The brutality of global capitalism

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am no fan of Monbiot but I can't complain about much in this concise and
damning indictment of present-day capitalism.
    Cheers, Ken Hanly

>
>THE GUARDIAN (LONDON)
> June 29, 2000
>
>This is a war of all worlds
>
> By George Monbiot
>
> Fuss about the human genome just hides the brutality of global
>capitalism
>
>Nearly everyone debating the mapping of the human genome now agrees on one
>thing: that the identification of our genes invokes an unprecedented
>danger, as it might assist a handful of companies to seize something which
>belongs to all of us. I wish this were true.
>
>Terrifying as the impending capture of the essence of humanity is, it is
>far from unprecedented. The attempt to grab the genome is just one of many
>symptoms of a far graver disease. We are entering an age of totalitarian
>capitalism, a political and economic system which, by seizing absolute
>control of fundamental resources, destitutes everyone it excludes.
>
>On Saturday I met a campaigner from Kerala, in southern India, who told me
>that, to the tribal people he works with, the ownership of land is as
>inconceivable as the ownership of air would be in the northern hemisphere.
>I told him the bad news. In several American cities, blocks of air, which
>(once legally transferred to a suitable site) allow their owners to build
>skyscrapers, change hands for tens of millions of dollars. There have been
>a number of legal disputes over the ownership of clouds, as firms battle
>for the right to make them drop their rain where they want it. Companies
>are now claiming they own asteroids and landing spaces on the moon.
>
>None of these presumptions is any more absurd than the claim to possess
>exclusive control over part of our own planet. But, as property rights
>proliferate, almost everything which once belonged to all of us is being
>seized.
>
>In Britain, for example, despite repeated pledges by the government,
>playing-fields and allotments are disappearing faster than ever before.
>Public squares are being turned into private shopping malls. Traditional
>stopping sites for travellers, some of which survived for five millennia,
>have nearly all disappeared during the past 15 years.
>
>Knowledge is rapidly becoming the exclusive preserve of those who can
>afford to buy it. Intellectual property companies are monopolising image
>banks and picture archives, while academic publishers, concentrated in
>ever fewer hands, are able to charge outrageous prices for access to the
>work they publish. Companies are asserting ownership in perpetuity of the
>material in their electronic databases. A firm called West Publishing has
>tried to insist that it owned the entire archive of US federal law.
>
>The biotech companies have been empowered to seize the human genome by the
>very people - Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - who are now begging them not
>to do so. Blair's government helped drive through the European directive
>on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions, which enables
>private companies to claim not only human genes, but also plant and animal
>varieties and even human body parts.
>
>Every asset, once secured by the new totalitarian regime, is surrounded by
>a Berlin wall equipped with border guards. There are ranches in the United
>States in which you would be shot on sight if you tried to take a walk.
>Disproportionate responses to the feeblest threats are assisted by the
>private prison and security industries now seizing control of another
>fundamental asset: human freedom. We cross the economic frontiers at our
>peril.
>
>The worst global inequality in history is a direct result of this
>totalitarian capitalism. Two hundred people now own as much wealth as half
>the world's population, for the simple reason that they have been
>empowered to steal it from the rest of us.
>
>This empowerment emerges from an unwholesome union of neoliberal economics
>and feudal law. Our legal framework, which pre-dates democracy, protects
>property above individuals and individuals above society. We can't expect
>our governments to address this inversion of democratic priorities. The
>three men who could begin to reform our legal system - the home secretary,
>the lord chancellor and the prime minister - are all lawyers, and all
>wedded (literally in the prime minister's case) to the profession which
>benefits from its iniquities. Property-based law favours the interests of
>the rich, which, in turn, favours the interests of its practitioners.
>
>The walls rising around us are beginning to look impregnable. But before
>we can decide how they might best be demolished, we must first recognise
>that the enclosure of the human genome is just a single cell in the
>privatised global prison the new regime has built.
>