Hi, Xenoglaux--I'm going to try to respond to this argument:
But I read something the other day that disturbed me: it was the most prominent Kennedy stating in an advertisement that people have a right to a clean environment, and that all other rights should basically be subject to revision in persuit of that goal. Scary. I knew there had to be something amiss in this whole thing. So now apparently we should have to give away our rights to individual liberty in order to work on the environment.
I tried to figure out what advertisement this would be, but, failing that on a brief google, I did determine that you're probably referring to something that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, may have said--as he is a very prominent Kennedy and who is active in environmental law. Here's an excerpt from a recent interview of RFK Jr with The Progressive magazine:
Q: Just how dysfunctional is the federal government now?
Kennedy: There are two reforms that we need to restore our democracy. The first is campaign finance. We need to get the corporate money out of the election process. And second, we need to resolve the dysfunction in the environment. Looters are running agencies that are supposed to be protecting us from pollution. The person who supervises the head of the Forest Service has been a timber industry lobbyist. The person in charge of public lands till last year was a mining industry lobbyist who believed public lands are unconstitutional. The chief environmental adviser to the President was a lobbyist for the Chemical Manufacturers Association, as well as for Alcoa and General Electric. This is a picture of dysfunction.
But you can’t fix it without first fixing our democracy. We need election reform because our elections are being stolen. And these huge powerful voting machine vending companies have privatized the election process in our country.
Q: How much damage have the corporate capitalists done to bankrupt our nation?
Kennedy: There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing. But corporations should not be running our government. Corporations are good because they drive our economy, they encourage people to assemble wealth and to risk it and then create jobs. They have driven the American economy since its founding, and the prosperity of our country is largely dependent on the free operation of corporations. But some corporations don’t want free markets, and they don’t want democracy. They want profits. And they use our campaign finance system to loot our commons, to steal from our treasury, and the other shared resources of our community—the air, the water, the public lands, the wildlife, the things that belong to all of us that are held in trust for future generations. Corporations cannot act philanthropically in America. It is against the law. They cannot act altruistically. They have to have, always, the profit motive in mind. When Wal-Mart brings water down to the Katrina victims, it’s not doing that to be nice; it’s doing it to make larger profits and to increase the value of its shares. If its actions are not accomplishing those objectives, the shareholders can sue the executives, and sue them successfully, because it is illegal for them to act on behalf of any other reason than increasing the value of their shares. There is nothing wrong with that. That is the way that they were created and the way we want them to function to increase prosperity in the market. But we’d be crazy to let them anywhere near our government. The only reason they want to influence government is to plunder. To steal from children.
Q: But this is not free market capitalism you are speaking of, is it?
Kennedy: We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism.
Q: What would a true free market economy look like?
Kennedy: In a true free market economy, we would properly value our natural resources. In a true free market economy, you can’t make yourself rich without enriching your community.
What polluters do is raise the standards of living for themselves, while lowering the quality of living for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the disciplines of the free market. You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs.
These are facts that would make every American upset. Our birthright is being stolen, the legacy of our country is at stake, and the values of our nation are in peril. The future whispers, and the present shouts.
So, I read that and, while I think he is also speaking in words I'd like to unpack, I don't hear him saying that regular Americans need to curtail our freedoms, so much as the people who are profiting from making our environments unfit for human life.
If the lead from paint from a toy gets into a child's body, it damages that child's brain and will affect his entire life and his ability to achieve anything resembling liberty and the pursuit of his own happiness. If your body has mercury or other toxins in it, probably at levels that don't immediately affect your health, but your child drinks your milk, a corporation is using your body to poison your child because ultimately its responsibility is to profits. Your bodies, your lives are expendable to that corporation.
So I see that his value is democracy and a planet that belongs, at base to all of us. I ask, of him: who benefits from such a view? who is most likely to have to sacrifice, most? who would most resist these ideas, and for what reasons?
As I see it, He's trying to get us to note that there is NO lever to make a corporation responsible to people and the environment in our current legal and economic system.
There ARE means to to try to make governmental agencies accountable to the people. The problem being that making such changes takes effort and hard work, especially in our current bureaucratic environment. And because, as he notes, the "democratic" processes have been co-opted. It feels impossible. But should I put my faith in ideas that largely benefit the people who have made democracy more and more difficult?
As I look at middle class America, I think the "collectivity" is most readily found in thos of us who are relatively privileged--we have our bread and our circuses. A massive industrial agriculture complex provides us with 3800 calories per day of largely pre-processed food. We have ready access to a number of shiny media outlets whose main job is to deliver our eyeballs to their advertisers, although they keep telling us that it's really all about us, the consumer, who they keep assuring us, 5,000 times every day, is always right, always at the center. (Bullshit, I say: the shareholder is the center. And that's KEY.)
We figure our present is shouting: "buy an ipod and play games! It's too fucked to get involved with politics. And someone somewhere said that government just fucks things up anyway. So, what the hell, I'm a libertarian. Give me some soma."
So I found my spine straightening at the characterization of concern for the environment as "collectivist" thinking. Because I find that kneejerk "individualism" is by far the most collectivist kind of thinking we have in the US. (The old Monty Python bit where the whole crowd is repeating after their messiah Brian: "Yes, We're All Individuals!" comes to mind when I step in front of a classroom where virtually everyone is wearing flip flops, Abercrombie shirts....)
I spend quite a bit of time trying to explore the concept of hegemonic ideas in class, as a result. Basically, it boils down to taking a very skeptical stance toward ideas that are comfortable. Ideas that are "comfortable" tend to stop me from thinking further. And they very often reinforce the status of people who look like those in power/who get money and access to resources (including in some ways people who look kinda like me--white, middle-class women) and those who aspire to have power, money and easy access to resources (e.g., my college students).
These are often "common sense" notions, such as the one that "socialist" stances are "collectivist" and emanate from a borg-like conformist mindset, a grey world of unshaven women and wimpy men. Whereas the more "individualist"/"libertarian" thought in our current climate is somehow more "free" and "original" and less derived from a collectivity--a shiny world where everyone is beautiful. It looks a lot like TV.
[Few of us actively hold this idea in mind, it's more like a kind of sedimented, wordless perception that I think is in the background of our minds, grounding our emotional reaction to ideas and words. It gives "socialism" a negative "collectivist" connotation, and "capitalism" something more neutral and/or even positive connotations in mainstream discourse. Where do those images/background stories come from?]
I am not interested in giving answers, so much as requiring students to ask questions, like: Who profits ultimately from this notion? Who profits most? Who is most invested in the status quo? Who might benefit from changing the status quo? What exactly is the status quo, with regard to wealth, resources, power? What does the world population look like? What do world leaders of business and politics look like? Are they representative of the variety in the world? What kind of world do I want to see?
What I see, personally, is business and political leaders who are NOT representative of the variety of the world. I want the world to be more fair for everyone, more democratic, more rich in diversity. But I don't see the world moving in that way. In fact, I think the "middle class" is in real danger of disappearing, and I do think our consumption habits are in danger of killing the planet we depend on for survival. So I ask: What's going on, that massive groups of not really that powerful individuals are acting in ways that don't benefit them, or democracy, or the planet that allows them to survive, especially long term?
What ways would be most effective in convincing people who are actually probably being harmed by the status quo, not to change? that the change being asked for is likely to be worse than what we have now? Who benefits from having us pay no attention to the man behind the curtain?
(People recognize having a gun put to their heads as force, and they naturally resist it; people, me included, are much more susceptible to the seduction of advertisement and its illogic: "You are the most important person in the world. You are smart--not book smart, necessarily. You're smarter than the average person." Flash the product. Sales rise. Who benefits from that transaction, most? Is it based on real value to me, or just the cheap buzz of having my ego stroked?)
What traditions, thought patterns, distractions can be tapped into to tell a story, however, incoherent, that makes it seem logical to for us to continue down a path that is actually harmful to people like us?
Those are my questions. I don't think they are collectivist dictates, although I admit that I am not alone in asking them, and I need to be on constant awareness of the "ego buzz" factor of being "right" in a certain crowd and looking "cool." Still, I think they are worth asking of any piece of writing, and I don't think they are unanswerable or that all answers to them are equally well thought through. |
