ProPublica’s Look At The Western United States Drought: A Crisis Created Primarily By The Endless Drive Of Corporate State Exploitation Rather Than Nature?
ProPublica has been running a series of stories on the drought in the western United States. They are presenting a position that while there is a drought caused by changing climate, the bigger issue is man-made. We certainly know that massive industrial farms and very wealthy farmers are far and away the largest consumers of water in California. And there is just about no focus on water ecology but rather exploiting a public resource for private gain. The same way they exploit immigrant workers with nonliving wages for private gain. Just as wealthy landowners did with outright slavery in the American south for hundreds of years. But now we call it free markets because people have a choice of where to be enslaved.
(As an aside but again the same fundamental issue, here is the link to an recent piece that speaks truth on so many levels about the elites conspiring against Americans with the immigration push needed to do the ever-increasing shitty corporate wage slave jobs in this nation. While Coulter hits the nail on the head, this really is nothing new. This dynamic was behind much of what led to the Civil War. ie, A major reason why slavery was not part of northern culture in the United States was that there were large cities with massive immigrant populations of cheap labor to fill the factories with exploitable wage slaves. Make no mistake. Tons of corporate profit was being made off of slavery in the north as well. It was a small but persistent band of decent human beings that were behind the abolitionist movement. In the south, the culture was more agrarian and rich landowners didn’t have the luxury of excess immigrant labor being readily available so they simply enslaved people for their profit motives. The working conditions of factories in the north were really not much different. Nor was shopping at the company store or living in company housing really much different than outright slavery. Not surprisingly, this still exists but its more covert. Regardless, capitalist elites from the north and south both exploited the masses for their personal gain during those times just as Coulter points out is happening today. And just as it happening the the endless overuse of water by corporate and wealthy elite in California’s farm production. This is capitalism and it was even worse in Adam Smith’s times as I’ved noted before. There are no good ole days of free markets and corporate capitalism. Only social memes and propaganda created by our class-based masters. Those memes and that propaganda mouths freedom while enslaving us to a system of massive injustice and tyranny every bit as violent as centuries gone by. )
The links to ProPublica’s stories are below. I’m sure they will be running more in the future. For this post, I am going to focus on ‘The Water Witch’.
How the federal government is helping to create the water crisis
“Indeed, Mulroy, (the water witch) though ambitious, had no engineering or environmental experience, and had thought little about water as a resource. She was 36 then, with two children younger than 3 years old at home. Her attention, as she put it, was “kind of split,” and she was weighted by guilt for the hours she poured into work and just as torn about the hours she spent away from the office.
But the job was politics, not science, and that came to her naturally. She had learned that politics works through relationships (cronyism), not rules, and she applied the lesson to her new position. The valley, back then, still had a quaintness to it, with a population of just 741,000 and a Las Vegas strip that looked little like it does today. There was no ersatz Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building and no Bellagio hotel, with its musically synchronized water cannons. As Las Vegas grew up and corporate bigwigs displaced mobsters as the city’s ruling class, Mulroy prided herself on being a student of character.”
It’s interesting to read this above snippet from ProPublica because it highlights a point I have hammered on here. That is, ambition, or that which is so exalted by corporate capitalism and its faux social value system, is a pathological virus. Ambition is getting ahead. Or, I get an opportunity that you don’t because I am willing to do whatever it takes to please my master. How do you get ahead? By stomping on the face of someone else. Ambition is driven by the ego’s emotional self-abandonment and insecurities and its never-ending judgmental comparisons and approval-seeking behavior. That’s why the most “successful” people in this system are almost always the most emotionally-stunted, disconnected and even vile or pathological. Or, as John Dalberg-Acton noted, almost all powerful men are bad men. This dynamic of ambition plays a substantial role to the artificial creation of class and hierarchy. And ultimately institutionalization. Mind you, ambition is much different than prosperity. Prosperity has no implication of being successful at the expense of someone else. Or somehow getting ahead by some method of violence or harm to another person or the artificial constraints of limited abundance that requires taking something from someone else ( Scarcity is a necessary dynamic for hierarchical systems to survive. And money is the control mechanism through which this scarcity is artificially created and enforced). Most people in this nation would be happy with prosperity but our actions clearly don’t support that end. Mostly because we are economic slaves to the power of the corporate state and without organizing against this pathological power, we really have no choice other than death. Mind you, they clearly understand this which is why they spend endless amounts of time and money dividing us through ignorance. Division is clearly a control construct used by class. Dividing blacks from whites or gay from straight or Christian from Muslim or what other useless bullshit they can dream up is no different than the division of labor that corporate capitalism or any system of class needs to survive. And the division of labor is right out of the book of slavery. Not surprisingly, since England is a class-based society and during Adam Smith’s lifetime was the world’s largest slave trader and slave owners, and the world’s largest corporations doing that trading, he wrote eloquently about the division of labor as virtuous. It’s all propaganda. Everything about modern society is about control.
The Water Witch had no idea how to run a major metropolitan water system but was ambitious and politicized a role of public service. ie, The typical ignorant politician. Ignorance is also a hallmark trait of institutionalization, class and hierarchy that defines corporate capitalism and the state. That’s why our society is so ignorant. Because the inventiveness, creativity, imagination and productiveness of humanity is being suppressed by corporate and political dunces. In other words, our society is so ignorant because our leaders are morons who only maintain their grip on power by suppressing human expression and human experience. ie, Through violence. How else can a corporate dunce, who has no real skills other than controlling people aka “management”, pay himself $50 million a year when people with the ability to create, invent and produce are artificially denied access to society’s wealth and capital and therefore can’t even afford a pot to piss in?
It is corporations and their drive for endless profits that were behind the massive growth in Las Vegas and the lack of any type of water management schemes or legitimate impact analysis studies on growth & natural resources or risk mitigation plans in the event of natural changes or whatnot. Do you know why? Because our corporate masters didn’t want that. What they wanted was more power and more profit and they were willing to pay for obedient politicians who would deliver that through any form of state violence necessary. And then because the only way we have to distribute prosperity in this nation is through dumbed-down corporate work, everyone in Las Vegas supports the wishes of their corporate masters. Anyone who tries to resist this tyranny is immediately labeled a terrorist or a troublemaker and given a tick mark in their “personal file”. So, corporate dunces know not to hire them. That is, if they aren’t carted off the prison first.
As cited in a recent post, Montesquieu famously stated that government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another. This was possibly the most significant determination of our founding forms of government. That is not corporate capitalism. Or, as Upton Sinclair famously stated it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. We refuse to see reality out of fear for losing our salary or our place at the trough of gluttony. Hey, we are all guilty. Slavery to corporate capitalism is not consistent with a society where one man need not be afraid of another. Because he fears for his ability to provide for himself unless he does the bidding of his corporate barons. Nor is it the form of ruthless statism that exists in this nation consistent with a government where no man fears another. We have a government that is run amok and is the instigator of fear. No man living in fear of another is based on a system of equality as outlined in our Declaration of Independence. And a society based on laws. One man, one vote. That’s more likely to be direct, participatory democracy at the local level. In a direct, participatory democracy, everyone has it in their own best interests to educate everyone on every issue. This compared to a system of ambition, class and competition where there is a sinister, if not well-understood, intent of keeping the masses uninformed so they can be exploited, victimized and preyed upon by class, hierarchy and institutionalization better known as moochers and parasites.
Guaranteed there are 320 million people in this nation who could make better decisions about their own lives and their local communities than the handful of self-appointed authority in Washington DC or Las Vegas or Wall Street or corporate board rooms.
The only way we will ever see any type of recovery is for the power of corporations and the state to be transferred back to We The People. That is going to happen. Because it’s our power in the first place. And their control of it is nothing more than an illusion that is disappearing before our very eyes. Until then, hierarchy’s intent of control will continue to erode social fabrics, economic opportunity, human experiences and the like. Because that’s the only way hierarchy exists in the first place.
Big changes are coming. Big.
<< Home