Making Money and Destroying Wealth

When all the land is destroyed, and all the fish are dead, then will the white man learn that he can't eat money.
--Native American saying

Today man does not live; he works. He works just for pay, never bothering whether his work (life) will promote his social life or degrade it. These things are simply beyond his comprehension, thanks to the proxy life style––mechanical life process––which, with all its wheels-within-wheels process, drags on like a giant social machine.

It is a fact that modern man produces material only for sale. But the problem that it has to be purchased and consumed by another man is a tragedy in many aspects. Apart from rendering human life indirect, it also makes his life totally dependent on the middleman who has suddenly risen to the status of the unique arbitrator in all arenas of life.

Here what is important is the saleable quality of the product, not its consumable quality. The long sophisticated middleman processes––from the raw material to the end consumer product, when it ends up in the hands of the consumer in world class packaging–renders the end product a caricature of its once natural condition, as a mere synthetic product. Here, as the appearance replaces the essence, what is ensured is its superficial look by expert mind-managers and advertisers who will ensure you that anything will sell if it is in world class packages. Here the final product is only the image or impression of the original matter or commodity which contains no real materials except the copies of the colour, taste, texture and even artificial smell of the original material through all sorts of chemical or superficial synthetic process.

In these long hierarchal layers of the middleman process, most of the natural qualities of the material are lost in the refinement, preservation, beautification and conversion processes, apart from the sort of degeneration and toxification of the commodities which they suffer in the chemical treatments in factories and in transportations. These aspects have been discussed in the chapter under ‘over-process’. Processing or factory production of materials, including fast food, is only a modern history phenomenon. Man lived for millions of years eating raw food and living in open nature with no artificial material requirements. Further wasting lots of energy and time in the conversion and ‘refining’ sort of processes they also cost the society on account of energy consumption in production and preservation, pollution production, and transportation from place to place, from one nation to another. This apart, masses of waste in the non-cyclic process (almost all synthetic processes are non-cyclic) also causes lots of environmental pollution and environmental hazards causing broken life cycles at various levels.

Such proxy ‘life styles’ seems to permanently hook the people and nations to the market dictate and rule, apart from creating all problems, as discussed above, and finally robbing human life of all its meaning and purpose. Here man may need extra exercise because his work (life) may not involve muscle because of mechanization and automation; he needs recreation because his work is lackluster; he needs ‘training’ (education, they say) because his natural brain cannot cope with the mechanical ‘brain’ of the machine; he has to pray because he has to sin, that his work (life) inevitably involves sinning too (many admit that adulterations, corruption, cheating and such malpractice are part and parcel of all modern professions).

Today man plays not for his entertainment but for his pay, for example the professional soccer players, for the promotion of Rothmans, Coke, Pepsi, Adidas, Nikke etc. And the play ends up a task. And those who watch it––they include millions of people––the play become acid to their body and mind that not only make their life and muscle sedentary but also end up addicts to these synthetic consumer culture for the rest of their life. Today mechanical life—over-process--has become more of a liability for man in order to maintain the mechanical society. Making money is not the same as creating wealth. The objective of this article is to facilitate an understanding of this deceptively simple statement which, in turn, will facilitate an understanding of the dimensions of the problems now being faced by humanity. Instead of creating wealth, our money system is depleting our real wealth: our communities, ecosystems, and productive infrastructureMarket economy equates money as wealth and rewards those who create money in proportion to their contribution. But, in reality, money is an accounting chit that by social convention we accept in return for things of real value. Manipulation of financial values allows those who control the creation and allocation of money to expropriate real wealth they had no part in creating. It is a phony to think that economic growth is the key to ending poverty and achieving environmental health. Economic growth as we have known it enriches the few at the expense of the many while destroying the families, communities, and natural systems essential to real human survival, prosperity, security and meaning of all, including the so-called rich. If we concentrate on growing strong and healthy families, communities, and natural systems, then prosperity, security, and meaning will follow.The modern era opted competition and domination as its organizing principles, hierarchy of riches as its favored organizational form, and ultimately chose money as its defining value. It has led to the emergence of a global suicide economy — otherwise known as the corporate global economy — that is rapidly destroying the social and environmental foundations of its own existence and threatening the survival of the human species.

In a healthy economy, money is not the dominant value, nor is it the sole or even dominant medium of exchange. Indeed, one of the most important indicators of economic health is the presence of an active economy of affection and reciprocity in which people do a great many useful things for one another with no expectation of financial gain. Such voluntary sharing creates and maintains the fabric of trust and mutual caring of which the social capital of any healthy family, community, or society is comprised.

Pathology enters the economic system when money, once convenient as a means of facilitating commerce, comes to define the life purpose of individuals and society. The human, social, and natural capital on which the well-being of any society depends becomes subject to sacrifice on the altar of money making. Those who already have money prosper at the expense of those who don't. It is a social pathology called finance capitalism.

Betting on financial bubbles is only one of the lucrative games that attract players to the global finance casino. There are as well opportunities to speculate on short-term price movements, buy and sell simultaneously in different markets to profit from minute price differences, and bet on derivatives contracts. While economists have become exceedingly facile in rationalizing how such activities actually benefit society, in truth they are more accurately described as forms of legal theft by which a clever few expropriate rights to the real wealth of society while contributing more to its depletion than to its creation.

Travelers on a living spaceship, humans continue to live like cowboys on an open frontier—living out an old story in a new era. In deep denial and captive to the imperatives of global corporations and financial markets that value MONEY MORE THAN LIFE, those who hold positions of institutional power remain resolutely committed to policies that accelerate the deepening crisis. The result is seen , for example, in healthcare system as the booming medical industry and the shrinking human wellbeing.

What is important is the quality of wealth, not its quantity. Measuring the wealth by the fatness of one’s bank balance is as fallacious as measuring the health of a fat obese man by his weight. It is the quality of health the absence of decease and the absence of toxins in the body which is real health.

Consuming capital to make moneyWilliam Greider, in his newly released book One World Ready or Not, observes that corporations get caught in the trap of having to compete for investment funds against the often more lucrative financial games of the world of pure finance. With the rare exception of companies with a hot product or distinctive market niche, in an unregulated global economy most corporations have little choice but to use their economic and political power to externalize ever growing portions of their costs onto the community. The dynamics of a competitive global economy favor the cost externalization process because they pit workers and communities against one another in a deadly race to the bottom. By competing for the jobs corporations offer, workers and communities are compelled to deplete real wealth to make corporations more profitable.

Pacific Lumber Company for years pioneered the development of sustainable logging practices on its substantial holdings of ancient redwood timber stands in California. It also provided generous benefits to its employees, fully funded its pension fund, and maintained a no-layoffs policy during downturns in the timber market. This made it a good citizen. It also made it a prime takeover target. Corporate raider Charles Hurwitz gained control in a hostile takeover. He immediately doubled the cutting rate of the company's holding of thousand-year-old trees, reaming a mile-and-a-half corridor into the middle of the forest that he jeeringly named "Our wildlife-biologist study trail." He then drained $55 million from the company's $93 million pension fund and invested the remaining $38 million in annuities of the Executive Life Insurance Company - which had financed the junk bonds used to make the purchase and subsequently failed.

The remaining redwoods are now the subject of a last-ditch effort by environmentalists to save them from clearcutting.
Professional buy-out artists are drawn like bees to honey by a socially responsible firm that internalizes its environmental costs, pays union wages, invests in worker training, fully funds its pension fund, and pays its full share of taxes. In a system that puts short-term profits first, these are inefficiencies to be eliminated.

Over the last several years, the biggest corporations have performed as the financial markets have demanded - increasing their profits by an average of 20 percent a year. In 1996, the 30 US corporations whose stock prices comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average returned to their shareholders an average of 28.2 percent for the year, a substantial increase from the five-year average of 18.3 percent. Each such increase further lifts the floor under investor expectations and increases the pressure on top managers to maintain such returns in the future - by any means.

The global corporation is arguably the most powerful instrument for concentrating power and wealth ever devised. Indeed, of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations. The economy of Mitsubishi is larger than that of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country and a land of enormous natural wealth.

Time-is-Money equation gives birth to Throw-away Society: There has been a thousand fold increase in the level of pollution since the last 50 years during which the world economy increased by almost seven times. The World Bank which took note of only the economy increase which it said was a big leap forward, thanks to modern science and market intellect. But what it failed to realize was even this seven fold increase in global wealth was actually a more than seven fold decrease or destruction of the global natural wealth or the real wealth of man .

Modern Science is synonymous with synthetics. And synthetics are synonymous with non-evolutionary or non-cyclic matter or imitations or arrested controlled motions in which process plates foot the bill fully. Therefore almost all modern developments are synthetic-swamping of human societies, which means plastic-swamping of modern societies. As such, in the fat throw-away modern society every single individual uses–by way of packaging, dress materials and a thousand similar items from synthetic soft drink bottles to throwaway once only usable syringes—a million times more non-biodegradable matters than an average man used a hundred years back.

The former Soviet Union started dumping uranium waste in 1959, and in 1972 it stopped building spent fuel reprocessing plants to save money, because it was so easy to dump the rods at sea, the report said. Another 1985 Government decree ordering new storage facilities was ignored, it said.

Every year, Russia’s 228 nuclear subs with a total of 394 nuclear reactors have been dumping 20,000 cubic meters of radioactive liquid waste and 6,000 cubic meters of solid waste, the report found. Russia also has seven nuclear-powered ice breakers.

Man ate fruits and roots, and lived for millions of years. Then he planted seeds of fruits and roots and grains and lived for thousands of years. Then he started to speculate techniques for living and started living on profit by selling what he produced through what he calls techniques--technology. Then he began to live by making profit by means of promising profit in future using speculated techniques - marketing of future, by selling dreams as promise of huge profits, by steamrolling what he calls - developments.

Today man no longer produces fruits or roots, nor does he produce much mechanical products. He produces only dreams of profits through what he calls speculations of ‘developments’. The sudden spurt of chain-marketing schemes—like the real estate business in the grab of developments in which even most political leaders are involved and the mushrooming of lottery menaces on a global level-- is just an indication. How long can now mankind survive on this speculation techniques is the moot question. Meanwhile, the glutting of duplicated products and services that are being produced through the non-cyclic methods are producing such environmental problems that the scientist frequently warm that mankind may not survive another decade if it cannot find two more similar planets to dump these wastes and pollutions from earth.