Resolved: Greed Is NOT Good

How often did we hear the promises made by the “free” traders that abolishing tariffs on countries that allow de facto serfdom and allow unregulated assaults on the environment would be just great for us? We did NAFTA, we’re implementing CAFTA, and we’ve basically outsourced our manufacturing and service sectors to China and India. How’s it working out?

We’ve also been told forever that if we just did away with those bothersome regulations, that the good-hearted souls in the financial sector would behave like altar boys in church. We’ve done away with a lot of those regulations, and we’re turning a blind eye to a lot of violations. How’s THAT working out?

Like it always works out. Greed seems to be an addiction that is worse than opium, or tobacco, or alcohol. The greedy will absolutely cut their own legs out from under themselves in the quest to turn over that quick profit, and they’ve been that way forever. To deregulate and not supervise business seems to have the effect of encouraging the pathologically greedy in the business community to act upon their pathologies with a complete abandoning of ethics, or even common sense.

With globalism, of course, the pathologically greedy have had ever-bigger scores to tempt them, and (gasp!) damned if they haven’t given in to temptation, time after time. From locking workers up in Chinese and Vietnamese sweatshops, to writing loans with terms that almost anyone with the ability to use a calculator could figure out would have to go bad at some point in time, to threatening the water supply of billions of Asians with their pollution, the pathologically greedy have behaved with the same mixture of hysterical urgency and profound indifference to consequences that has been their trademark for thousands of years. They’ve always preyed on the decency and honesty of the great majority of people both in and outside of business, and this time is no exception. The exception here is that the world, as a whole, is going to get to suffer from their blind greed much more than has been the case in the past.

At the end of the year 2007, we face a world financial system that is broken. Central banks all over the world are trying to stave off the inevitable by throwing money into the financial sector, but they might as well be trying to bail the Titanic out with a bucket. The world’s banking system is now so frightened of what is yet to come that they’ve literally shut down their core business, making getting financing for almost anything nearly impossible. And if banks don’t collect interest, banks don’t work. Period.

On the pollution front, global warming has entered warp-speed mode, almost undoubtedly because of pollution from the Indian subcontinent and east Asia. Unregulated pollution threatens to melt enough ice off of Greenland and the Arctic ice cap to send sea levels high enough to engulf places like New York City, Washington, DC, Mumbai, even Shanghai. Even worse, the spoiling of land and water resources now threatens the survival of billions of people, who are going to find it difficult to find a safe source of drinking water, let alone force crops out of land that has been poisoned with industrial sludge. Despite the promises made by the “free” traders, the plight of the desperately poor in places like India and China has actually WORSENED in the last few years, and the legacy of pollution promises to make their plight worse still.

In the Americas, the United States of America now boasts many urban areas that rival the worst that the third world has to offer. The often-repeated wingtard mantra that the desperately poor in America are much “better off” than their counterparts in other places can quickly be dispensed with by going through parts of Cleveland, Detroit, Washington,DC, Philadelphia, Montgomery, Alabama, Miami, and just about every city of any size in Texas. And in many places even where there isn’t a lot of poverty, prolonged drought is now threatening heavily populated areas with loss of water resources severe enough to make living in them a dicey proposition. Wells are drying up in Texas, reservoirs are running dry in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida, less and less spring runoff from mountains is leaving Los Angeles and the rest of southern California looking at an extremely thirsty near future, and lack of rain has made wildfires much larger and more menacing all over the country. If global warming is caused by man-spewed greenhouse gases, greed is drying and burning up a good chunk of the US.

Deforestation is leading to drought and even desertification in South America. The Sahara is bringing more and more beachfront property to millions upon millions of already put-upon Africans. Forest fires are now raging out of control every summer in Europe, where thousands have died from heat-related illnesses in the last few years.

We’ve pumped so many nutrients (via agricultural and industrial runoff, and the dumping of raw sewage) into the oceans that the explosive growth of algae blooms have led to the choking off of all kinds of aquatic life. When that life dies off, it tends to suck all the oxygen out of the water in the process of decomposition. Spreading “dead zones” in our oceans have led to an explosive growth in the population of jellyfish, primeval creatures that can survive in such conditions. Jellyfish have found more and more of the ocean to be to their liking, which further threatens other ocean species. Enjoy your tuna-while you can. Soon, Chicken of the Sea may have to take Charlie whether or not they want to.

Again, a good bit of the pollution entering our oceans is because of unregulated pollution on land. Greed at work, and there is even less room to argue about this than there is about global warming.

Am I an anti-business Marxist? Nope. I am a pro-habitat realist. Profit done intelligently is the only kind of profit anyone should strive to achieve. As far as I can tell, the modern MBA hasn’t a shred of social or environmental consciousness, which makes me question just how much value in real terms a MBA gives to this world. In this second gilded age, almost every aspect of life on Earth has been negatively tainted by unscrupulous business practices. Honest financial transactions would do everything to promote a healthy financial sector, every bit as much as environmentally-sustainable manufacturing policies would promote a healthy and expandable manufacturing base. The shortsightedness of those looking to turn a quick buck has gutted the world’s financial sector, is now gutting industry, and may well gut life on Earth itself. Is there any arguing that Governments all over the world are going to have to step up and do some regulating? Well…

I do understand that I presented all that greed has done to life on Earth without even touching upon what greed has done to Government. Maybe I’ll do that one later.

Greed just isn’t good.

Tags: credit crunch, drought, financial crisis, global warming, greed, pollution

Crossposted at Reconstitution

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