PUTTING A BANDAID ON CANCER

It’s been called putting a bandaid on cancer, and that’s not even my wild-eyed, crazy way of saying it. Tennessee State Senator Steve Cohen, an elected official, called it that. But he’s an advocate of medical marihuana, so maybe he is wild-eyed and crazy. Still, he’s an state senator, and I, who am deeply suspicious of elected officials, am inclined to agree with him. What we are referring to is the ethics reform bill just passed by the Tennessee Legislature. Like any promise of reform from an unrepentant addict, it’s heartbreakingly meaningless. The bill puts limits on what lobbyists can do, but that’s like putting limits on how much a shark can bite instead of getting rid of the shark—if the shark has to take ten little bites to eat you instead of one big one, he’ll just take his time and bite you ten times to get what he wants, because you still haven’t kept him from getting what he wants.

What would “getting rid of the shark” look like? We can see an example in the State of Maine, which has recently made public financing of political campaigns a cornerstone of its democracy. Most Maine legislators are now campaigning with funds provided by the taxpayers of Maine, instead of the state’s wealthy business interests, and it is making a difference. Maine is now the only state in the Union that offers universal health care—something blocked year after year by lobbying interests although poll after poll reveals its popularity and study after study reveals its sanity. Just for another example, Maine has also passed legislation guaranteeing truckers overtime pay, although every trucking company in the state opposed it.

Here’s how lobbying and state government work elsewhere: in West Virginia, when legislation was introduced due to public outrage over accidents from illegally overloaded coal trucks, by the time the  lobbyists got through with it the law raised the legal load limit on coal trucks

A great deal of this has to do with the legal notion that corporations are “persons” in somewhat the same sense that you and I are persons: corporations are entitled to the same rights of free speech and discretionary spending that human beings are. (Fortunately, they have not yet been accorded the right to vote—although they can buy elections a lot more easily than you or I!) Now, there are some important differences between a corporation with the right of free speech and discretionary spending and a human being with those rights.

First, a corporation is likely to have a great deal more money and other resources than a human being—insofar as freedom of the press is for those who own one, they can buy not merely presses but editors and publishers and distributors and retail outlets. They can buy out their competition and shut it down much more readily than a private citizen can. Comcast, Bell, and some other big corporations are trying to do that to the internet, even as we speak.

Second, corporations, properly run, live much longer than human beings, and having composite brains made up of replaceable individuals dedicated to their service, are capable of carrying out more complex and longer-term plans than individual human beings. This can be a good thing. It can also be a very bad thing.

Third, a for-profit corporation is committed through its charter to one basic purpose: becoming bigger and wealthier. To state this a little differently, for-profit corporations are dedicated to infinite self-agrandisement. If this were the case for an individual human being, that person would be deemed a dangerous sociopath or psychopath, removed from all positions of responsibility, and segregated from society. In the case of corporations, we tend to put them in positions of responsibility and let them order society. I don’t know about you, but this does not make sense to me.

Not-for-profit corporations, by contrast, are primarily dedicated to providing some kind of service, rather than to self-enrichment. This is a much saner business model.

A fourth difference between corporations and individual humans is that, while humans may face capital punishment for crimes against society, corporations face no such direct threat. Only financial judgments may be levied against them, and if those financial judgments wreak havoc with the corporate bottom line, there are bankruptcy courts that are the financial equivalent of Intensive Care Units, designed to do everything they can to keep their corporate patients’ cash flowing. There is no such state-run fallback mechanism for individual human beings who run afoul of the death penalty—and due to recent changes in the law there’s a lot less help for those of us who fall into mere bankruptcy, too.

Now, I seem to be a bit far afield from ethics reform in the Tennessee Legislature, but I think real legislative ethics reform has to be sweeping enough to bring corporations to heel, including capital punishment for the most serious corporate crimes. That is, a corporation should be subject to dissolution for doing things that get large numbers of people killed or injured—think Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Dow, Dupont, asbestos, coal mining…the corporate sector in America is completely out of control. It should exist to serve the people, not the other way ’round, as our current government advocates.

I think another wider reform that would bring us a more ethical government would be greater competition in the political field. We need to work to break up the Demopublican stranglehold on elected office. The either-or political choices we are forced into by this monopoly do not encourage creative thinking. We need to make politics more of a multiple choice affair. Just for openers, we need to make it legal for so-called “third party” candidates to list their party affiliation on the Tennessee ballot.

Equally important would be the institution of Instant Runoff voting, which allows you to vote for your second choice as well as your first choice. For example, I’d rather see the Green Party’s Chris Lugo as senator from Tennessee than Democrat Harold Ford, but I’d much rather see Ford in the post than, just for example, Van Hilleary. So I could cast my primary vote for Chris, and my secondary vote for Harold. And, if Chris doesn’t win, but Ford can plainly see that he won because he was the second choice of a substantial minority of Green Party voters, then he knows he has to keep the Green Party faction happy to get elected. And if Chris gets elected because a whole lot of people feel more comfortable voting for a Green over a Democrat because they know they’re not supporting a Republican by splitting the non-Republican vote, so much the better.

Other reform measures that would result in a more honest legislature would be making referendum and recall readily available to the citizens of Tennessee, so that not only do the Republicrats lose their monopoly on elected office, the legislature no longer has a monopoly on enacting legislation. And of course, the foundation of any electoral system is a tamper-proof voting system—for which we need national legislation to replace Bush’s Helping Americans Vote Republican act, which, by pushing states towards non-verifiable electronic voting systems, makes it easier to steal elections.

Meanwhile, there’s cancer in our legislature and all we’ve got for it is this lousy bandaid. Guess we need to make more noise.

(no music segue)

WILSON’S BOTTLENECK

Renowned biologist Edmund O. Wilson estimates that the “combined biomass” (that means weight of the human population of the earth) is one hundred times greater than that of any other large species that has ever lived on Earth, though it’s possible that we are outweighed by the dung beetles. But, I digress…In order to sustain ourselves, Wilson says, we are sucking up about 40% of the planet’s production of biomass, outcompeting other species to the extent that one fifth of all bird species, a third to two fifths of all mammals, fish, and amphibians, and fully HALF of all plant species are threatened with extinction—crowded out by US—human beings. I just read that a record one third of the planet’s land surface is now under cultivation of some kind. Where can the wild things go?

I hope I don’t have to tell you that this is not a healthy situation. Species are already disappearing at a rate at least a thousand times more frequent than what seems to be normal background extinction. We seem to be in the early-midstages of a mass extinction, the kind of event that has only occurred perhaps five other times in the entire 2.1 billion year history of life on the planet.

The last great extinction, in the late Cretaceous period, which cleared out the dinosaurs and made way for the likes of us, or at least our monkey-faced ancestors, took place 65 million years ago. eliminated 85% of all species on the planet, and was evidently caused by a relatively small asteroid–only about six miles across.. there are a lot of those still out there, folks. But, I digress…The Permian extinction, which eliminated 95% of all species on the planet (amazing luck for our ancestors to get through that!) about 250 million years ago, is linked with widespread vulcanism, and the previous three extinctions all seem connected with glaciation. But this current mass extinction is being propelled by humanity’s success in appropriating the world’s resources for our own use. This extinction is being created by an animal that think of itself as intelligent, compassionate, and possessed of free will. It’s enough to make you wonder.

The question that remains to be answered is, “are we fraying the web of life to such an extent that it will no longer support us? Will this mass extinction culminate in our extinction?”

For some of us, most notably those living in sub-Saharan Africa, the answer already appears to be “yes.” For those of us who live in the comfort of North America or Europe, we can at best say, “not so far.”

Think about it for a minute, though. Those who seem to be the most indifferent to this almost inconceivable crisis are the ones who don’t think twice about their Mexican lettuce, Argentine beef, Chinese clothing, Canadian building materials, Japanese cars, and Saudi Arabian energy sources. They seem to think that America’s overwhelming military and technological superiority will always be there to help them live in the style to which they have become accustomed. They have no problem with fighting a pre-emptive war for oil, because deep in their hearts they know that might makes right, and since they have the might, they must be right. In any case, they have the most to lose, so they are committed to winning at any cost. Why not pre-emptive strikes on China and India, to cut their population down so they won’t use so much of that oil we want so badly?

But nobody wins if the Natural World loses. The natural world is not just a passive repository of great scenery and resources for us to exploit. The natural world is what creates the air we breathe, the soil that feeds us, and the temperature conditions in which we can survive. The natural world purifies our wastes and provides the water we drink and use for agriculture. The natural world “just grows” the grasses and trees that provide fodder for our animals, food, fuel, lumber and paper for us, and –yes, I’m repeating myself–the air we breathe. Sure, we plant crops, but “we” don’t grow them—nature does. And we don’t know what threshold will have to be crossed before these basic natural systems will fail. We may not know until we’ve crossed them. And by then it may be too late.

This is why we, as Greens, are not exactly “leftwingers.” We are actually rock-ribbed conservatives. We would like to conserve water, soil, and air, conserve petroleum, because we recognize that the human race is currently using these things up faster—in the case of oil, far, far faster—than they can be replenished. Everybody acts like petroleum is as common and replenishable as water, but it’s not. For all practical purposes, there is only so much of it, and when it’s gone there won’t be any more, and the end of petroleum in our economy isn’t just about a looming scarcity of vehicle fuel and heating oil, it’s about all the millions of things we make out of plastic not being cheap any more, it’s about fertilizers and pesticides that mass agriculture depends on being prohibitively expensive, it really is about the end of the American lifestyle we have all come to be so dependent on—or is it addicted to?

Surely we all know by now what needs to be done to prevent the coming crash—or at least mollify its impact. There are things we can do personally: We in the developed world need to back off the path of conspicuous consumption, eat food that is in season and grown close to home, learn to share with each other and appreciate each other’s company and talents. There are things we need to do institutionally: find ways to transfer appropriate technology and wealth to those who are severely impoverished, so that they can enjoy a graceful and sustainable standard of living. A little electricity, pure water, and access to health care and family planning would go a long way to ease the lives of billions. There are things we need to do politically: end the paradigm that favors the continued accumulation of wealth by the already wealthy and that favors violence as a solution to disputes. Suppose we said that corporations should no longer have standing as persons, that nobody needs to earn more than, say, a hundred thousand dollars a year, and that the best way to get rid of the threat of weapons of mass destruction would be for America and China—followed by the rest of the world’s governments– to quit manufacturing them and decomission their armed forces?

If we can just take a few steps towards sanity, the rewards will be great enough to keep our feet on that path. One step at a time…..