Saturday, January 22, 2011

THE COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYTHING

The commodification of everything continues to grow and spread.  Today I read about a new trend in Arizona.  Emergency responders and fire fighters are proposing that the people they rescue be billed for the cost of doing so.  Imagine someone you don’t know leaning through the smashed window of your car crash, trapping you inside, smelling leaking gas, your consciousness much compromised -- and this guy asks you whether you can afford the Jaws of Life.  Maybe he reaches into your clothing to check for your bank book.
I ran this past Paul, who has done his share of emergency response.  He said:  “I can understand the issue with the fire department needing to get paid. What most folks don't realize is that 75% of this country (in terms of space, not people) is served by volunteer fire and EMS services, and frequently, they are set up as voluntary subscription services, not supported by tax dollars. Folks that subscribe and pay their annual fees to that particular service get served, others that haven't paid either don't get served, or have to make payment arrangements. I sell fire and rescue equipment to all our county volunteer units at cost, so I know exactly how much all that junk costs and it ain't cheap. Somebody's got to pay for all that stuff. 
“Two of my kids are firemen now, and they'll donate hundreds of hours every year for training and responding to calls. They don't get a dime for their time, nor all the gas they burn. Half the time if there's no handed down turnout gear, they're forced to buy their own. On top of that, they're all the time setting up fundraisers and baking cookies trying to make ends meet. Folks get all upset when they see those shiny trucks with all the lights and sirens, thinking their tax dollars are paying for it, but that's often not the case at all. Even when you try to explain it to them, they still seem to think the volunteers are the ones that should dig deep in their pockets to fund equipment purchases, and fuel and buildings to house it all.
“I subscribe to two separate departments, each about 15 hilly miles away. There's no way in the world that they'd ever be able to save a structure here, but they might be able to keep the fire contained to private property, and not spreading to USFS land that I would be responsible for paying damages on. Pretty cheap insurance if you ask me.”
Part of this is a rural/urban split.  The problem in a city is a growing population of indigent people living in perilous conditions while the tax base withdraws outside the city limits to houses that are regularly safety checked and maintained.  This split and other budget shortfalls are so troublesome now that some people are predicting that the cities will begin to implode in this decade, sending Somalia-style lines of refugees to the small towns of rural America, searching desperately for food.  
We are now to the point of troika economics.  Many are the stories of Russian troikas racing through the snow ahead of wolf packs, only able to escape by throwing someone out the back to lighten the load and keep the wolves busy for a little while.  (Cartooners: should the wolf be labeled “banks” or “debt” or “forecloser”?)  
A troika is a kind of Russian sled that is pulled by a team of three horses, evenly hitched to the sled, rather than two-behind-and-one-ahead.  What I’m after in this image is the dire hardship of a Russian winter (not that different from a Montana winter, especially this one) and the conceptual echo of triage.  Triage is the practice, esp. in war or after a disaster, of separating victims into three groups: one that will be all right anyway, one that needs care to survive, and one that is simply hopeless or already dead.  At this moment governments at every level across the county are struggling with budget triage.
It has become clear that we are willing to throw out the old, the ill, the disabled, the children, the unemployed -- hey, all that stuff costs a lot!  We exploit them for money first.  But that has its advantages to them. Anyone who thinks a drug subsidy is for the benefit of the old and ill is not paying attention.  It is the big pharma companies who rake in the profits from subsidized drugs.  If the only people who buy them are those who can afford them, the sheer quantity will drop abruptly.  Of course, the other dark side of the selling is that big pharma has every motivation to keep prices high, the consumers hardly care so long as they can get what they need, and there is little reason to find cures so that the drugs become unnecessary.  The terms of housing foreclosure are presented in terms of loss to deserving families, but the real “victims” are the developers and financiers.  Those are the people sending lobbyists to Congress.  
Morality/ethics is crucial to the acceptance of triage.  If those who are thrown out are labeled drug addicts, criminals, sexually unconventional, “other” as in foreign, or possibly “useless” or offensive artists, then we don’t feel so badly about doing it.  Those who don’t want their friends and children thrown out must then get busy trying to defend them from abandonment.  Still, drunk drivers should have to pay for their crimes and what’s more effective than leaving them in the wreckage unless they can buy their way out?
But the world is not like a troika.  Many of those people excluded from the ride survive somehow -- maybe by killing and eating a wolf -- and they begin to deeply resent troika drivers.  Let’s kill and eat a horse.  They start walking, just like those apocalyptic movies.
We’re all on the same planet.  In spite of people constantly trying to arrange things so that they don’t have to put out the effort of fighting fires or attending governance meetings, which is the essence of democracy, we all have to take the consequences of decisions made by people who get tired of having to organize bake sales to improve the schools.  Or the manipulation of corporations raiding our pockets while assuring us that it’s for our own good.  If we’re trapped in wreckage, we don’t have much leverage.  Of course, that’s very good for the insurance industry. 

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