Laissez faire corporatism executes the wellbeing of everything it touches — two toxicity metaphors

01 May 2021

Caveat — imagination required

Today, I illustrate Caitlin Johnstone's point about cognitive unconciousness's toxicity with two other metaphors.

Johnstone's premise

Clan humanicus is suicidally dumb.

She wrote that:

It’s really, really weird how any time there’s a major scandalous revelation about the powerful, there’s a lot of noise about it for a few days, and then essentially nothing happens.

Mainstream news media might report on it for a bit . . . [but] they trot out the pundits to manage the narrative in such a way that ensures nobody in power will ever face any consequences, and then it is quietly memory-holed.

There are many people who understand that we are ruled by sociopaths who manipulate our society into alignment with their greedy and power-grabbing agendas, and that most of our world’s problems arise from this fact.

[T]here are more than enough readily available facts in evidence to make it abundantly clear to anyone with the time and willingness to look.

Yet it remains a relatively fringe understanding, far short of the numbers it would take to make a real difference in our world.

Caitlin Johnstone, What if the Big Reveal already Happened?, caitlinjohnstone.com (30 April 2021)

Let's illustrate Johnstone's observation . . .

. . . with two other poison-related metaphors:

DDT and radioactive waste.

Metaphorical symbolism can be apt.

Metaphor 1 — DDT

I coincidentally came across the following DDT news, just after reading what Johnstone had said:

Marine scientists say they have found what they believe to be more than 25,000 barrels that possibly contain DDT dumped off the Southern California coast near Catalina Island, where a massive underwater toxic waste site dating back to World War II has long been suspected.

Amplified:

[A]nalysis of sediment taken from the area and published in a 2019 paper by Professor Valentine and colleagues, revealed very high concentrations of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT).

Previous research also found that dolphins in the Southern California Bight had high concentrations of DDT in their blubber and that sea lions with high concentrations of DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) had a significantly higher instance of cancer.

Shipping logs from a company working for a DDT manufacturer in California revealed up to 2,000 barrels of "DDT-laced sludge" were dumped every month between 1947 and 1961, according to an investigation by the LA Times.

Although there was a designated dump site off the LA coast in the mid-20th century, the location of many of these barrels was well outside that area.

DailyMail.com strung Culpability's dots together:

DDT was once hailed as a wonder pesticide after saving crops and fighting off malaria but it was banned in the US in 1972 after it was linked to cancer and threatened wildlife.

The largest DDT producer in the US, Montrose Chemical Corp, was one of the companies stationed on the border of Los Angeles and Torrance and dumped waste between the 1940s and 1970s.

A $140million legal battle in the 1990s exposed it and three other companies for their disposal of toxic waste through sewage pipes heading to the sea.

The 27,345 'barrel-like' images, some of which were leaking and corroding, were captured by researchers at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography . . . .

Regulators said in the 1980s that barrels were deliberately punctured when they were too buoyant to sink, sending the toxic chemicals spewing into the sea inhabited by diverse marine life.

The site has been rumored for decades and the first 60 barrels were spotted in 2011 using an underwater camera by UC Santa Barbara professor Dr David Valentine.

The latest investigation using high-tech autonomous vehicles on the ocean floor has now revealed the extent of the dumping ground with thousands upon thousands of abandoned waste barrels.

It is estimated that as many as half a million barrels could still be underwater today according to old logs and a recent study, and scientists said they were overwhelmed with the debris which they said was like counting stars in the Milky Way.

© 2021 Jack Newman, Toxic timebomb 12miles off LA coast: Scientists discover 27,000 barrels of banned pesticide DDT in 3,000ft-deep dumping ground off Catalina Island amid fears they've already caused cancer in sea lions, DailyMail.com (27 April 2021)

Explicating the DDT metaphor's pertinence . . .

. . . to Johnstone's point — notice that the toxics dump site had been "rumored for decades".

Meaning either that Corporatism had covered it up, or 'Authorities' deliberately turned a blind eye.

Arguably worse, no one bothered to keep even marginally accurate — or, for that matter, easily available records — regarding who was dumping which toxicity, where.

The planet is big. And there are Robber Baron profits to be made.

Metaphor 2 — radioactive waste

Still lacking a decent repository for radioactive waste materials, the US has temporary holding sites scattered all over the country.

Most of this biology-screwing stuff is contained in deteriorating temporary containers of one kind or another:

Commercial energy generation produces the majority of nuclear waste in the U.S., which remains stored above ground near each of the 99 commercial nuclear reactors scattered around the country.

Nuclear waste is stored in pools to cool for many years, and some is moved to above-ground concrete casks. However, these storage solutions are temporary at best.

This form of storage requires personnel to maintain the sites of disposal, to monitor leakage, and to check the temperature and radioactivity of waste.

Because nuclear waste could be repurposed for weapons, these pools and casks require a security presence to prevent theft.

Above-ground casks are also vulnerable to natural disasters such as earthquakes, flooding, and hurricanes that could overwhelm the storage sites.

While nuclear waste disposal sites are designed to safely store waste for several years, they haven’t been built to a standard that would allow the waste to sit there for centuries without constant upkeep.

Japan's current and casually concocted plan to dump tons and tons of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster's radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean — to China's consternation — puts a wry exclamation point on all of this.

Conclusion?

Foresight is (evidently enthusiastically) denied as a matter of world policy.

In contemplating this conclusion, accept that the DDT and radiation metaphors are not just constructs from the Past.

Consider the parallel toxicities posed by plastics — and their reported hormonal effects — or antibiotics leaking into the environment — and their associated contributions to planet-wide antibiotic resistance — and so on, ad nauseum.

Yet, no one is paying substantive attention to even these most obvious of threats to biological functioning.

This is how . . .

. . . unregulated capitalism, government — and their associated implementing sociopaths — treat ' the commons' and public.

Casually indulged destruction is one of the aspects of the knowing villainy that Johnstone was addressing in her observation.

"Big reveals" — like the DDT example and all other exposed Military Industrial Complex and Plutocracy machinations — happen on a daily basis.

Yet, the overwhelming mass of Everyone ignores them.

The moral? — Humanity is stupid, self-destructive . . .

. . . and deserves to go extinct?

Probably so. The rest of Life's critters will thank their lucky stars.

Can Darwin's fitness guillotine be dodged?

While humans await the Cosmic Axe, perhaps its currently Awakened component can start shaking its Complacently Slumbering overproportion into quasi-consciousness.

Perhaps that will work.

However, my expectation is that Corporatism will invent an artificially intelligent Robotic Police Species to govern the rest of us — who will then be completely relegated to roach status.

On this last point, see:

Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (Haymarket Books, 2021)

Being even mildly awakened is a PITA.

On that cheerful note, I wish y'all a good day.

PeteFree.com

Laissez faire corporatism executes the wellbeing of everything it touches — two toxicity metaphors