in prison

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday November 27, 2002 10:32 by prisoner x - inmates

Prison

Prisoners of the capitilist regime.

Totalitarian Capitalism
Corporations are seizing the genome, but that's only the beginning

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 29th June 2000

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 over the last 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.

29 Jun
2000