Capitalism bills us double, first we pay and then it steals our future

                Capitalism bills us double, first we pay and then it steals our future

By Jonathan Cook: Here's a word that runs the risk of dissuading you from reading further, even though it may be the key to understanding why we are in such terrible political, economic and social mess. That word is "externalities."

It sounds like a definition of economics, a piece of economic jargon. But it is also the cornerstone on which the current Western economic and ideological system has been built. To focus on how externalities work and how they have come to dominate all spheres of our lives is to understand how we are destroying our planet and, at the same time, offer the way to a better future.

In economics, "externalities" are generally defined indifferently as the effects of a commercial or industrial process on a third party that are not included in the cost of that process.

Here's what a familiar example should look like. For decades cigarette manufacturers made huge profits by hiding scientific evidence that their product could eventually prove lethal to customers. Companies benefited by externalizing the costs associated with cigarettes, death and illness, to those who bought them and to society at large. People gave their money to Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, as these companies made Marlboro and Lucky Strikes smokers less and less healthy.

The outsourced cost was paid - it is still paid - by the clients themselves, by bereaved families, by local and national health services and by the taxpayer. Had the companies had to take over these various accounts, it would have been totally unsuccessful to manufacture cigarettes.

Inherently violent

Externalities are not incidental to the way capitalist economies function. They are an integral part of them. After all, it is a legal obligation of private companies to maximize profits for their shareholders, in addition, of course, to the personal incentive that bosses have to enrich themselves and the need for each company to avoid making itself vulnerable to more profitable and predatory competitors in the business. market.

Therefore companies are motivated to offload at as many costs as possible. As we will see, externalities mean that someone other than the company itself pays the true cost behind their profits, either because those others are too weak or ignorant to defend themselves or because the bill is due later. And for that reason externalities - and capitalism - are inherently violent.

All of this would be very obvious if we did not live within an ideological system, the definitive echo chamber imposed by our corporate media, which is an accomplice in hiding this violence or normalizing it. When externalities are particularly onerous or harmful, as they invariably are in one way or another, it becomes necessary for a company to obscure the connection between cause and effect, between its accumulation of benefits and the resulting accumulation of damage caused to a community, through a distant country, the natural world or all three.

This is why corporations, those that inflict the biggest and worst externalities, spend a great deal of time and money aggressively managing public perceptions. They do this through a combination of public relations, advertising, media control, political lobbying, and the capture of regulatory institutions. Much of the work of business is deception, either by rendering externalized harm invisible or by gaining resigned acceptance from the public that harm is inevitable.

In that sense, capitalism produces a business model that is not only rapacious but also psychopathic. Those seeking profit have no choice but to inflict harm on society at large, or the planet, and then cover up their deeply antisocial, even suicidal actions.

Psychopathic demands

A recent movie - from last year - that alludes to how this form of violence works was Dark Waters, about the long-running legal battle with DuPont over the chemicals it developed to make nonstick coatings for pots and pans. From the beginning, DuPont research showed that these chemicals were highly dangerous and accumulate in the body. Science overwhelmingly suggested that exposed people would be at risk of developing cancerous tumors or having children with birth defects.

DuPont would profit enormously from its chemical discovery as long as it could keep the investigation hidden. So that's exactly what your executives did. They put aside basic morality and acted in accordance with the psychopathic demands of the market.

 

 

 

DuPont produced saucepans that contaminated their customers' food. Workers were exposed to a cocktail of deadly poisons in their factories. The company stored the toxic waste products in drums and then secretly disposed of them in landfills where they leaked into the local water supply, killing livestock and causing an epidemic of disease among local residents. DuPont created a chemical that is now found in all parts of our environment, putting the health of future generations at risk.

But a movie like Dark Waters necessarily turned a case study in how capitalism commits violence by externalizing its costs into something less threatening, less revealing. We repudiate DuPont executives as the ugly sisters of a pantomime rather than ordinary people, not unlike our parents, our brothers, our offspring, ourselves.

In truth, there is nothing exceptional about DuPont's history, other than the company's failure to keep its secret from the public. And that exposure was anomalous, it happened only late and against great odds.

One important message that the film's nice ending fails to convey is that other corporations have learned from DuPont's mistake, not the moral "mistake" of outsourcing their costs, but the financial mistake of being caught doing it. Corporate lobbyists have since worked to further capture regulatory authorities and amend transparency and legal discovery laws to avoid any repetition, to ensure that they are not held legally liable in the future, as DuPont was.

Victims of our bombings

Unlike the DuPont case, most externalities are never exposed. Instead they hide in plain sight. These externalities do not need to be hidden because they are not perceived as externalities or because they are considered so unimportant that they are not worth taking into account.

The military-industrial complex, which President Dwight Eisenhower, a former US general, warned us about more than half a century ago, excels at these kinds of externalities. Its power derives from its ability to outsource its costs to the victims of its bombs and its wars. They are people we know and who matter little to us: they live far from us, they look and sound different from us, they are denied names and life stories like ours. They are simply numbers that mark them as terrorists or, at best, unfortunate collateral damage.

The externalities of Western war industries are opaque to us. The chain of cause and effect is hidden today as "humanitarian intervention." And even when the externalities of war hit our borders, when refugees flee from bloodshed, or nihilist cults sucked into the power vacuums we leave behind, or the debris of infrastructure that our weapons cause, or from environmental degradation and pollution we unleash, or economies ruined by our plundering of local resources, yet we do not recognize these externalities for what they are. Our politicians and the media transform the victims of our wars and our resources that become, at best, economic migrants and, at worst, invaders knocking on our doors.

Snapshots of the catastrophe

If we completely ignore the externalities inflicted by capitalism on victims beyond our shores, we are gradually waking up very late in the day to some of the externalities of capitalism much closer to home. Parts of the corporate media are finally admitting what can no longer be plausibly denied, which is self-evident to our own senses.

For decades politicians and the corporate media managed to hide two things: that capitalism is a model of endless consumption, totally unsustainable and for profit. And that the environment is gradually being damaged in ways that are harmful to life. The damage was in the shadows, as was the fact that the two are causally connected. The economic model is the main cause of environmental damage.

People, especially the young, are slowly waking up from this forced state of ignorance. The corporate media, even its most liberal elements, are not leading this process, they are responding to that awakening.

Last week the Guardian newspaper featured two stories on externalities, even if it did not frame them as such. One was about the filtration of microplastics from baby bottles to babies and the other about the toll that air pollution is taking on the populations of major European cities.
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This latest story, based on new research, specifically assessed the cost of air pollution in European cities - in terms of "premature death, hospital treatment, lost workdays and other health costs" - at £ 150 billion a year. year. Most of this was caused by pollution from vehicles, the profitable product of the automobile industry. The researchers admitted that their figure was an underestimate of the true cost of air pollution.

But of course, even that underestimation was reached solely on the basis of metrics prioritized by capitalist ideology: the cost to the economy of death and disease, not the incalculable cost in lost and damaged human lives, let alone the harm to other people, species, and the natural world. Another report from last week alluded to one of those many additional costs, showing a sharp rise in depression and anxiety caused by air pollution.

The other story, about baby bottles, is part of a much larger story of how the plastics industry, whose products are derived from the fossil fuel industry, has been filling our oceans and soils with plastics, both visible and invisible. Last week's report revealed that the sterilization process in which bottles are heated in boiling water causes babies to ingest millions of microplastics every day. The study found that plastic food containers dumped loads of microplastics much higher than expected.

These stories are snapshots of a much broader environmental catastrophe unfolding across the planet caused by an industrialized, profit-driven society. In addition to warming the climate, corporations are cutting down forests that don't burn first, stripping the planet of its lungs, destroying natural habitats and soil quality, and rapidly wiping out insect populations.

The externalities of these industries are, for the moment, impacting the natural world more severely. But they will soon have more visible and dramatic effects than our children and grandchildren will feel. None of these constituents currently have a say in how our capitalist "democracies" are run.

Perception managers

Capitalism is Double-Billing Us: We Pay From Our Wallets Only to be Robbed of Our Future

Capitalism is not only hurting us, it is billing us twice: first taking out of our wallets and then depriving us of a future. We have now entered an era of profound cognitive dissonance.

Unlike a few years ago, many of us now understand that our future is at serious risk from changes in our environment, the result. But the task of today's perception managers, like those of yesteryear, is to obscure the main cause, our economic system, capitalism.

The increasingly desperate effort to dissociate capitalism from the impending environmental crisis, to break any perception of a causal link, was highlighted earlier this year. It was revealed that the UK's counter-terrorism police had included Extinction Rebellion, the West's leading environmental protest group, on a list of extremist organizations. Under the related 'prevention' regulations, teachers and government officials are already required by law to report anyone they suspect of being 'radicalized'.

In a guide explaining the purpose of the list, officials and teachers were asked to identify anyone who speaks in "strong or emotional terms about environmental issues such as climate change, ecology, species extinction, fracking, airport expansion or pollution. '

Why was Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent civil disobedience group, included alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic jihadists? An entire page is dedicated to the threat posed by Extinction Rebellion. The guide explains that the organization's activism is rooted in an "anti-system philosophy that seeks system change." In other words, environmental activism runs the risk of making evident, especially for young people, the causal connection between the economic system and damage to the environment.

 

Once the story broke, police were quick to row back, claiming that the inclusion of Extinction Rebellion was a mistake. But more recently, the establishment's efforts to decouple capitalism from its catastrophic externalities have become more explicit.

Last month England's department of education ordered schools not to use any materials in the curriculum that would challenge the legitimacy of capitalism. The opposition to capitalism was described as an "extreme political stance," the opposition, remember, to an economic system whose relentless pursuit of growth and profit treats the destruction of the natural world as a cost-free externality.

Paradoxically, education officials equated promoting alternatives to capitalism as a threat to free speech, as well as endorsement of illegal activity, and inevitably as evidence of anti-Semitism.

Suicidal trajectory

These desperate and draconian measures to shore up an increasingly discredited system are not about to end, on the contrary, they will get much worse.

The establishment is not preparing to renounce capitalism, the ideology that enriched and empowered it, without a fight. The political and media class demonstrated this with their relentless and unprecedented attacks over several years against the leader of the Labor opposition Jeremy Corbyn. And Corbyn was offering only a reformist democratic socialist agenda.

The establishment has also demonstrated its determination to hold on to the status quo in its relentless and unprecedented attacks on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is locked up, seemingly indefinitely, for revealing the externalities, the victims, of the Western war industries. and the psychopathic behaviors of those in power.

Efforts to end the suicidal trajectory of our current “free market” system will no doubt soon be equated with terrorism, as the Prevent strategy has already hinted. We should be prepared.

There can be no escape from capitalism's death wish without acknowledging that death wish and then demanding and working for total change. Externalities may seem like harmless jargon, but they and the economic system that requires them are killing us, our children, and the planet.

The nightmare can end, but only if we wake up.

Source: https://www.unz.com/jcook/capitalism-is-double-billing-us-we-pay-from-our-wallets-only-for-our-future-to-be-stolen-from- us /