Oil Spill In The Gulf: Chris Hedges

Well, it could be the greatest environmental disaster in the history of humans...but even if it's not, it's still worth getting some perspective from Chris Hedges. If you haven't read War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, you're missing out. Well, here's his latest, quoted in full:

BP and the ‘Little Eichmanns’
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/bp_and_the_little_eichmanns_20100517/
Posted on May 17, 2010

By Chris Hedges

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.

Those who carry out this global genocide—men like BP’s Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume’’—are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, “little Eichmanns.” They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Hannah Arendt wrote of “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. “One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization,” Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats “hedonists of power,” and warns that their “obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world.”

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.

Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation,” written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences—the depressions, wars and totalitarianism—that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function.” He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political system—which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure “the demolition of society.”

“In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Polanyi wrote. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”

The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.

America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, “world civilization will disintegrate as a whole.” This time around we will take the planet down with us.

“We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the ‘end’ of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense,” writes Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress.” “Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won’t be another like it—not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds.”

The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.

The Monoculture of Food, Explained

Chaos has, over the past couple of years, begun to realize just how toxic the American diet actually is, and why. In brief, the vast overproduction (caused in part by subsidies to agribusiness) of corn, soy, and other grains has resulted in a monoculture of food, wherein the same substances are introduced into the ingredients of food items or as feed for industrially farmed animals (chickens are referred to as "crops," for example in the referenced article), such that there is in fact, little variety in the highly refined carbohydrate/inferior meat diet foisted upon the unsuspecting public. For more reading on this most important subject, we fly, figuratively, across the Pond to read this excerpt from an upcoming book (nice title for the article: "Our Diet of Destruction"). If it's a surprise to you that a tiny number of gargantuan corporations control most of the food production, you need to do a bit more reading...start with Michael Pollan.

Our Final Visit To The Hill Of Shame

The former Mountain of Shame, now shrunk to a mere hill, has contaminated five wells of vital Edwards aquifer water, as efforts to extinguish it and "make it go away" are perhaps finally bearing fruit (albeit at a huge cost). Unfortunately, the ignorance, apathy and indifference to environmental destruction symbolized by this monolith will remain embedded within the local population, driving its monster trucks and SUVs, growing ever more obese by gorging on cheap and empty corn-fed fast food, happily and unconsciously shopping for more cheap junk to bring meaning into their empty lives, or taking refuge in the cult of celebrity worship or primitive religious rites. This, as news comes that Saudi Arabia's oil production declined 8% last year. Read the link, ponder, and then take a drive out in traffic today, readers: experience the Matrix at its most powerful.

An Enlightened Citizenry Offers Solutions to the Mountain of Shame

NOT!
Well, here they are,published in the local rag (really), in all their ignorant glory, for your amusement (Chaos has just about run out of laughs, between this and all the coverage in the MSM of a certain celebrity's death and her fatal refrigerator...):

Solution One:

"Instead of spraying more of our precious drinking aquifer water, why not spray the whole accursed mountain of burning mulch with concrete?

It would be wise to put to use several concrete conveyers and long-armed track spraying machines so they will spew wet concrete instead of water.

Once the concrete dries and settles with its own heavy weight, such an undertaking will both smother and extinguish the whole mess of burning mulch for good. Then, the Helotes mulch fire will be history."

Oh, concrete just takes so long to dry, and we have to get back to our shopping! Oh, wait, this guy has a better idea:

"What's this? Millions of dollars ... millions of gallons of water ... contaminating the aquifer ... weeks and months to get rid of the smoldering mulch pile?

I've got a very simple, fast and low-cost solution. Blow it up! They do it to buildings, casinos and mountains with a few well-placed high-explosive charges in a split second.

Level it with explosives, sprinkle water on anything burning, then plow it under or haul it off. Shouldn't be more than an inch or so layer of mulch over the area after the explosion, which would be easily and quickly contained if there is any combustion.

A good Army demolition unit and a bunch of C4 explosive should do the job just right!"

Yes, nothing like good oldfashioned American ingenuity. Thank goodness for the astute citizens of this community.

A Wistful Morning: Tahiti

Humanity's accelerating "footprint" on the planet is the subject of today's article in the nation's paper of record. Oh, you won't see anything in the piece dealing with the underlying causes of the ruination of the islands once called "Paradise on Earth," but the article is a fine one in that it encapsulates humanity's current problems (perhaps intensified on this small string of Pacific islands). To whit: the main islands of French Polynesia no longer resemble utopia, what with the degradation caused by (oh yes) too many people and their resulting waste. Instead, to get the full experience, it is necessary to move to the outer islands, whose future is very much in doubt due to global heating. There are many sights in this world that will soon be gone forever, so Chaos recommends readers to see as many of them as possible.

Fire On The Mountain (of Shame)

Well, Chaos supposes this is just an excuse to post another dramatic picture of the symbol of why Derrick Jensen calls developers "killers," but the news today is that the firefighting efforts have slowed while the use of 300,000 gallons of water per day is investigated to make sure the region's sole source of water is not contaminated. A more fitting example of the local development scene cannot be imagined. (Note that the title of this monument appeal to Chaos' sense of the ironic, since it can only be shameful to those who are aware enough to realize what it symbolizes....)

The Mountain of Shame

A few weeks ago Chaos was performing almost-daily ablutions to the God of Exercise, this time on a bicycle, and when rounding a corner came face to face with a large mountain of dead trees, seemingly three or four stories high, in the middle of a field. As amazing as this was, and as a symbol of the local environmental destruction, it was small potatoes for what happened next: someone set it on fire, and it will burn by itself for quite a long time (a year or more) if not extinguished, which of course will cost quite a lot of money (hence the reluctance of various state and local officials to get involved). Much has been made in the local media about "health hazards" of the said burning, but nothing mentioned about what an embarrassing symbol of willfully ignorant environmental disaster this is. The sickening irony is almost perfect: not only do the effects of the destruction of the ground cover (for enabling the building of unsustainable suburban sprawl)linger for years, but the detritus actually further contributes to air pollution. As a further totem of the cluelessness of the local population, this is fine beyond measure. Chaos wishes to have the wit to make this stuff up, but unfortunately, reality is much more bizarre than imagination.