A couple of different things are intersecting for me right
now as our once hopeful land of opportunity remains frozen in partisan
gridlock, maybe more than a couple.
Krugman’s column in my local paper today is about corporate
“inversion,” which is about as obscene as it sounds. It is the practice of
corporations declaring that their off shore subsidiaries are now the corporate
owners in order to avoid corporate taxes. Apparently Walgreens is about to do
it, so I guess it is time for me to consider changing my prescriptions to a
small locally owned chain. [Scratch that. Walgreens backed away from it. I
still may change, just because they floated the idea.]
And speaking of corporations, those friendly church going
neighbors of all of ours, and Big Pharma in particular: I’m getting really
tired of all of the medication ads on the network nightly news shows.
Apparently we are like one of only two or three countries that allow
pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers. On vacation
recently I was talking to a doc who works for NIH and he was telling me that
doctors hate them, too, that they tend to make for bad medical decisions. So
who wants them? Big Pharma, the same people who have instructed their
Congressional delegation to prevent Medicare from negotiating price with them.
If corporations are people just like me, how come I don’t
get to own a few dozen Congressmen? Really. It hardly seems fair.
So with this as background I am about 2/3 of the way through
an interesting piece of speculative fiction—the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley
Robinson—I’ve read Red Mars and most of Green Mars. It’s extrapolative sci-fi.
It takes current science and scientific trends and extrapolates some time in
the future. Red Mars begins in 2026 with the expedition to colonize Mars. It’s
2114 now and the members of the first one hundred not killed by murder, war, or
accident, are still alive thanks to restorative gene therapy they invented on
Mars.
This has been exported back to Earth which was already a
disaster of overpopulation, pollution, and armed conflicts between haves and
have nots, now exacerbated by the new division between those who can afford the
longevity treatments—the wealthy and those who work for the big
corporations—and the rest. And those corporations have changed, too.
Ongoing consolidation has led to the creation of a very few
“metanational” corporations which now run things, the UN being shunted aside,
and multiple countries actually owned by the megacorporations. Even the largest
countries are an insufficient counterweight to the metanationals that actually
have armies. What has resulted at this point in my reading is a kind of feudal
plutocracy. The democratic idea has become meaningless, and the thirty-some odd
who remain of the first hundred Mars colonists, now in their 130s, and their
children and grandchildren plot revolt.
I described it as extrapolative fiction and it believably is
an extension, and not a very far one, from where we are now.
Corporations, now declared in multiple Supreme Court
decisions to be people, essentially own Congress. The huge expense of the
eternal campaign and its associated fund-raising makes that inevitable. Given
that many of those corporations cannot even operate in the interests of their
owners and employees, but instead serve the interests of the small cabals that
constitute their boards and the C-suites, it is silly to expect that they might
operate in the interests of the people.
The hope at one time was that government could supply the
counterweight, but the phrase “too big to fail” probably is now completely
synonymous with “too big to be regulated and controlled.” And the spin doctors
have convinced the social conservatives and their allies that government must
be shrunk to the size where it can be “drowned in a bathtub,” as Grover “the
pledge” Norquist has famously said.
The irony is that it is plausible to oppose government since
it no longer seems to be “us.” Remember, government “of the people, by the
people, for the people.”
And the irony for me is that I was educated to be a member
of that corporate leadership class. I made choices to alter that, as I was
committed to the idea of making workplaces be healthy and affirming for all of
their constituents; but perhaps I was, as we used to say, “shoveling shit
against the tide,” or “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Now I’m
thankful to be done with it and thankful that there are not longevity
treatments yet.
But really—we have the little people all stirred up about
the children running for their lives who are here to destroy our Amurrican Way
of Life. It’s theatre. It’s theatre like the security crap in the airports 13
years after the event that prompted it. It’s theatre like the elections that we
think will influence things and make not much difference in the long run. It’s
theatre like the medical industry controlled by corporate hospital chains, big
pharma, and the insurance industry. It’s theatre like the sacrosanct pork
barreled military budget. It’s theatre like the cops armed like paramilitary,
primed to SCOTUS approved no knock entry. Deadly, persistent, toxic fucking
theatre, with 500+ channels and facebook to serve as bread and circuses.
The “Man/Woman on the White Horse?” That’s Don Quixote.
I want to apologize to my children. Really, I am so sorry we
have left you this fucking mess.
