source: junkscience.com
Business's main system of control, their influence if you prefer, is currency and therefore all those emotions that arise from it which they pull us into - let's simply call that idea the perception of affluence. Plus, the subtle manipulation of the emotions which trigger our wants. They wield both of those well to beat us and the environment with regularly.
Look at your mobile phone and ask, why do your emotions encourage the upgrading or the replacement of a perfectly good phone? And regularly too.
The following touches on what I call, scandal but which the psychopathy of business considers fair play.
source: junkscience.com
For those who have no idea what I mean please follow the scandalous trail of cobalt to where it is found in West Africa. Then research how and by whom it is mined, for instance, children by hand - no tools other than a stick and bare fingers - much like The 100,000's of Dalit scavengers who are forced to clean public toilets in India. Here is a link to an article: Children as young as seven mining cobalt used in smartphones, says Amnesty As reported by The Guardian.
Find out for yourselves just how poisonous cobalt is, especially to those children. Learn how many of the young - 10, 11, and 12-year-olds are raped by the gangers and traders and left to raise their child who they many carry in slings upon their backs as they mine the cobalt for you.
All that is well known in government and business circles, but dismissed by them and yes, by us too because we have been encouraged to want our wants, regardless of the costs elsewhere. We are encouraged not to focus on how such things come into being, but merely on how to use them.
Every single tech company around the world is involved either directly or indirectly in trading cobalt. They use it, yet not one is successfully prosecuted for conspiring to either allow or for encouraging exploitation, slavery, starvation, sickness, the rape of underage children and the deaths of extremely vulnerable children and women. But not so many men though...
Such practices are protected by government officials. Licenses are issued to shady individuals. In this instance Chinese Traders, who sell on the cobalt to back-alley wholesalers. The chain if you like of the source is nicely muddied.
Consider, how many individuals around the world need a new Cell Phone. I suspect none actually need one! There will be those who may need to replace a broken model, but does it have to be with a new one? If we all stopped buying new Cell Phones because we know full well they are environmentally undesirable and contribute directly or indirectly to slavery, then Apple and Co will have three main choices.
* Counter the opposition.
* Go out of business.
* Change their business model.
The first option will be short-lived if we, the consumers, pointedly ignore it.
Some companies operating in and around the rainforests are known to use a more directly dramatic and irreversible 4th option. They kill the protesters who are trying to protect the forests. And not just in The South America's. It happens in the Philippines as well. Prosecutions for killings are rare, if at all. That is how serious governments and businesses are when it comes to maintaining their hold on systems of exploitation and ensuring their continual personal enrichment, i.e. it is The Psychopathy of Business at work.
Having looked at your mobile phone, now take a long hard look at all those other material things in your life and ask, what influenced you to buy them?
We walk into an empty flat and we need a chair to sit on. That is fair enough, but do we need to keep replacing that chair over and over again? Understand, we have been encouraged to do exactly that and it has been made easy for us to do so, regardless of the cost to the environment.
Somewhere else in the world, an undervalued, underpaid worker will have produced the chair using wood stolen from a forest most like. That worker might even be a child who has no choice. We in this comfortable part of the world are discouraged from considering such things. But ask…, why is that?
The following is yet another attitude which environmentalists have to overcome:
You want a new chair, you will have a new chair and you will feel terribly denied if you cannot get one. You might even be called poor and ridiculed. And we can’t have that now, can we?
Similar emotions I suspect were extant in the outrages of the South Sea Bubble, the Highland Clearance, India, China, the British use of concentration camps in Africa to further their exploitations, or even the scalping of American Indians encouraged by Britain in the US and Canada to pacify resistance. All of which are not taught about in British schools. What is taught is that the Indians scalped the white man… What the Native Indian’s actually did was turn the atrocity back on to the perpetrators.
A few more links to articles about how businesses kill and maim Indigenous peoples while destroying the planet.
The world’s most toxic town- the terrible legacy of Zambia’s lead mines - Pollution - The Guardian
Indigenous children suffer most from illegal miners’ Amazon invasion - Indigenous peoples - The Guardian
Anglo American sued over alleged mass lead poisoning of children in Zambia - Pollution - The Guardian
And one more to stir up your ire. Take that townhall.com.
‘The world’s richest are plundering the planet’- Billionaires' huge carbon footprints prompt call for action. Climate News - Sky
Occasionally outrages surface - the production of trainers by children operating in dangerous and under slave conditions. At the time, sage chins wagged along and declared it was wrong, before dipping mouths down to spoon in another helping of truffles and veal - their dinner sponsored by that very company probably (but not funded directly of course - that would be too obvious.) Nothing really happened about the trainers situation. Money was involved, so why would it? And we the people to this day buy those very trainers. We have no conscious because we are not encouraged to have one.
So, how on earth are we to begin to save the planet when attitudes like that abound in most areas of our lives?
The trainer issue has been raised on and off since the 70s. I suspect little has changed within that industry other than celebrities now front their campaigns. And so the wheel turns and the planet and exploited people burn.
Regardless of world opinion, a certain South American country has been killing off the indigenous peoples to snatch their traditional lands - to make money. And as we know, they also kill protesters. The world’s businesses who covet the rainforest’s trees and minerals, just like England did the land of Scotland, stir the pot then sit back and watch - or tinker or even get involved - and wait for the auction houses to start selling off the plunder, or mining rights or whatever, even though the country concerned has no legal rights to do so, but… That never stops a good exploiter does it, for such is The Psychopathy Of Business. And who ultimately owns the logging companies and the mining companies? They will have their feet in the West for sure.
They are the same methods the British Empire used around the world. Hence the lesson. The outrages still happen. And the money people are at the very front of it all. The wants of business and therefore governments must prevail regardless - The Psychopathy Of Business and the Collective.
Again I state, I do not present these outrages to business bash per se. Or to British bash come to that. As mentioned earlier, we need commerce, but not the way it presently runs.
I suggest for two reasons.
We have been removed from the land and therefore disconnected from nature, both our own, and that abroad, unless it’s to go and lay on a beach.
Such removal encourages us not to note our environment. If we do not note it, we do not care about it. If you work all hours, then what time do you have to note and care for anyway? You don’t… Think about that… Think about the why that is… Or more correctly, who put you there…
So, we hold onto our lifestyle of work and buy, work and buy, because it is all we are encouraged to know.
Now consider this. The attitude towards our UK waterways and Johnson and Johnson, and the US water authorities as mentioned in part one exist in every business and all governments around the world. The populace has been manipulated for centuries not to care by those very people.
Here in the UK for centuries we were taught to say, “Yes sir, no sir. Anything you say sir.” It is almost part of our DNA and it is certainly part of our national culture. Tongue in cheek I would suggest that as far as The English are concerned it is our only national culture, for all others have been taken from us over the centuries by various invaders. That might well explain all the fawning over the royal family and such. It’s all we have that we can call our own, except in reality it is not our own. It belongs to all the indigenous peoples who died or suffered to keep it there. The Gurkhas included.
Businesses needs through greed to automate or implement AI well eventually kill businesses markets. Why? If only a few people are in paid work, then who will be able to buy the services and products? So their demise is inevitable if the logic is followed, but the social and environmental damages caused in the meantime will not be recoverable. Elon Musk is even suggesting similar.
Greed is greed, regardless of the times. Investors and businesses will ensure their greed is fed, and will do so right down to the very last tree, the last fish and the very last wonky carrot.
Unless we the people stop it. And if we can stop it, we will help to turn back the environmental damage.
We must also keep questioning the origins of our personal prejudices. We must question businesses wants and our own wants as well.
When the last 'Collective' manipulator is finally pulled beneath the waves of the rising seas to mingle with the bodies of those already drowned, I imagine their arm much like the lady-of-the-lake will rise above the waves to punch the air and proclaim:
At least I had it all... All I tell ya... All!
I dread the very idea that that type of person will be the very last of us left alive on this planet.
Continued in Part 5. The Closing Conclusions
~~ ↓ ~~
Comments as usual to author@theannstories followed by .co.uk