Lifeboat Aporophobia

 

Photo by Bravadi Malangjoedo on Unsplash

While decluttering my apartment, I came across a yellowing and brittle copy of a 1974 issue of Psychology Today which contained ecologist Garrett Hardin’s essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor.” His diatribe plays fast and loose with the facts he presents to back up his argument and comes across as a petulant rant against the poor rather than a coherent discussion. In short, Hardin is just another whack job who enjoys the public attention he gets from his proposal to starve the poor out of existence so that the rest of us can enjoy our luxuries.

From the first paragraph, Hardin set out to define the terms of his case against the poor. It’s his essay, he can define terms any way he wants, he seemed to say. He took very seriously his metaphor of the lifeboat as the refuge of the wealthy, with hungry swimmers — his metaphor for the poor — trying to usurp his privileged place on the boat. Fortunately for his argument, he did not push the lifeboat image to its logical conclusion: the lifeboat passengers will deplete the boats resources and people will have to go overboard — the order of plank walkers would depend, of course, on the most able and not the wealthiest. Or Hardin will hope to be saved by a passing yacht, at which time he proves himself no better than the miserable swimmers for whom he expresses such contempt.

Some of his arguments were just silly. He provided his own definition of “safety factor,” one that grants him the greatest amount of space for him and his dinner-party buddies. In fact, safety factors are built into engineered products. If his boat is designed to hold sixty people, any more would violate that margin for safety. But that’s nitpicking, and there are too many major errors in his thesis to dwell on the minor ones.

He wrote that guilt is the motivating factor behind the urge to aid the poor. I can’t argue that, because I don’t have the statistics on the subject (and he doesn’t provide any). Those people I know who are willing to help, however, operate from an enthusiasm for life that they wish to extend to others, and consider themselves spread proportionately across the self-family-group-nation-humanity spectrum, and not stuck in the “it’s all about me” mode. Sorry, Garrett; we haven’t even turned the page yet, and you’ve been wrong on each point made. Let’s move on.

On the disparity of population growth between rich and poor countries, he falls back on a Marxist quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” From that, he extrapolated the absurd idea that helping the poor amounts to a misinterpretation of the socialist ideal of economic equality. He confused “share” and “help” with “surrender,” as in his assumption that those who do not agree with him want him to give up all his worldly goods to the starving masses. He has not been asked to surrender all his worldly goods to the poor. St. Francis, we are not. A check to an NGO relief agency does not amount to voluntary poverty.

He introduced an equally ridiculous argument that he called “the tragedy of the commons,” a highly simplistic theory that the poor will ravage the world’s resources if allowed to reproduce at will. To that, I will introduce the “tragedy of the landed gentry.” In pre-Industrial Revolution England, the nobility often owned vast wooded estates. True to the “tragedy of the commons,” the English poor had all but denuded the countryside of woodlands in search of game and fuel, and were forced to poach the enclosed woods owned by the wealthy (and undeserving) nobility. For poaching, the hungry poor faced public torture, imprisonment, or hanging. The world had not run out of resources, but the wealthy and powerful had locked them up for their own use. Picnics in large groups, lavish outdoor parties, and game hunts were popular pastimes among the landed elite.

Hardin abandons any pretense at reason in his “Tragedy of the Commons.” In those situations in which the “commons” face abuse, they are first abused by the privileged class for commodity resources. In that, the rich and the poor form a symbiotic relationship: the wealthy strip the land to provide products and services to the poor and middle class, who in turn form the source of wealth. Without labor and markets, there is no wealth.

He confused the depletion of oceanic fisheries with an exhaustion of the commons by the poor, when in fact, the ocean is being over-fished by multi-national corporations owned and operated by… the wealthy elite.

There’s more.

His claim that Public Law 480, “Food for Peace” program, benefitted only wealthy U.S. business amounts to an argument against himself. Did he denounce the wealthy and well-fed along with the hungry poor? Maybe his complaint came from his statement that the U.S. taxpayer paid the cost of PL480. Not true. The middle-class taxpayer — not the wealthy elite — picked up the initial cost, but that cost was recovered in subsequent negotiations called for in the agreements with hungry nations and affluent partners. We gave away our surplus grain, he said. Not true. We entered into financial and foreign relations agreements in which we were to share a portion of our surplus in return for future markets. Tons of wheat sold to the former Soviet Union to help with an approaching famine, added to the tons shipped to markets and to starving masses around the world, still left us with enough surpluses that we risked the danger of spoilage. He wrote that “…international charity frequently inspires distrust and antagonism rather than gratitude….” Not true. Distrust and antagonism directed toward the U.S. comes from Washington’s insistence in propping up friendly foreign governments that are hostile to their own people. Food for Peace occasionally ended up in the hands of tyrants and their cronies who marketed it at pure profits. When it goes to the hungry citizens, it is almost always received with gratitude. I say “almost,” because of a famous incident in Africa, starving stick-figures broke down the barriers to a shipment to break open bags of wheat to consume them on the spot. The wheat needed processing but the people there had been reduced to desperation. The U.S. received a mild rebuke for sending unprocessed food to living skeletons. We had seriously underestimated the severity of the problem.

In his harangue against immigration, he blames some of the problem on the wealthy elite’s need for cheap labor; a position that, again, seems to argue against itself. Beyond that, his proposal to hermetically seal the borders amount to the same tired clichéd sloganeering that has haunted the immigration problem since the first European stepped ashore half-a-millennia ago. He craves a static America in which the status quo can be guaranteed. Is that even possible in an ethnically and politically diverse country? Or would Hardin deport all liberals and non-whites along with immigrants?

I got the impression in reading his essay that Hardin would like for all nine billion of us to just get the hell out of his way so that he can have it all, the only survivor on the boat. “Lifeboat Ethics” is not a serious discussion about ethics, but a mere selfish, petulant, and ego-centered rant, and reads well as such.

#

Corporate Culture: The American Electorate

 

By Jonathan McIntosh - Cropped version of File:J20_corporate_flag_dc.jpgCropped and uploaded by Trickymaster at de.wikipedia (07:25, 12. Apr. 2009), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8458827

Introduction

Large corporations have commandeered the world economy to such extent that, of the one-hundred largest economies in the world, sixty-nine are corporations (Global Justice). Those numbers don’t appear alarming on the surface but placed in the framework of the recent collapse of the world economy, the problems of what to do about “too big to fail” takes on an alarming importance. Only about a handful of America’s largest corporations have brought down the housing market, reallocated pension, and retirement funds of millions of workers into exorbitant salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, produced massive job layoffs around the world, and caused a spike in personal and small-business bankruptcies.

Corporate representatives in government, such as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, have created a “shadow government” that essentially controls American economic policy.(Open Secrets) The recent granting of human rights to non-human corporate entities has turned electoral politics into a scramble for massive campaign funds from organizations with no stake in the public interest. The American political system is now governed by those sixty-nine percent economies, which have perpetual life, unlimited resources, and the ability to make their own law to assure that their rights and their power take precedent over the will of the people and the public good.

We’ve had amble warning about the excesses of corporate power. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816:

"I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which are already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country." (Founders Online)

And on another occasion:

"Headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and moneyed incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar." (Google Books)

And again, in a letter to Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin:

"I sincerely believe [. . .] that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." (truthorfiction.com)

The history of the United States has no shortage of great leaders who have alerted us to the dangers of the corporate monster; Along with Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Dwight D. Eisenhower issued public warnings of the encroachment of corporate money and corporate power into government.

A History of Corporate Personhood: Causes and Consequences

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed into law in 1869, reads:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The Amendment was written primarily to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1865 that denied citizenship to slaves, and clearly refers to person and citizen. But Supreme Court decisions before and after the Fourteenth Amendment have resulted in the creeping—and creepy—definition of “person” to include corporations, including multi-national corporations.

“A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” (Family Guardian) A corporation is not a person. American jurisprudence takes corporate strengths and human weakness into consideration in making and enforcing its laws. Prisons are built for people but cannot contain a corporation. Corporations have perpetual life in which to realize their goals, while humans have about fifty productive and voting years. Corporations have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources, while the average worker lives on a weekly wage. Corporations have the legal power to make laws as they wish; the citizen can cast a single vote for a representative he can trust to look out for his interest in the legislative and executive branches of government.

Corporate personhood extends back to Roman law, but its American History began with the end of the American Revolution. Citizens of the newly found republic held contractual agreements with agencies in the mother country. Did the Revolution nullify those obligations? Could the United States legislate new laws to supersede English law that created the contracts?

Those questions came before the new Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in 1816. The state of New Hampshire had passed laws changing the charter of Dartmouth College from a private institution, chartered by the British Crown in 1769, to a state university. The college trustees filed suit. The court ruled that the charter was a contract between the king and the college trustees, and that a state cannot pass laws to alter a contract. That ruling honored corporations and people as equals in contract law.

In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, filed before the Supreme Court in May 1886, “Chief Justice [Morrison] Waite said, ”The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” (Supreme.Justia.com) That statement was made before arguments were heard in the case, and do not appear in the court record. Subsequent cases before the court have drawn on that case as legal precedent regardless of the error. (Justia)

Since 1886, the court has heard several cases involving corporate personhood, and the benefit or loss to actual humans has swung in unpredictable directions. Then, in 1978, the issue of corporate personhood exploded.

The Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall brought Marshall v. Barlow’s before the Supreme Court. An inspector for the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA) entered Barlow’s Company, a plumbing and electrical installations contractor. The president and general manager of the company denied access to the agent on the grounds that he did not have a search warrant. OSHA had the responsibility and the authority to conduct warrantless searches of businesses to guarantee worker safety, but Barlow’s argued that the corporation enjoyed the same Fourth Amendment guarantee of protection against illegal search and seizure as an individual. The court sided with Barlow’s, and henceforth OSHA inspections of businesses must be enforced with a search warrant, or OSHA must make an appointment with the company to conduct an inspection. (Justia)

On January 21, 2010, an appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia reached the Supreme Court. Led by the court’s conservative members, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, citing free speech rights, struck down the McCain-Feingold Bill and allowed corporate entities to sponsor funds to political elections without revealing their source. Multi-national corporations now control the financing of elections in the United States, and corporate financial contributions to the political process reached the one billion dollar mark in 2018. (Open Secrets) The Democratic Party under President Obama appealed to the corporate interests for a détente. Democrats softened their support of workplace safety, a livable minimum wage, and government regulation of business.

With Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell. the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a stunning decision that a corporation cannot be sued for human rights abuses. A panel of the court ruled 2-1 on September 17, 2010, that the Alien Tort Statute gives U.S. courts jurisdiction over alleged violations of international law by individuals only, not by corporations.

Seeing the direction those court decisions will take the country, former President Obama’s plea for détente with the corporate community makes good political sense but has the potential to forever end the democratic system. His party has traditionally championed worker safety, equal employment opportunity, and a livable wage; issues at odds with corporations. If the Democratic party is to survive—that is, to receive unlimited campaign funds from the deep pockets only corporations can provide—it must relax its support of the proletariat. Ergo, détente.

I find reams of eloquent prose about the failure of the American democratic experiment in the phrase, “Follow the money.”

 Abuses Committed by National and Multi-National Corporations

Who can forget the televised images of Enron company employees who found it hilarious that “grandmas” were in danger of dying in the heat due to the artificial electrical shortages created by Enron to hike their fees for services?

“A Defense Department auditor testified [on August 10, 2010] that DynCorp International billed the government $50 million more than the amount specified in a contract to provide dining facilities and living quarters for military personnel in Kuwait” (Haynes).

Headlines like that represent a common feature of Americans’ daily lives. We have become inured to corruption. The 2010 mid-term elections resulted in a turnover of the political majority in Congress because of the anti-corruption mood among the electorate. Yet, many of the very people ushered into power have praised the Citizens United decision. The revolution in Washington suggests lyrics from a rock anthem by the British rock group, The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Human rights violations by corporate entities don’t often garner headlines, though. The only way to get a handle on corporations’ involvement is through research. Here are just a few of those violations. For a full list of name brand-name companies engaging in behavior that might have made Genghis Khan blush, the Global Issues website at http://www.globalexchange.org/.

https://archive.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/221-transnational-corporations/46979.html offers a full alphabetical list of offending corporations and links to reputable organizations that back up its claims.

Caterpillar, Inc. supplies equipment to the Israeli army for the purpose of destroying Palestinian homes to facilitate annexation of East Jerusalem.

The crimes charged against Chevron are too numerous to list in a paper of this scope, but they include rape, murder, political corruption, and—the plague of America’s dependency on oil—environmental destruction.

Outside of the United States, the Coca-Cola Company behaves like a mafia family. Murders, kidnappings, and torture highlight its activities in Third World countries, and in some of the industrialized world, reads like intrigue and adventure fiction.

Employees of DynCorp have been found to have engaged in sex trafficking with girls as young as twelve years old.

The Future of Corporate Personhood: Consequences

The year 2010 marked the crowning of transnational corporations as the new owners of the American government. Where it will lead us is, at this time, anybody’s guess. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have prepared the way for the new leadership with International laws that supersede federal and state statutes regarding relaxed food safety governance, reduced product quality standards, a virtual end to workplace safety regulations, and the erosion of individual rights and national sovereignty. We have already seen the cost of those agreements in the recent flood of product recalls, tainted food in the marketplace, and the undermining of workplace safety laws (Wallach 23-64).

Social attitudes, too, have favored the growing power of corporate entities. Contemporary views of entrepreneurship no longer include the bootstrap legacy. An entrepreneur is now one with massive financial backing from banks and capital investment firms. The corporate culture is rapidly becoming the only socially acceptable course of economic pursuit. Employment in a large company, preferably a multinational corporation, is regarded as a most noble profession, one pursued by most college students. The arts and crafts, manual trades, outdoor work, jobs in philanthropic organizations, and vocations in religious organizations are rarely considered by those who came of age in the corporate world, and—judging by a barrage of human-interest stories in the media—shunned by even the chronically unemployed.

Conclusion

Of all the conceivable results of the corporatizing of America and the world, the bulk of them are unpleasant But that need not be the reality. The companies that now own the country’s political and judicial system rely on consumerism to feed their gluttony, and they have the power to destroy the consumer culture through the elimination of a middle class with disposable income. They must take care that, in bringing down American wages, they do not undermine their own profits. Worldwide, people have shown a surprising tendency throughout history to sacrifice their individual pursuits and band together to resolve injustices. If our new masters do not tread carefully—with much more care than they have in the recent past—they could find themselves pitted against the very source of their power: the consumer.

 

Note: This is an updated version of an older work published on Writing.com

Works Cited:

 

Google Books, Hidden Treuhand, page 226

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Hidden_Treuhand/wdxvhhUiabEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Headed+toward+a+single+and+splendid+government+of+an+aristocracy+founded+on+banking+institutions+and+moneyed+incorporations+and+if+this+tendency+continues+it+will+be+the+end+of+freedom+and+democracy,+the+few+will+be+ruling+and+riding+over+the+plundered+plowman+and+the+beggar.%22&pg=PA226&printsec=frontcover

 

“Thomas Jefferson quote about banking-Truth!”

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Rich Buhler & Staff

https://www.truthorfiction.com/jefferson-banking/

 

“Thomas Jefferson to George Logan” 12 November 1816

Founders Online

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-10-02-0390

 

‘69 of the richest 100 entities on the planet are corporations, not governments, figures show’

17 Oct. 2018

https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/69-richest-100-entities-planet-are-corporations-not-governments-figures-show/

 

“Corporations data 2017”

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12Jdgaz_qGg5o0m_6NCU_L9otur2x1Y5NgbHL26c4rQM/edit#gid=1364122473

 

“Of the world's 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries.”

compiled by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh of the of the Institute for Policy Studies in their Report on the Top 200 corporations released in December 2000

https://www.corporations.org/system/top100.html

 

“James Inhofe”

https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/james-m-inhofe/summary?cid=N00005582&cycle=CAREER

 

“Corporation: As stated by Chief Justice Marshall in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)

Definition of a corporation by Chief Justice Marshall in Dartmouth College v. Woodward

https://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/corpor.html

 

“Supreme Court: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886)”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/118/394/#:~:text=CHIEF%20JUSTICE%20WAITE%20said%3A,laws%20applies%20to%20these%20corporations.

 

“Supreme Court: Marshall v. Barlow's, Inc., 436 U.S. 307 (1978)”

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/436/307/

 

“Surprise! Citizens United Legal Reasoning Doesn’t Rely on Corporate Personhood”

By Nick Bentley November 11, 2012

https://reclaimdemocracy.org/citizens-united-corporate-personhood/

 

"Obama, Chamber of Commerce seek détente’: U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday he wanted to lower the corporate tax rate and eliminate tax loopholes to pay for that, requesting support from the business community to achieve that goal."

11 Feb. 2011

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41456730

 

Geoffrey Pariza, Spring 2011, Loyola University Chicago, School of Law

“Genocide, Inc.: Corporate Immunity to Violations of International Law after Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum”

https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1022&context=lucilr

 

“Companies Immune From Alien Tort Suits, Court Rules”

Bob Van Voris & Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg, 17 Sep 2010

https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/companies-immune-from-alien-tort-suits-court-rules/

 

“US: DynCorp Billed U.S. $50 Million Beyond Costs in Defense Contract”

Published by Washington Post, By V. Dion Haynes, Wednesday, August 12, 2009

https://www.corpwatch.org/article/us-dyncorp-billed-us-50-million-beyond-costs-defense-contract

 

“Global Exchanges List of ‘Most Wanted’ Corporate Human Rights Violators of 2005”

December 2005

https://archive.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/221-transnational-corporations/46979.html

 

Suggested Reading

Timothy Gorringe, Fair Shares: Ethics and the Global Economy, New York, Thames & Hudson, 1999. Print.

Lori Wallach, essay, “Hidden Dangers of GATT and NAFTA”

            The Case Against Free Trade, San Francisco: Earth Island Press, 1993. Print.