BP and the 'Little Eichmanns'

Cultures that do
not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred
dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize
themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world
and the members of their society in the name of progress until
exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own
self-destruction. The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to
be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish
death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the
trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not
be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be
global.

Those who carry out this global genocide-men like BP's Chief
Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a
very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it
is tiny in relation to the total water volume''-are, to steal a line
from Ward Churchill,
"little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark
instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us
to annihilate all living things, including ourselves. These deformed
individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and
dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast,
destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications.
The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that
have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in
the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year
of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part
of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.

The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress
and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel
universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that
rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and
enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural
world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of
profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools
and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb
and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of
management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse.
These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.

"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his
inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think,
namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt
wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem." "No communication was possible with
him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most
reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others,
and hence against reality as such."

Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul
points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is
unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and
morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and
he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the
technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and
warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or
unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an
abstract force-a force that works, more often than not, at
cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."

BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this
year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP
is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is
common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New
York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as
tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus.
Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment
and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human
species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant
under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure
who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an
insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and
under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage.
As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary
force. And this force is consuming us.

Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation,"
written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences-the depressions,
wars and totalitarianism-that grow out of a so-called self-regulated
free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a
market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial
system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia
capitalism-and a Mafia political system-which is a good description of
our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human
beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human
beings and nature are destroyed. Speculative excesses and growing
inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued
prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society."

"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would,
incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity
'man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective
covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the
effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social
dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature
would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled,
rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food
and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of
purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for
shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business
as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land,
and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society
could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the
shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well
as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this
satanic mill."

The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto
Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the U.S. Treasury so speculators can
continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted
system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class,
decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our
infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons
the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of
farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are
an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world
because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are
mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.

America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die.
Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues
that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so
burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more
efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local
forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire,
from the Sumer
and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into
disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because
we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will
disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down
with us.

"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century
bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even
been called the 'end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological
sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress."
"Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens
as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half
the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has
been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital,
especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest
bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it-not unless we
find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the
vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds."

The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural
contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish.
It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of
advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time
and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our
intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the
empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the
final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful,
into the inferno.