State of Alabama secondary Archives: on Corporations

Al Gore: Bush supporters oppose regulations but like big contracts

1. There is no such thing as “public interest”; that phrase represents a dangerous fiction created as an excuse to impose unfair burdens on the wealthy and powerful.
2. Laws and regulations are also bad-- except when they can be used on behalf of this group, which turns out to be often. They worry about the impact of government policy on the behavior of poor people and work incentives--opposing the minimum wage; the 40-hour workweek; job safety laws; consumer protection.
3. Their one central doctrine: government is very bad and should be done away with as much as possible--except the parts that redirect money through big contracts to industries that have won their way into the inner circle.

Al Gore: Commerce wounds nature that can no longer heal itself

Nature, by contrast, is slow-moving, undemanding, maybe underwhelming for many people. But if you never put yourself in the midst of nature--to understand that its essence is our essence--then you’re inclined to treat it as trivial. You become willing to abuse and destroy it through carelessness, not recognizing that to do so is wrong.

We’ve come to accept that if nature can yield something of value to the lucrative engines of commerce, then we should grab it and rip it out, never thinking twice about the wounds left behind. According to this way of thinking, if exploitation results in injury to the environment, so be it: nature will always heal itself. But the magnitude of environmental destruction is now on a scale few ever foresaw; the wounds no longer simply heal themselves. We have to act affirmatively to stop the harm.