A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Bruce A. Dixon
The crime of deforestation is just one of many callous offenses against nature.
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We hear all the time about what geniuses the masters of capital, the lords of innovative technologies and global supply chains are. But are modern supply chains really that different from the transAtlantic slave trade, which brought genocide of Native American and African peoples and destruction of natural environments?
We hear all the time about how the competitive genius of firms like Wal-Mart, Monsanto, GE and Apple Computer have mastered innovative technologies, and global supply chains to bring us all the objects we covet and consume. We understand they did all this by being braver, more far-sighted and just plain smarter than the rest of us, because that’s what we’ve been told all our lives.
But thanks to intrepid journalists who have visited and reported on sites like the massive 400,000 employee Foxconn plant in South China, through which nearly all Apple’s Dell’s, and the product lines of many of their “competitors” pass, there are many reliable accounts describing how final assembly of all our cell phones, computers and computer subassemblies is done by workers, often children confined to barracks, exposed to toxic chemicals, worked to death and disability for near-starvation wages in 12 to 24 hour shifts, and discarded for newer serfs before they reach their late twenties. This innovative system is backed up by a Chinese state every bit as much the craven servant of capital as our own US government. And this is only one stage in the electronics industry’s global supply chain.
It starts in Central Africa, in the Congo where most of the world’s coltan, a naturally occurring compound used in every cell phone, circuit board, computer, car, aircraft, missile or electronic device, is mined. To ensure that a strong central Congolese government didn’t block Western access to its vital resources, Western powers engineered the invasion of Congo by seven surrounding countries who turned it into a vast free-fire zone and killed 5 to 6 million in the last half of the 90s alone. The ore is shipped to China on freighters fueled by West African oil, where that industry has turned Nigeria’s delta region into one of the most ecologically devastated areas on earth.
“Capitalist efficiency then, is nothing more than the murderous offloading of real costs onto powerless oppresssed people and the natural environment.”
In China the coltan is refined and processed using coal fired electricity, with the coal coming from the rape of Australia’s indigenous lands. Chinese manufacturing for US companies selling to the US market are an enormous contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide which is melting the polar icecaps and causing uncontrolled and catastrophic global climate change. The electronic subassemblies are put together in Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand and Maylasia under conditions so terrible even the Chinese government can’t force them on its people. The subassemblies are shipped to China for final assembly and to the US on more oil-burning freighters. The electronics industry differs only in the particulars from global corporate agriculture, fisheries, auto, textile and many other industries.
Capitalist efficiency then, is nothing more than the murderous offloading of real costs onto powerless oppresssed people and the natural environment. The trans-Atlantic slave trade was a global supply chain as well. The genius-grade innovations of Steve Jobs, the Waltons and the rest of the investor class are ecocide and genocide. They are parasitic vampires, a malignant disease feeding off humanity and the planet Earth. It’s time we begun planning a cure, and how we will someday live our lives without these geniuses of capitalist efficiency.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and lives in Marietta GA, where he serves on the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
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ADDENDUM
Ecocide — an international crime?
Ms. Higgins justifies adding ecocide to crimes under the jurisdiction of the ICC by claiming it is essentially a crime against peace. “Ecocide is in essence the very antithesis of life,” she says. “It leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind.” Her argument has considerable merit. Sir David King, Great Britain’s former chief scientist, predicts a century of “resource wars,” and a report on resource conflicts entitled Lessons UNlearned by the group Global Witness has convinced many skeptics of the threat of resource depletion.
Higgins has already achieved success in her environmental efforts. In 2008, she launched a campaign for a Universal Declaration for Planetary Rights, modeled on the human rights declaration, and the Bolivian government plans to propose a full members’ vote on the idea in the United Nations.
Her proposed ecocide law has support in the United Nations and the European Union, among climate scientists, and among environmental lawyers and organizations. If successful, it would have a major effect on energy, farming, mining, forestry and chemical industries. The effect almost seems to overwhelm Higgins herself when she says, “I’m only just beginning to get to terms with how enormous that change will be.”
But it’s an idea whose time has surely come. Our offences against nature are so immensely destructive, it seems perverse not to call them crimes when offences against members of our own species that are trivial by comparison are subjected to severe criminal prosecution.
Anyone with a desire for justice toward our fellow species will wish Higgins success in her mission. You can follow her campaign at http://www.thisisecocide.com/.
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