-Caveat Lector- http://www.truthout.com/02.21C.Absence.Democracy.htm
WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! In the Absence of Democracy by Jennifer Van Bergen t r u t h o u t | February 20, 2002 One week before the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, I was on a safari truck travelling through those very two countries. On the truck was a collection of books people had left for others to trade for: you take a book; you leave a book. I left my Kenya travel book and took Jerry Mander's "In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations." It was a well-worn copy, bent and water-damaged. On the inside of the cover were the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the previous owners. They both listed their addresses as Whitehorse, Y.T. -- the abbreviation for the Yukon Territories, part of northern Canada which is still largely untouched and inhabited by native peoples. This old book pretty much changed my world-view and explained much of what I had already perceived going on globally. Subsequent to that trip, I wrote a paper on "Economic Development and Human Rights in Kenya," in which I argued that Westerners had no right to have ever gone to Africa to impose our corporate philosophies on millennia-old nomadic and agricultural tribal communities. I argued that our incursions had destroyed ancient, environmentally sustainable ways of life and replaced them with profit and exploitation as the chimeric basis for happiness. I wrote about the hostility I could sense in East Africa towards Western visitors. The anger was palpable and made one feel unsafe. This I felt only a week before those embassies were bombed by Muslim terrorists. I could see the results of Western incursion in East Africa with my own eyes. Where Westerners had "improved" areas, all was in decay, both environmentally and morally. High crime, pollution, poor sanitation, poverty, corruption. Where Westerners had not reached, there was yet great, undestroyed natural beauty and a strong sense of community. There was yet a light in the eyes of the people who lived agriculturally self-sustaining lives. But the eyes of the 12-year-old boy who sniffed glue on the street of the decaying city of Kisumu were vacant, except for flashes of occasional rage at his mother's absence and my inability to take him with me. The paper I wrote was for a class I took in law school (taught by a former Ethiopian Ambassador to the U.S.), and I got an A on it, but I never found anyone interested in publishing it. Indeed, one progressive economics publication found it uniformly lacking in proper research approaches. The fact that I used what they termed "popular culture" (meaning, I suppose, Mander's book, but I also drew on many other sources, including law review articles and my own observations) to support my arguments seems to have been a personal affront to the learned reviewers. But perhaps what was more offensive to these economists and sociologists was Mander's ground-level assertion that corporate culture and environmentally-sustainable culture cannot co-exist. Mander, in fact, asserts that corporate culture kills environmentally-sustainable cultures. This is a pretty powerful statement. One which I am sure many people would like to continue to deny. But, I wonder what those scholarly reviewers think now about that thesis, in the light of September 11th and Enron. I suspect that business intellectuals, who are as dissociated as can be from the effects of their "progress" on this planet, will continue to find excuses for turning a profit at the expense of the very foundations of life on earth: our environment and our bonds of humanity. To reinforce a point I've tried to make in earlier articles, democracy is not a game. It is the only basis for sustainable life on earth. But democracy does NOT mean "free market" removal of restraints for corporations. Why? Because corporations are not people. They are fictitious entities which have no morals and are not answerable for their actions, unless a statute says so. As Tony Benn, Britain's former minister of industry said, according the The Nation: "If you want to know where economic globalization along the lines cheered on by the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, George W. Bush and Tony Blair is headed, look at Enron. Globalization has created an international no man's land where businesses survive by engaging in financial practices that no responsible nation-state would permit." In corporate government -- that is, in the absence of democracy -- the interests of humanity are subjugated to the interests of personal profit, hiding behind the guise of legitimate corporate pursuits. In aboriginal communities -- communities which depend on good treatment of the land and of each other in order to survive -- it would be unthinkable to do something socially or environmentally unsound. Corporate culture -- and that IS the culture we now live in -- has lost this essential connection. We have so far lost it that we can sit and argue about whether damaging the land all that much or only this much will really after all do substantial harm. We really believe that the idea of unlimited growth is viable, that it's okay to endlessly dig up the earth to "develop" nonrenewable resources, and ultimately that any business practice is okay as long as you turn a profit, take care of your buddies, and don't get caught. If you get caught, well then, you just didn't play the game well enough. Never does any one of the corporate profit players ever consider that maybe, just maybe, the game itself is all wrong; that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be doing ANY of this stuff at all. Nobody ever considers the idea that maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to return to solidly environmentally-dependent and -sustainable lives. None of us considers that possibility. Why? Because we no longer can. Because we are all dependent on technology and machines, gas and oil, electricity, power plants, and more. It is hard to imagine changing our entire mode of living -- especially if we are doing at all well in our profession -- for the uncertain end of reconnecting to something to which we can not even remember ever having been connected. Because there are no words or figures in our culture which convey what nature is to us, we forget its very existence, and brutalize ourselves in the process. This is what Manders calls life "in the absence of the sacred." I don't have a quick solution. I flew to Africa in an airplane. I reach my readers via the internet. I drive my gasoline-powered car to the supermarket. I am as dependent as anyone on this human-created technologically-superimposed world. But, this I know and will say: that what this Administration is doing bears a long, hard look. The layers of fog are increasing: no answers, less and less accountability (and look at what's happening with campaign finance reform), half-serious congressional investigations (well, 90% of Congress owes Enron), increasing executive secrecy, incursions on civil rights, and always, always deniability. And where is there any assurance, let alone proof, that any act the Administration has taken has been beneficial to anyone but themselves? Are these really the kinds of leaders we want? *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for nonprofit research and educational purposes only.[Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ] Want to be on our lists? Write at [EMAIL PROTECTED] for a menu of our lists! 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