1.  Corporate Capitalism  

A.  The Goal of Corporate Capitalism:

--to maximize short-term private financial profits

• To maximize means to make as large as possible.
• Short-term usually means over the next financial quarter, the next fiscal year, or at most the next few years.   Rarely is a time horizon of decades considered.  (Compare the Native American's traditional appraisal of their effects "seven generations hence"-- to think 150 years ahead sounds ludicrous to the modern American.)
• Private means personal, and often secret (as opposed to public, social, and open).
• Financial means measured in units of money, in terms of commercial value.
• Profits refers to the results or outcome sought.  Economic profits are what remain of revenues (or gross income) after all expenses are paid.  Hence, it is easily seen that profits can only be increased by expanding revenues or by decreasing expenses (or both).

Joe Dowpontsanto explains the "real world"...

B.  About Capitalism 

These are some common questions about capitalism:

• What is capitalism?
• What is corporate capitalism?
• What are some important tendencies of capitalism?

For some answers, as well as more observations and ideas about capitalism continue ...

C.  Corporate Capitalism and Environment

1.  The capitalist compulsion (described above) has many unfortunate consequences for our life support system.  Let's look at several examples. 

• Profit maximization leads to vigorous attempts to externalize environmental and social costs of doing business. For instance, instead of paying for processes that would reduce the yield of pollutants (an expense, and hence a reduction of profits), the owner of a factory will try to push the pollutants (and broadly their costs) out onto nature and the public at large.  It's private, not public, profits and losses that matter most.

• The short-term capitalist viewpoint often leads to rapacious environmental behavior.  Natural resources should be used sooner rather than later, and in a manner that gains the most revenue with the least expenses.   Hence, let's clear-cut the forest rather than selectively cut it for sustained yield.  Let's plow and poison the farmland to get the greatest yield this year, despite lost topsoil and fertility next year. 

• If an action doesn't have a measurable financial value, the capitalist asks: What good is it?  Envision the carcass of a spotted owl with a price tag dangling from its leg. What is the proper dollar value written on the tag?  The ecological and other non-commercial values of the spotted owl as part of old-growth forest ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest are beyond calculation.  On the other hand, we can look up at a giant Douglas fir tree and quickly translate its diameter and height into n thousand board feet of lumber, at x dollars per thousand, and conclude its absolute financial worth.  What chance of survival does the spotted owl and its ancient habitat have under the cold calculations of the capitalists' compulsion?

2.  Capitalists have a strong economic self-interest in not halting environmental problems:  If problems persist, capitalists can reap profits from selling goods and services to victims, and by selling "clean-up" work.  That is, they can profit at two ends: by not internalizing environmental costs of production, as well as by selling remedies.  This surely helps to explain why, in a capitalist system, whatever attention is (begrudgingly) paid to environmental ills neglects prevention in favor of cure. (For an optional example, see "The Breast Cancer Biz," by Allison Stone, Synthesis / Regeneration 20, Fall 1999.) This despite the common sense that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."  Look at the pain and expense of of treating groundwater contamination, rather than avoiding it; or of trying to restore forest ecosystems decimated by acid rain, rather than halting acidification; or of treating cancers, rather than emphasizing prevention.  The same companies that profit from breast cancer treatments also manufacture cancer-causing toxins.^REF  And the list goes on and on. 

Job creation...

3.  Compare the capitalists' goal with a predominant ecological goal: to minimize long-term environmental threats

• To minimize means to reduce to as low a level as possible.
• Long-term denotes periods spanning decades, centuries, and longer.  (Recall the traditional Native American time horizon of concern: "seven generations hence".)  Such a temporal perspective is inherently necessary for attaining "sustainability".
• Environmental refers to the aggregate of external conditions that functionally support life, including humans.   This ecological goal gives top priority to the integrity of our physical life support system.
• Threats means stresses, hazards, perils-- processes and conditions that would degrade or fracture our environment.

Act to maximize short-term private financial profits	Act to minimize long-term environmental threats

4.  Corporate capitalism is perhaps the most basic basic cause --as it tends underlay and perpetuate the other "basic" causes.

"The corporation is a creature of money, not life, and as such it will always put money's interests ahead of life's interests."   --David Korten, "Corporate Futures," Positive Futures Network, September 1999 REF

5.  WHY corporations inherently subvert nature

"The commercial interests destroying the environment world-wide are not just 'bad people' or crooks. They literally can't help themselves because of the kind of organization that propels their behavior: the corporation."   Continue ...

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Thomas Detwyler maintains this page (tdetwyle@uwsp.edu)
Last updated 8 June 2001

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