Corporate Ownership of Human Life?

May 13, 2011

The Student Insurgent condemns the mainstream media. A recent story in Time Magazine was defending fracking- that process of pumping unknown chemicals into the ground to force natural gas up. The leftover sludge invariably leaks into local ground water and food. With news stories like that, the discourse is all wrong.

Being forced to defend clean drinking water is like arguing for your life with someone who has a knife to your throat. The discourse then is about justifying your life, while you are already disadvantaged and if you lose, it’s your life on the line. That is not the premis for an rational discussion. Since human life requires food, water and sleep, threatening the source of water is like threatening one’s life. To lose the debate on fracking is to lose a long debate that requires one to justify their own life. Such a premis is not the basis of a valid discussion, for to lose in courts, politics or elsewhere is to give up the health of human life.

Essentially we must ask ourselves, are we willing to sacrifice people and land, to meet the needs of a privileged, wealthy communities that use the fossil fuels?

If we cannot have control over our water, food or lands. If all that exists can be held by patent, where does this break down?

In a dystopian future of being owned, it will not require guns, whips of chains. It will be in control of our very blood, genes and ownership of our very makeup. I sure wouldn’t want to be the supreme court justice that defends the private ownership of human life because ‘all the legal precedent was leading that way’.

Monsanto’s ownership and patenting of genes is likewise concerning. How long before human life is patented and owned? In a terrible experiment, one has to ask, if we continue to advance in prosthetics and nanotechnology. A doctor’s obligation to save lives will require the deployment of this technology on a patient who cannot pay. When the treatment is administered, the company will demand their patented product back and the person will say “No” and the court will find that technology, which cannot be returned will require payment. After a pause, the horror will sink in for the patient, not yet recovered from near-death, a horror that their life just entered indentured servitude. As time goes on the technology will advance and the tech will be administered at birth, as a vaccination and later the population will be enslaved, not with a whip or chain, but by the mere threat that their technology will shut down. At which point we must ask, how much do we value human life.

If we continue to allow the ownership of genes, the clock is ticking until human life become the property of corporations.

The alternative is to respect the collective ownership of land, of the human body, of the necessities of nutritious food, clean water, clean air and shelter to sleep. So in summary, Why corporate media, do you not examine the extension of your argument- that the sacrifice of our wild areas is the sacrifice of our lives. Oh yeah, because you’re sellouts. We cannot own others, we cannot own what we share with others, our ideas, our spaces and all the things necessary for our very survival.

The Insurgent stands in solidarity with resistance to the privatization of public goods. Solidarity Forever!