The Future is Worth Protecting

And there it was; a screaming headline on the front cover of the Jersey Evening Post, urging islanders to be vigilant and keep an eye out for the unwanted, ie. desperate migrants who would possibly try and reach our shores on little boats.
Would anyone with brown skin qualify as a suspicious element? Or perhaps we should look out for someone slightly confused, somewhere in the vicinity of the harbour. Protecting our shores should rightly be a community effort. God forbid that the ravaged and displaced should reach us; our beaches are only for legal people and if they’re very, very rich, we might even welcome them with a tax break. We only cater to the ‘winners’ here in Jersey, those who have successfully played the system to extract wealth from it, not those who have been bogged down by forces beyond their own control, desperately dependent on those more fortunate than themselves.
Our island would not take in Syrian families, even though the United Nations had dubbed the Syrian conflict the gravest crisis of our generation. There were plenty of people who wanted to play a positive role and welcome some families, but the system couldn’t allow it. There was red tape everywhere. Chief minister Ian Gorst talked about legal constraints, preventing him from following through what he said he intended to do. Everyone’s hands were tied. When an Iranian asylum seeker turned up on our shores, he was chucked in jail, in spite being severely handicapped and in need of treatment by specialists. If it hadn’t been for the efforts of ordinary Islanders, lobbying, pressurizing and campaigning, he might have had to await the outcome of his asylum case in jail, a violation of international law, but yet something which the States were willing to accept.
When local families took him in, there was no enquiry or concern about his wellbeing. He was left to his own devices, leaving it up to Islanders to care, something to which our community responded amazingly. There was a real urge to care for this individual and numerous groups and people offered all kinds of help, from cooking meals, to taking him out and even teaching him English. On the other hand, it was all too clear this individual was a burden the comfortable rulers of our Island could do without. After six months of agony, our Iranian guest was granted asylum in the UK. Jersey proceeded to fortify its borders with France and reinforce its previous security commitments. They didn’t need to care. Where would the profit in that be? The courtesy of not caring is extended to locals as well. Jersey has the fastest growing wealth gap of the industrialized world and austerity measures will predictably target some of the more vulnerable groups of our society.

Jersey’s rejection of the vulnerable really stands in stark contrast with the red carpet we roll out for the villains of this world, the vultures of an economic system based on extraction rather than replenishing, who take, take take, until nothing is left but wasteland. Will the JEP ask us to be extra vigilant about parasitic companies like Glencore, who are massively involved in the plunder of some of the world’s poorest countries? Do we need to look out for those who destroy whole eco-systems while raking in record profits? After all, it’s only our planet we’re talking about. ‘Glencore brings in jobs. It is a legitimate business,’ I hear the apologists sigh. Sure, about as legitimate as Britain’s conquest of India, or its genocide in Kenya in the 1950s. That was all about profits and it made a small group of people very wealthy. It was also built on violence and coercion, but never mind. People who complained about details like that were surely just the enemies of healthy entrepreneurship. If they got in the way, we called them savages and exterminated them; simple, cost-effective and necessary for the onwards march of progress.
Imagine those backward first-nation peoples in America, only taking from nature what they needed, leaving all of that money in the ground???!! Brutes! Such enemies of business. Their savage desires resurfaced a few months back, when they united with all those tree-hugging, leftist snowflakes, blocking the planned pipelines through Standing Rock. I’m glad white America finally elected someone who built his legacy on annihilating opposition in the face of profiteering, the great extractor in chief; he’ll show those kumbaya singing primitives what real entrepreneurship looks like. According to climate experts, the Trump presidency spells further catastrophe for the environment. Who needs nature nowadays anyway?
I certainly don’t see the JEP or politicians instructing us to be wary of companies like Ashburton Ltd. which is registered in Jersey and has stakes in Exxon Mobil, Halliburton and Monsanto, investing in arms, chemicals, fossil fuels and food monopolies; nice! Good choices as well, very profitable. Let’s hope that juicy little conflict in Yemen, where children are now choking with cholera, simmers on a little; good for business. A food crisis gives a decent return on investment as well. Barclays Bank made about 500 million a few years back. It takes real entrepreneurship to stake out an opportunity when times are hard. Who needs regulations? Wasn’t it Darwin himself who defined evolution as natural selection and ‘survival of the fittest’? The poor need to help themselves and our planet…?? Aah well, it might not be as bad as they claim. Someone will invent a magical solution to global warming…. Won’t they?

Is it even funny that Ashburton makes the effort to inform us that they feel ‘the future is worth protecting,’ on their corporate social responsibility page? What a crock of shit. So they invest in Exxon Mobil, a company that was aware of global warming since the late 1970s, but chose to invest money that would spread misinformation and keep the public confused about the science, which was unequivocal. Or what about Halliburton, a company which made millions of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, causing millions of deaths and tearing apart the Middle-East, arguably playing a massive role in triggering our current refugee crisis. Monsanto is another lovely company, monopolizing global trade on food and forcing small farmers to buy their seed through patents, completely undermining food self-sufficiency in some of the poorest countries in the world.
Ashburton donates a bit of money to Durrell and Jersey Heritage so they can facilitate the further plunder of our ecosystem or the violent deaths of thousands of innocents. The future certainly is worth protecting. It sums it up, really.
Crime pays. There really is no other way of saying it. The crimes of these multinational companies are crimes against humanity. The damage their ‘entrepreneurship’ is wreaking, affects the public interest, while a few stakeholders rake in record profits. It is gangsterism, varnished with respectability. And it scours the globe as corporations grow bigger, annual turnovers often far outstripping that of states. These corporations operate like plagues of locusts, landing somewhere, consuming everything of value, which disappears into secrecy jurisdictions like Jersey, until it resurfaces in the pockets of the super rich. Capital roams freely, almost without constrictions, while people cannot, creating one of our modern world’s greatest contradictions: While human beings are restricted by passports borders and visas, corporations and investments can settle anywhere, seeking out the most favourable conditions to maximise their profits, often establishing themselves in low-tax jurisdictions and in places where labour costs are low as well. It is one of the primary reasons why global inequality has escalated so dramatically.
“Well, but Jersey would be stupid to bite off the hand that feeds it.” Are we paid for our silence to become complicit in the plunder of our world? Sure, there is a small group of people growing wealthy off of Jersey’s financial services, but it is all bubble money. When the economic or political climate changes, all we’ll be left with are big empty office buildings and overpriced properties. Jersey is among the most unequal societies in the world and having low taxes might sound nice, but it is regressive, as private services remain the privilege of few, while our public spaces keep shrinking.
It is why the world keeps spiralling further into crisis; we care, but are being guided to look in the wrong direction, often turning on each other, like dogs fighting over the scraps chucked down at us from above. Sighs of relief were heaved when the JEP reported this week about the arrest of a Bangladeshi ‘illegal’ immigrant. Phew, this danger to our wellbeing has safely been locked away, a massive calamity averted. Imagine him remaining undetected. We would really be in for some trouble.
So what about hope? The hope of protecting our world from parasites like Glencore, Ashburton, Exxon and all the rest of them? The hope of salvaging the beauties of our natural world; one of the things Gerald Durrell fought so hard for. Will we simply keep deluding ourselves while we race for the abyss? Do we accept Ashburton claiming that to them the future is worth protecting? Will we keep buying the nonsense, because ‘that’s just the way it is…’? Are we at least using the enormous wealth generated by multinational corporations and sloshed through our island to invest in the transition to a carbon-neutral economy? Are we training our young people to be future leaders, turning their creative young minds towards the building of post-carbon communities? Our natural clock is ticking and we need our communities to respond, adapt and turn their brightest minds towards the future of our planet. Jersey is focusing on the exact opposite; it has geared its entire economy towards accelerating humanity’s impending self-destruction!!
There are glimmers of hope. They exist in the masses of people resisting privatizations across Africa and Latin America. They surface when indigenous peoples fight to protect their environments. They are visible in Standing Rock, where a diverse and cross-sectional alliance managed to turn the area into Ground Zero for our climate fight. Hope is also to be found in new political formations, wishing to confront the rise of the far right, who have unwittingly become the storm troopers of the exploitative, regressive developments touched upon above. Hope lies with the immense courage of millions of displaced, who daily defy enormous odds to survive and continue their fight for a better future. But all these struggles desperately need to unite and translate into mass action, civil disobedience and revolutionary change. And that enormous task lies with our youngsters, who want to keep living on a planet which is habitable.
Winter is coming, but alliances are forged. Or is the election of Donald Trump nature’s way of accelerating humanity’s self-destruction while we all have a merry old laugh?

