The Emperor Has No Clothes A Practical Guide for Environmental and Social Transformation (4 page)

6. It is interesting to note that large
agribusinesses are apparently immune to the antitrust laws.

This business practice has become common in
the last several decades. For example, starting in the late 1980's
a lot of debate in the U.S. took place about granting China most
favored nation trading status. It was delayed for some time because
the U.S. government had a policy of not granting this status to
nations with a record of human rights abuses. China having an
appalling record, i.e., the Tienanmen square massacre and the
ongoing persecution of the Tibetans since they were conquered in
1959, precluded them from this status. In the early 1990's an
advertising campaign was conducted to change public opinion in
order to reverse this policy. It was based upon arousing greed, it
was argued that China was this vast market for the export of
American products. The PR message was that everyone would
financially benefit through profits derived from sales and the
creation of many high paying domestic industrial jobs. At the time
I was mystified how this could come about since the average Chinese
worker made less than $20.00 per week and an engineer around $75.00
per week. The question was, where would they get the money to buy
$40,000.00 SUV’s, $500.00 appliances or $100.00 tennis shoes when
the vast majority were barely surviving? Some time later after a
number of the multinational corporations transferred their
manufacturing to China, it became apparent the main reason was to
provide a means for these large multinational businesses to take
advantage of weak or non existent labor laws, environmental
regulations, and very low labor costs to undersell and force their
domestic competitors out of business thereby gaining market share.
Of course the transfer of manufacturing offshore caused huge
numbers of high paying American industrial jobs that already
existed to be lost! Again, to blunt public concerns a PR campaign
was launched. The PR extolled the virtues of working in service
positions instead of in what was disparagingly referred to as being
dirty out of date industrial positions in rust bucket industries
and other negative tendentious monickers. One can imagine how happy
the displaced workers were when they moved into the new “nice clean
service positions” which on average pay 20% less than the
industrial jobs they replaced. Most of the service positions also
lacked the valuable benefit packages that usually accompanied
industrial jobs.

As just mentioned, some of the reasons for
relocating their businesses offshore was to evade paying for
workers benefits and environmental regulations. This is referred to
as externalizing costs. Externalizing costs is a euphemism used to
describe the business practice of avidly seeking ways to foist off
as many of their direct and indirect costs onto the community
forcing others to subsidize their enterprises.

Let's consider some of the costs of the use
of disposable products. When we use these products, throwing away a
container, or other disposable item such as a pen seems to be
trivial. However, if one considers the amount used collectively, it
is not. For example, after graduating from high school I obtained a
job with a company that produced house-ware products. The
production of disposable aluminum containers for food was a major
component of their business. The job that I had was part of a two
man team that operated an aluminum shear to size the foil used to
produce the containers. The company had two larger machines and one
small machine used for thin foil such as you use to wrap things. A
large machine on most days would be able to shear approximately 20
tons of foil in eight hours and the small machine several tons,
thus, in one shift the combined output was around 40 tons. These
machines were operated for three shifts a day producing around 100
tons of sized foil that would be promptly converted into disposable
foil products, or about 500 to 600 tons per week.

When usage is considered on a yearly basis,
around 29,000 tons where used (we often worked 6 days). This was
before recycling so all of this aluminum was going into dumps. The
colossal waste and other environmental problems associated with
this type of disposable product was troubling to me, and ultimately
produced the motivation to start investigating these types of
issues.

Starting in the 1950's a great expansion of
the development and use of disposable products took place. In my
youth, it was a common activity for youngsters to get spending
money by scouring the area where they lived in order to recover
discarded reusable beverage bottles. These containers could be
returned to a supermarket, liquor store, etc., to recover their
deposit. The refunds on the bottles were: a 12 ounce bottle $.02, 1
quart $.05, and 1 gallon $.15. To put this in perspective at that
time a cup of coffee in a restaurant was $.10, few bottles went to
waste. In the 1970's the people who were environmentally aware were
cognizant of how needlessly wasteful our society had become. To
reduce the high level of waste it was decided to attempt to rectify
the situation by regulatory means. The idea was to return to the
use of improved types of reusable durable containers. What was
desired was not only to use reusable containers as before, but have
national standards for them that would specify their shapes and
sizes. The use of standardized containers was sought because it
becomes feasible to sort and clean them using automated equipment.
This would have greatly reduced waste of materials, energy, and the
cost of packaging born by the consumer. Studies of the proposition
demonstrated that further benefits would result because a net
expansion of the number of jobs would take place as a result of the
need for people to operate the new system. This idea was not
welcomed by the disposable container industry. Of course it also
gained no traction with the politicians who received their
financial campaign support from these industries. A solution was
sought that was more palatable, and thus the idea of recycling was
born. Recycling is a lot less effective than standardized improved
durable containers for resource conservation. The container
industry, material producers, and the politicians were still
adamantly opposed to any change away from the disposable products.
The folks in the environmental movement decided to pursue the
second option (recycling). This approach reduced the amount of
resistance being produced to that originating from the material
producers who would feel the greatest effects. Therefore, a
nationwide petition drive was organized to place it on the election
ballots as a referendum in order to weaken political resistance. In
Illinois $50,000.00 was raised for the petition drive. The various
industries spent $3,000,000.00 to oppose the referendum, these
funds were spent on lobbying, political contributions, and PR. The
initiative was defeated in Illinois and even if it had been a
success, referendums in Illinois are only advisory and non-binding.
Non-binding referendums have no legislative force, thereby allowing
politicians to ignore successful referendums if they choose.
However, the initiative was successful in some other states (you
can see a listing on the bottom of beverage cans).

How have things progressed since then? The
amount of packaging and use of disposable products have greatly
increased. Recycling has proved to be only partially successful.
For example, only 27% of the hundreds of millions of plastic water
containers are actually recycled; one hundred million disposable
pens are used each year and discarded. The amount of plastic that
can be recycled is limited because it loses its engineering
properties. A common specification for the production of plastic
items is to allow a maximum of 20% regrind (reprocessed used
material). Many products require the use of 100% virgin material.
The fibers in paper products such as cardboard break down when
being reprocessed and also lose their properties limiting the
number times of reuse. Metal’s properties do not breakdown, however
reprocessing metals requires a lot of energy, although much less
than needed to convert mined ore into new metal.

In the United States our electoral process is
quite expensive (the 2012 election cycle cost $6 billion), and is
dependent upon private funding. These private donations in some
cases can be augmented by government matching funds. The matching
government funds are available to those who have been able to
attract 5% or more of the vote and are released after the election.
Since independents and third party candidates campaigns are
generally poorly funded and have no staying power, the lions share
of matching funds go to politicians sponsored by one of the
established parties.

Lets consider one of the largest political
campaign contributors and sources of lobbying, the armaments
industry. After world war two, the United States established a
policy of maintaining a large standing peace time military
establishment. President Eisenhower was aware and concerned about
the formation of what he referred to as the military industrial
complex. He consistently sought to restrain its growth by
restricting the amount of military spending. President Eisenhower
gave a number of speeches on this topic, the last one shortly
before he left office in 1961 which presents a fine portrayal of
the problematic effects the relationship between industry and
government was being produced by this policy.vii He noted that
prior to the cold war the United States did not maintain a large
standing army supported by a large permanent armaments industry
that required large scale scientific and engineering support. He
warned that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, weather sought or unsought, by the military industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power
exists and will persist.......domination of the nation’s scholars
by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money
is ever present and is gravely regraded.” The final points that
were made in this speech warned that there would be an “impulse to
live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience,
the precious resources of tomorrow.” He concluded that it was
imperative to “avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and
hate”.

Well here we are in 2013, how have we done?
In one of Eisenhower’s other speeches he pointed out the tradeoffs
being made to support a large military establishment the gist of
which I shall update as follows: currently a new aircraft carrier
the Gerald R. Ford is being constructed at a cost of $13.5 billion
dollars. If this money were spent on schools (the average cost of a
school in 2013 was $20.6 million) 655 new schools could be built. A
B-2 stealth airplane costs $1 billion, or 48 schools could be
built.

The United States military budget for 2013
was $716 billion. When our politicians are questioned about the
need for this level of expenditure they usually reply that it's
needed to provide adequate equipment and training for our military
forces. Is this true though? Lets consider the relative strength of
our military. The United States nuclear arsenal is currently
comprised of 7,700 bombs of which 1,950 are strategic bombs that
are deployed, 200 nonstrategic bombs, and the rest are in storage.
During the cold war the U.S. government evaluated the number of
potential targets where a nuclear bomb would be useful and found
that the number was around 200. These numbers suggest to me that
the likelihood of being attacked by another nation seems very
remote since they would be facing certain annihilation if even a
tiny fraction of these bombs were used. If we compare the size of
our military expenditures to the next highest nation which is
China. China was spending $106.4 billion in 2013, and that the U.S.
is spending 6.7 times more ($610 billion more). The U.S. navy is
larger than the next 13 largest navies combined, 11 of these navies
are possessed by our allies. By 2020 the number of stealth
airplanes we are building will be 20 times what China will have and
also be much more technologically advanced. The addition of the
Gerald R. Ford will bring the number of deployed aircraft carriers
up to 10. Currently only one other nation has an aircraft carrier
and it is of much smaller size. It is owned by the British which is
one of our allies. When considering these facts it is obvious that
the United States is not maintaining a military appropriately sized
to act as a defensive deterrent but one to support an aggressive
foreign policy which may be characterized as a form of economic
imperialism. If we recall the reasons for the formation of the
United States, the American revolution occurred as a result of
economic exploitation by a colonial power. If we look at recent
history it seems that the United States government is engaging in
the same kind of policies that the country was originally formed to
escape from! What Eisenhower was warning about, the formation of a
military industrial complex was anticipated as a potential problem
by the framers of the United States constitution. The Federalist
Paper Number 10 (22 November 1787) articulated an expression of
deep concern about the potential for the formation of factions that
would come to dominate the political process with narrow interests
contrary to the interests of the wider community. United States
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens cites Federalist #10 as
saying “Parties ranked high on the list of evils that the
constitution was designed to check”. James Madison also wrote in
Federalist #51 on the 6 February 1788, that political factions will
always be present and the way to counteract excessive influence by
a small number of factions was to have numerous factions. idea was
that no group could become strong enough to thwart the interests of
the other groups.