Parasites, Inc. - Death by Media

Parasites, Inc. - Death by Media
by arendt


...."What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering,
....low and horribly cruel works of nature."

....- Charles Darwin

There is no debate about the fact that mega-corporations are shipping American jobs overseas as fast as they can find U.S. government subsidies to do so. How could there be debate, given that outsourcing is the expressed policy of WalMart (a.k.a. the American East India Company) and other famous "American" brand names - a policy given the rousing imprimatur of the high priests of the free market.

What has been surprising, ever since Bill Clinton rammed through NAFTA and GATT, is the acquiescence to this activity by elected Democratic politicians, who supposedly represent the interests of the working class and the middle class professionals most injured by these policies. It is as though the elected representatives of 50% or more of America's citizens have been paralyzed, while the GOP dines out on their constituents.

The clue to this paralysis is to be found in the hijacking of political debate by the corporate conglomeration of the media and the hijacking of the Congress by Tom Delay's "K Street Project". Both of these hijackings have been highly destructive to small-d democratic processes in America. As to the anti-democracy effects of the lockstep corporate media, we need look no further than James Madison:

...."A popular government without popular knowledge or the means of acquiring it
....is but a prelude to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both."

Right now, we certainly have a farcical government. Some of the words used of late to describe Bush's slow-motion drive to dictatorship are: bizarro world, pantomime presidency, Alice-in-Wonderland government, and delusional democracy. The true extent of the tragedy being deliberately foisted upon the Middle East (and the unfortunate American soldiers stuck there) by the neocon puppet masters of George Bush is being dutifully withheld by the corporate media. They have effortlessly switched the focus away from the descent of our "glorious" campaign to bring democracy to Iraq into civil war . In place of that cancelled reality show, they have substituted the incredibly disproportional, but somehow "justifiable", response of the Israelis to the umpteenth incident of minor border skirmishing in a forty year war.

It goes without saying that the K Street-intimidated Democratic congressmen and senators have been tripping over themselves in their hurry to declare wholehearted supported the Israeli collective punishment of Christian Lebanese hundreds of miles from the battlefront, condoning the shipment of depleted uranium bunker-busters to the Israelis while stalling on the call for a cease fire.

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With the above features of today's world in mind, I invite the reader to consider the following extended quotation from the late biologist, Steven Jay Gould. His topic is the debate, which occurred around the time of the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution, over the morality of predatory behavior in nature. In the nineteenth century, an early version of Intelligent Design, known as "natural theology", had been promulgated in response to the steady encroachment of scientific discoveries in biology upon the self-serving medieval credulity of Christian Churchmen. The many examples of predation found by biologists demolished natural theology.

The quotation from Gould's essay "Nonmoral Nature" centers upon one of the most gruesome, but undeniable facts of nature: predatory wasps, called Ichnuemons (from the Greek for hunter).

...."...nature includes many phenomena far more horrible in our eyes than simple
....predation. I suspect that nothing evokes greater disgust in most of us than the slow
....destruction of a host by an internal parasite - gradual ingestion, bit by bit, from the
....inside...Our nineteenth century forbearers maintained similar feelings...The classic
....case, treated at length by all great naturalists, invoked the so-called ichneumon fly...

...."The Ichneumonoidea are a group of wasps, not flies...like most wasps...pass their
....larval life as parasites feeding on the bodies of other animals, almost invariably
....members of their own phylum, the Arthropoda...

...."The females locate an appropriate host and then convert it to a food factory for their
....own young...(they) lay their eggs directly upon the hosts body. Since an active host
....would easily dislodge the egg, the ichneumon mother often simultaneously injects a
....toxin that paralyzes the caterpillar or other victim. The paralysis may be permanent,
....and the caterpillar lies, alive but immobile, with the agent of its future destruction
....secure on its belly. The egg hatches, the helpless caterpillar twitches, the wasp larva
....pierces and begins its grisly feast.

...."Since a dead and decaying caterpillar will do the wasp larva no good, it eats in a
....pattern that cannot help but recall, in our inappropriate, anthropocentric interpre-
....tation, the ancient English penalty for treason - drawing and quartering, with its
....explicit object of extracting as much torment as possible by keeping the victim alive
....and sentient. As the king's executioner drew out and burned his client's entrails, so
....does the ichneumon larva eat fat bodies and digestive organs first, keeping the
....caterpillar alive by preserving intact the essential heart and nervous system. Finally,
....the larva completes its work and kills the victim, leaving behind the caterpillar's
....empty shell. Is it any wonder that ichneumons, not lions or snakes, stood as the
....paramount challenge to God's benevolence during the heyday of natural theology?"

To cut to the chase, predatory corporations (to be distinguished from civic-minded corporations) are the ichneumons; America's jobs and factories are the caterpillar of their own species; and corporate-controlled media and lobbying is the paralysis toxin.

Corporations have paralyzed the political process, by buying the media and both political parties; and they have devoured the reserves and the substance of American industry in order to build up private empires in corrupt, authoritarian regimes abroad. In the process, they have installed a corrupt, authoritarian regime in America. And the American political process has done nothing more than twitch like a paralyzed caterpillar. The phrase "hollowing out", used to describe the effects of outsourcing, takes on its true meaning in the context of predatory wasps.

In spite of these facts, the natural theologians of corporate benevolence insist that this gruesome predation is the "wisdom of the market" in action. These theologians imply that Americans are undeserving of what they had built up by their own hands over a century of industrialization, even as these pharisees bilk the taxpayers of billions and trillions of dollars for corporate welfare, military bling, and Paris Hilton giveaways. They insist that these changes are inevitable, unavoidable, and necessary. Just what you would expect from primitives who assign to the marketplace the anthropomorphic godly attributes of infallibility, infinite wisdom, and benevolence. The same excuses were made 150 years ago:

...."How did they square the habits of these wasps with the goodness of God?...The
....strategies were as varied as the practitioners; they shared only the theme of special
....pleading for an a priori doctirne - our naturalists knew that God's benevolence was
....lurking somewhere behiind all these tales of apparent horror."

However, should anyone press these corporate theologians, citing instance after instance of unbenevolent outcomes - sweatshops, illegal immigrants, union busting, and the general "race to the bottom" - off comes the mask of benevolence and out pours the rhetoric of Social Darwinism. The marketplace is a lawless jungle. Only the strong and ruthless survive. Compassion and loyalty have no survival value for corporate entities. And so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

We can see that, when it comes to the question of whether they are God-ordained mercy killers or Social Darwinists in an amoral universe, corporations have applied their signature technique of buying both sides of the debate.

But the Darwinist position, while seemingly hard-nosed, is actually the weaker of the two. Once again, Dr. Gould:

...."If nature is nonmoral, then evolution cannot teach any ethical theory at all...the
....answer to the ancient dilemma of why such cruelty (in our terms) exists in nature
....can only be that there isn't any answer - and that framing the question "in our terms"
....is thoroughly inappropriate in a natural world neither made for us nor ruled by us.
....It just plain happens. It is a strategy that works for ichneumons and that natural
....selection has programmed into their behavioral repertoire. Caterpillars are not
....sufferiing to teach us something; they have simply been outmaneuvered for now in
....the evolutionary game. Perhaps they will evolve an adequate set of defenses
....sometime in the future...and perhaps, indeed probably, they will not."

Notice the current-ness of Gould's reference to "framing the question", even though he was writing in the early 1980s. He understands that all the social Darwinist claptrap is basically a category error.

The problem for the social Darwinists is that the business world was both made for humans by humans, and is ruled entirely by human beings. In particular, the idea that the market is a nonmoral force of nature is a convenient fiction. History show that laissez-faire markets must be held in place by force of law, including military and police force (for example, NAFTA and GATT or the earlier British domination of the terms of world trade). That in the absence of coercive laws, these unfair markets cannot survive.

The idea that corporations are impersonal, immortal entities driven only by the quest for profit is another legal fiction. This one was duplicitously implanted in the court record of an infamous case of the 1880s. (See Thom Hartmann for the details.)

In reality (there's that pesky word again), a limited liability corporation is a human-created entity, made up of human agents. If it is given the legal right of persons, which was one of the biggest mistakes ever made in U.S. jurisprudence, it must also be given the legal duties of persons: the duty to behave ethically and to not be a predator.

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In the end, however, those ethical duties are enforced by the same government agencies of law that enforce the rights of corporations. And there's the rub. For we have already seen that the corporations have paralyzed those agencies. The U.S. is nothing but a giant caterpillar's meal for these multi-national predators. They have spent twenty five years consuming our substance, and are about to leave the husk of America behind as they fly free to find new hosts in East Asia.

One can only hope that other democracies in the world evolve "an adequate set of defenses" against media and lobbyist-induced paralysis of democratic functions. The South Americans seem to be moving in that direction. As for the United States, its legacy as a great nation seems to be nothing more than as a glaring example of a new way to mistakenly commit national suicide - death by media-induced paralysis.

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