicit Afghanistan. The result is that the US, encompassing a terrain rich beyond almost any other, and with only 6% of the world's population, consumes 25% of the planet's resources and holds 50% of its wealth. We are the fat man swatting starving orphans away from the picnic table. The picnic table that they set for us. Right now the United States and its brethren buy goods, resources, and labor at below market value from poorer countries, then sell them "value-added" goods and services at far above production and distribution cost. We have set the rules so that this will happen. Look at the world oil situation, look at labor in Central America, Southeast Asia, and China (or even Mexican laborers working in the US itself), look at the wealth transfers effectuated from Argentina to US and European companies, facilitated through bribery...the list goes on and on. We have done this because commercial interests have contorted the laws of the land through cronyism and the thinly-disguised bribery of campaign contributions, and latterly (and most spectacularly) in the Cheney administration (to call it by its right name), by hijacking an election and putting themselves and their puppets in the seats of government. This has gone on to some extent at least from the days of the United Fruit Company's colonization of Central America, but the Oil Economy has accelerated the pace of depredations and perversions. Its comrades, the pharmaceutical industry--busy patenting other countries' traditional remedies on the one hand, and inventing new diseases for poor people to be cured of on the other--and agribusiness--with its terminator seeds that devastate genetic diversity while enslaving subsistence farmers to loans from US banks, as well as its relentless marketing of petrochemical poisons and fertilizers to a world that has 25% more food than it needs--they are the infantry that follows in the wake of Big Oil's armored columns. The result is a world that sees us as bullies and robbers, or clever con men at best. This is not right. We cannot strive to be rich and claim to be righteous as well. You cannot have great wealth without accompanying poverty, since any attempt to make all wealthy results in inflation (not that it's ever been tried). Wealth is always the result of robbery or connivance. What you can have is a world of equitable prosperity. How to achieve this on an international scale? Simple (in an easier-said-than-done way): members of Western economies (be they companies or countries), and especially the United States, pay Second and Third World countries fair prices for their resources and labor, and pay indirectly by not imposing environmental burdens on their lands and peoples in exchange for cheaper goods. In other words, just play fair. If only we in the US really wanted to.... The Osamas of the world would find little sympathy in the streets if this were so. Now is the time to liberate America from the corporate cults whose influence has made our government a travesty of the Constitution. And we need not wait for political action to do it through the slow churn of legislation. We can make corporate power irrelevant by refusing to play its game. Start by examining the moral extensions of your own career. It is no longer enough--it was never enough--to say that you did what you were told and did it well. It is not sufficient to uphold shareholder value, to make a good living, to get the pat on the back from the man on the next rung up. It is no longer enough--it was never enough--honestly to care in the silence of your heart, if your acts support dishonesty. There will be no comfort in fitting into the corporate structure if that structure is just a gilded jail for all the world. Nor will there be any mercy at the next Nuremberg, where the judges will be starving wraiths and the sneers of your own grandchildren. Just to have done a good job is meaningless. The task must be worth doing, not just worth doing well. Listen: sincerity in the service of evil is no virtue, nor are diligence, competence, or dedication. Virtue does not inhere in such qualities but depends utterly on the circumstances in which one exercises them. One's first responsibility is to determine for oneself the rightness of an action before undertaking to carry it out, whether for oneself or in service to another. Otherwise one inevitably becomes a slave to one's own whims, and to hypocrites and other villains. Likewise, "right and wrong" and "rules and order" have no relationship whatsoever. They are independent qualities. Most of the evils our species has perpetrated, from the great holocausts of conquerors and tyrants to the corporate robberies of recent times, have depended on "good soldiers" and "team players" to carry them out. Let us favor justice and freedom over efficiency and security--the latter pair comprising the two most dangerous words in any language. The revolution must begin with you. The changes have already begun in the world, but every revolution must begin anew in every human heart. Now is the time for us to dedicate ourselves to honest work, even if it means losing the perks and the salaries, the company cars, the pats on the back. Now is the time to examine how much of the value you ascribe to yourself comes truly from your own acts, or whether you too have been conned into buying stolen goods. Boycott the corporate cult. Don't work for a large corporation if you can avoid it. If you work for a corporation which acts dishonestly in the world, leave it. Find a job where you do good, even if you do less well. If you can't leave it, subvert it from within--it's easy. Just talk about the responsibility we all bear to live justly and share the earth, and to clean up after our own messes. Simply talking about such things to your colleagues is in itself a subversive act in the American workplace. Don't invest in the cult. Do not own their stock. If you want to play the game, find a "socially-conscious" mutual fund, which at least will put your money with less-harmful companies. But it's better just to work for your pay, as you would expect your employees to do. We should take an example from the Islamic world and ban interest on loans. Impractical, you say? But think of it this way: one would then invest only in companies one believed in, and had a real stake in. Perhaps only in companies one worked in. And instead of waiting for money to fall like rain, one would dig a well and water the garden. If we had lived like this fifteen years ago, perhaps the dot.com crash might not have happened. Don't buy from the cult. If you live a life of thoughtless consumption, well, start thinking about it. Do you really need to drive everywhere? Do you need to live isolated in the suburbs, muffled in the delusion that you are self-sufficient? Do you fear human contact? Who taught you to hide so well, in your dim room, in your quiet house, in front of your widescreen advertisement platform? Support neighborhood businesses when you can, those who will be responsive to their customers, rather than big chains that tell you what you need to want, because it easier for them to sell. Read books instead of ads, eat "slow food" and remember what your taste buds are for. Walk to work, or take a bus and look at the faces around you. Talk to someone you don't know. Sleep with the window open. Instead of cursing the rain, wonder what the world would be like if it never fell. Look over the fences you've put around your soul. There will be a gate there somewhere. Question, and seek. There are hints to the answers all around you. I'll list some sites where you can learn more at the end of the article, but before I do that, I want to offer you the words of a couple of fellows whose names you will probably recognize--one a physicist, and the other a lawyer, both of whom changed the world, though neither ever held public office nor worked for a Fortune 500 company. I hope they'll speak to you as they have to me:
If you're ready to learn more, visit some of the following sites:
Richard Risemberg Go to A Word from Eric Miller
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It is always easier to wave flags and shout slogans than to act according to the principles outlined in the Constitution. This afflicts not just barstool generals hoisting their Buds in rowdy cheer while their tax dollars convert Iraqi civilians into collateral damage, but also, most notably, the administration of our putative constitutional republic, who spared no effort to ignore the slow, unspectacular, and inexorable success of the UN Inspections Program in Saddam Hussein's many times unfortunate country. One must wonder why this particular war was so important to the corporate warriors who presently rule the United States.
