Why sustainability?

Offered, for your consideration:

What do you get when you cross corporate greed, underpaid workers, and a runaway freight train?

Answer: the New Feudalism.

Given their way, in order to compete with with foreign countries with cheap labor, Corporate America would cut expenses, wages first, regulatory expenses would decline.

Government would shrink along with its tax base, until it was eventually rendered impotent. First to go? The Executive Branch and its enforcement powers. EPA, OSHA, the Department of Labor, minimum wage laws, and other unfair regulatory burdens-history.

As spending power decreases, the middle class would shrink, demand would disappear. With no one to buy them, new cars would just rust on the lot. The strong would devour the weak. All wealth would shift to the hands of the most mighty.

After the last tree is cut from the forest, the last ounce of crude sucked from the ground, the remaining trillionaires would have nothing to do but retire to their once and future castles, counting their fortunes, hunkering down for the millennia-the way it always used to be. The recent social experiment called free enterprise? Over.

Evicted from their Manors once by the industrial revolution and the birth of our middle class ancestors, the once and future aristocrats retake the thrones they've been pining for. The cycle is complete. Game over.

As for the rest of us? We could offer to till their soil and hope for some scraps to trick down from their banquet tables.

"Globaloney"? What goes around comes around.

Or is there an alternative?

Regards, Stuart H. Rodman

-- Anonymous, February 15, 2000

Answers

I'd vote "create your alternatives" with what works about our globally diverse societies and communities. The difficulty comes in defining what that "is."

One thing to do is to find the private industry examples and case studies of those eco-responsible organizations that are working on their own inner transformations. Part of my personal research challenge.

Stay tuned.

;-D

Diane

-- Anonymous, February 15, 2000

Feudalism can come through regulation. I just finished listening to some of the House subcommittee hearing on forests and forest health. One witness related that an officer of Louisiana Pacific, (large timeber company with private holdings,) had told him: "Why should I protest the spotted owl listing?" He then clarified that shutting down the federally managed forests to small and medium sized operators eliminated his competition for him.

Feudalism had much to do with "ownership," or the right of exclusive use and enjoyment. Under the feudal system, all real property was held "of the king" and beneath him, "the lord," and so on. Each exacted a cut of the fruits of a serf's labor mixed with land. When titled ownership to land was exchanged, the serf was considered part of the land and "ran with it."

The demise of feudalism brought on by the Black Plague, cottagers and the growth of the wool industry, etc., had much to do with the separation of the ownership of labor from ownership of the land. One of the precepts of the Lockean movement was that because man owned himself, he owned his labor, and that "property" was born of the mixture of labor with a thing.

When regulation appropriates a man's property from him without just compensation, it steals his labor. When it encroaches upon the "exclusive" rights of ownership, it steals his labor. Each step is a diminishment of man's freedoms. If unchecked, he will eventually end up as a serf.

-- Anonymous, February 15, 2000