Externalized Costs

I am annoyed by corporations, yes, even the same transnational corporations that I depend on to make the jeans that I wear, the coffee that I drink and the paper, O God, the paper that I rely on as a writer, poet, teacher, etc.
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Without even asking my permission, they are moving their business activities to Taiwan, Indonesia, India, and other places where the people do not have the political power to push their governments to ensure safe working conditions and decent wages for workers and environmentally safe standards for manufacturing facilities. In fact, as a rule, they are usually hiding their complicity—and thereby mine—in the kinds of practices that inevitably erode political power, labor safety and environmental sustainability. And it pisses me off.

I am also deeply offended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which both force developing countries to “open” their markets to “foreign business” if they want “loans” that will help them “develop” without also mentioning how the “open markets” will change the countries’ economic basis so as to disempower the traditional small businesses and farmers and create an economic dependence on these foreign loans that will eventually (if it does not already) look disturbingly like addiction.

Wanna buy a watch? Cheap? Want some coke? Just a taste. No, really, this toot is free on me…

And I am really pissed off by the World Trade Organization, which encourages both of these “economic globalization” trends, making the conquistadors and their accompanying Christian missionaries look like innocent lambs in comparison. It's not just me who thinks this. The magazine Mother Jones has long criticized the way the WTO works.

And, naturally, the production processes, the extraordinary amount of transnational shipments of natural resources, parts and whole products rely on fossil fuels, the use of which is wrecking our planet’s climate and soon will overwhelm its natural ability to bounce back from more and more catastrophic changes.

Yes, I am mad, because I don’t know how to disengage myself from these corporations and their greedy, grimy, normal-seeming grip on my life. Going off the grid is not an option, as I do not have the skills to support myself. I am gradually trying to divest from investments in unsustainable companies, but when you make as little money as I do, you have to do this slowly so as not too lose to much of the nest-seed (it isn’t an egg, alas, not even close) that will support me when I can no longer work. And beyond even the economic side of this question, our social life, inherently, relies on objects, material objects whose manufacture puts us right in the middle of this problem.

I am grateful for Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff (and all the other versions, including those that discuss electronics, cosmetics, bottled water, cap and trade, and Citizens United). They give me, both personally as a consumer and professionally as a teacher of writing and critical thinking, tools to use to give knowledge and gain hope.

But grr. Arrgh.

Sometimes I just feel like my brain is going to pop. I can only hope that my anger gives me the passion and courage I am going to need to get through the next, wetter and messier and hotter and colder, few decades.

I suspect I’m going to need it.