Supply side venality
There are whistleblowers now prepared to explain how the oil and gas majors have no intention of helping limit climate change. Absurdly powerful corporations with bought influence everywhere they need it and subtle propaganda campaigns to manage public opinion will sell the oil they want to sell. It matters little that energy policy changes or that people buy EVs — the oil will be produced and sold.
The environmental damage from growing soy at rock bottom prices follows the same logic: more and more will be grown and it will be sold. New uses will be found in food that will further undermine human and animal health: not from any particular problems with soy but because of the business logic of its supply. There is no demand as such, only successful supply. Animal fodder does not drive growing, it is an outlet for soy that will be grown whatever.
I learnt these lessons working as a consultant to big supermarket chains and food services companies. What gets sold is what gets sold and the reasons for selling it have to do with margins and market positioning. There is a constantly repeated mantra about consumer choice but it is not allowed to interfere with supply side logic. If you do a quick health status assessment of customers when you are in a store, that is entirely fair. Addictions and particularly sugar addiction is a core sales tool.
We are reminded again this week that gun manufacturers in the US will sell more and more guns to US citizens no matter how much carnage they create. Firearms are the number one cause of death in US children, and the situation is getting worse. What price gun manufacturers saying they are responding to customer demand? What price an AR15 just being the gun that people want to own?
Bayer produces vast quantities of glyphosate biocide and finds uses for it, gets agricultural operators to become dependent on it no matter what the consequences for them and the public. It is part of a business model that gets agriculture dependent on technologies with escalating needs. There is legislation in Europe, but the business logic is simply to find a way round or through any restrictions and to up the propaganda campaigns.
In all these cases political support is bought to limit restrictions on business and in the worst cases to engage in predatory delay. When it is inevitable that restrictions will be put in place, corporations just delay the day so that they can continue to make a killing at whatever price.
What is the moral situation?
We act as though the ability to make money in a market is good in itself, that there should be no restrictions on trade unless there is a compelling case for regulation. And we are slow to recognise that regulation is often a tool for exploiters to use for their own ends. We allow corporations to use their huge resources for legal manoeuvres that jeopardise other parties with more public-spirited aims.
There used to be a thing about creating employment. About a thriving economy. About the balance of trade. Which somehow now seems so 1970s. Wages have not grown in all that time. But the supply side factors have undermined the quality of life, possibly terminally. How did we get that so wrong?
Nora Bateson talks currently about how the narratives insist that the individual is the unit of change. Sort of Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society” on steroids. Of course, all these criminal supply side antics love nothing more than people feeling they have to take personal responsibility.
I once met on a long train journey a South African commercial spear-fisherman diver. The offshore reef paradise he used to hunt in was ripped up by vast commercial bottom trawler factory ships and would never recover. One day’s profit set against a lifetime’s useful employment and wonder. That seems to me to be a metaphor for what we are talking about here.
The rest of the story still resonates too. He had just paid over his entire life savings to try and establish his South African credentials as a chiropractor in the UK, so as to be able to support his girlfriend that way. Many official bodies now mainly exist to earn fees rather than do their job for society: perhaps the Health and Safety Executive is a good example here.
Pigeons and roosts
The phase of (lack of) humanity we are in cannot last. That is not a wishful statement, it is an almost geometrical truism. When you undermine the bases on which you trade, even the most powerful corporations will crash, taking with them much collateral damage.
It doesn’t matter what politicians or executives or futurists say about a coming crash. The crash has its own dynamics that are largely independent of the actors in the situation. We have been through this once with the banking crash and with hindsight what the banks did was play chicken with a deteriorating situation — they tried to trade and make money out of seriously flaky “assets” until the music stopped.
I was once treated to a life lesson by the head of a very progressive insurance company. I was part of an outfit looking to demonstrate better ethics as a good business practice, and this guy said so passionately not to waste time and energy on the executives of the high street banks because they were not capable of managing better, they were both second grade and lacking a moral compass.
This is the real problem with corruption and croneyism. The regulators and committees for this and that are already in the pocket of second-rate jobsworth timeservers. They will do the job they perceive they were put there for. They simply do not recognise the public interest as a thing at all, let alone a valid stance.
In the banking crash the Queen asked why all the economists had not predicted it. A slack handful of economists did predict it but they were overruled and crowded out by the commentariat. It will be no different except that the dimensions of the crashes to came will be more the financial and banking sectors.
Licence to operate
I used to write about removing the licence to operate of the sort of corporations we are talking about here. Nowadays it seems inconceivable that such an event could occur. Even breaking up large corporations to improve competitive behaviour is seldom done even when it is talked about. This should give us pause. This is a description of a unipolar world order where corporations and their money and lawyers hold all the cards.
The big pharmaceutical companies and the agrochemical companies get fined billions of dollars and it make no difference to their behaviour. The arms companies are arguably worse but don’t get prosecuted. The food companies have collectively destroyed public health with no comeback. This should also give us pause. The law is used in practice to keep the little man and the innovative small company in line with the venal policies of the big fish.
Whatever you think of the global pandemic, it is clear that it is a problem with poor metabolic health. To the best of my knowledge no public body anywhere is addressing the underlying problem with diet. This should give us pause too. There is an open goal with near zero cost to address a pressing problem and it is not on the agenda, despite there being high-profile passionate advocates for a programme.
It is not clear to me where the exit lies from this mess. Hegemony is complete. Any deviation form the destruction being wreaked in view as eccentric at best and criminal at worst. What did Julian Assange actually do wrong? How are we to make change stick without Assanges? Why is this so far from the agenda? I have deliberately chosen the famous name but there are lots of brave people whose names never even make the news. We really don’t want the mirror which reveals just how little control we have left.
The more complete the control exerted by corporations, the more easily people are persuaded to take the King’s Shilling for the sake of being allowed to do work on real stuff. I know bright-eyed and bushy tailed researchers who are quite sure they are cutting edge even though they know they are not allowed to work on things that would up-end the science, are already up-ending the science. They just say that these other, more hopeful, realities are not science.
Polarisation
We know very clearly now from US and UK politics that the powerful tactic to maintain this disastrous state of affairs is polarisation. Everything, anything said by a Democrat is immediately held to be twaddle by a Republican and vice versa. The attitude consumes all the energy and puts any actual quest after truth beyond reach. We see it every day. Try asserting that conception is a complex process that does not and cannot take place at a point in time. Try to find people who want to listen to that angle on truth and where it might lead.
The last thing the people spawning polarisation want is an actual debate on actual issues. They want to demonstrate to both sides that it is not possible to have open debate. We have lost the sense that truth is something to fight for, something to believe in. We cave in to “well he would say that wouldn’t he?”. We allow working for a future to be sidelined as Utopian. We give the benefit of the doubt to people who are actually cynical manipulators who have no doubt.
The only benefit I can see from the debasement of public life is that the mask slips. It is now tolerably clear that the UK government is largely controlled by Russian money and dark money from the US. That was always going to be a challenge to establish. It is also clear that the Conservative party as an institution have no interest in governing for the benefit of the country. That has often been said but often discounted as too cynical. And there is gallows humour in understanding just how ignorant and know-nothing government ministers can be.
I play a game in which when one polarised camp throws insults at the other side I use the event to understand what the insult-thrower is trying to cover up. Where in current events is the actual smoking gun that is being diverted from, by accusing opponents of exactly the same crime. If the cap fits better on the accuser I see that as valid evidence.
The UK government has committed many serious crimes, of which we only know a few. But whether you take a constitutional view, or a legal view or a financial view, the biggest of these crimes are not the centre of attention with the government’s critics. That should give you pause too. We can all get hot under the collar about parties (and we should) while multi-billion-pound corruption can wait.
Social organisation
Any response to all these pauses is social. It has to involve people joining minds and joining forces. It has to forge something out of the sense that we are all going to hell. And probably the most apt summary here is to note how difficult it is to imagine such a force, to join with such a force, to create such solidarity. The measure of the damage that has been done is truly in the difficulty of mounting a response. Of course the establishment leant a long time ago just how to keep people from exerting their true power, and they do so now.
Maybe we should twist as well: so far all the technologies that promised freedom have played a role in repression. “surrendering to total surveillance one convenient tech at a time” Abeba Birhane
