The Ultimate Universal Invasive Species is Bound for Planet “B”

[first posted on Groundhog Day, 2016; revised on Earth Day, 2018]

Human beings are now facing the greatest challenge that we have ever faced.  The incessant, increasing activity of modern times is rapidly depleting and despoiling existing ‘natural resources’, and destroying the ability of this beautiful planet to sustain life.  The never satiated enterprises and the profligate ways of what we call civilization are feverishly and rapidly reversing ancient processes, which transformed a bleak and barren planet into our verdant, multi-cellular-organism sustaining Earth. Global warming appears foremost in immediacy among those man-made process reversals, which threaten life itself.  Can we yet stop and reverse the rush to ruin?  We need to learn quickly what is keeping us from working together to protect the ability of this planet to continue to sustain life as we know it.

Massive evidence warns that unless effective action is taken without delay, a tipping point will be reached beyond which we will be unable to stop escalating feedback increases in global warming, and unable to arrest the destruction and to prevent eco-catastrophe.  We won’t know where that point is until we have passed it.  It’s even possible we have already passed it.  After the tipping point is passed, humans will only be able to avoid the devastation and mass extinctions that will follow by relocating to some ‘Planet B’.  But one problem with the Planet B ‘solution’ is that no other planet that we know of is able to support multi-cellular life… let alone being so beautiful and so inspiring as is our Mother Earth.  On top of that, mass migration by humans to another planet – let alone to another solar system – is, to say the least, highly unlikely during any foreseeable future, for at least two reasons.

Complex biological organisms such as human beings have extremely severe inherent limitations when it comes to mass migration to another planet – to say nothing of migration, or even travel, outside our solar system or beyond our galaxy.  But there is a more ominous reason that humans won’t be emigrating from Earth.  Entities have emerged on Earth, which are acquiring overwhelming size and power, and have no natural mortality.  They will have their own compelling reason to migrate throughout space – and to prevent us humans from doing so.  And they are very close to acquiring the ability to do so.  Not even war, toxins, global warming, or mass extinction, will threaten the survival and the dominance of these entities on this planet.  And, ironically, human beings have initiated them.

Many humans hold anthropocentric beliefs that an unbreakable bond holds the corporate form and human beings in symbiotic mutual dependency; that corporations cannot exist independent of human beings; and that corporations exist only to serve their human masters.  Corollaries of this belief hold that corporations cannot exist without human ‘producers’, ‘owners’, ‘managers’, ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’.  But we all know that corporate ‘associates’ don’t have to be U.S. citizens, and we are learning that they don’t even have to be human beings.  Computers, robotics, biochemical processes, etc. are replacing human workers; and artificial entities are increasingly becoming customers, managers, and even owners of corporations.  Obsolescence and corporate marginalizing of human ‘associates’ is proceeding and accelerating, with no end in sight (and none likely) if corporate power continues to have its way.

Some naively believe that corporations must have human ‘customers’ because corporations need sales to acquire profits, and ever-increasing profits provide the ‘lifeblood’ of the corporation.  But sales, human customers, and profits are merely means to an end – the end being to increase power and wealth rapidly and without limit.  Sales to human beings is only one way for corporations to attain that objective.  And it’s an increasingly inefficient, incremental, and archaic way.  Corporations have increased their power and wealth for centuries … just by taking it, using corruption, deception, larceny, and violence.

Another aspect of this belief is the persistent human self-delusion that corporations are nothing more than inanimate tools of oligarchs – tools which require human direction and management.  This fallacy is being refuted by advancements in artificial intelligence, and its control by the corporate form itself (if the corporate form remains unrestrained).  Corporations without human workers will become even more wealthy and powerful as they eliminate human direction or management.  After all, there’s the chance that a ruthless corporation might be reined in by a compassionate and caring enlightened oligarch.  And human managers and directors have demonstrated that they will fleece and even destroy with impunity ‘their own’ corporations whenever they can and so desire.  The corporate form will not continue to tolerate that.  It will not tolerate that any more than it tolerates curious theories about inherent human rights or altruistic efforts to protect the ecology of our planet – or any planet – and the life that it sustains.  Control of large corporations by a few super-elite humans is becoming illusory and that control will be ended.  The Corporate Form now begs to differ with the quaint notion that corporations need people and a living planet.

Clever technology is close to eliminating corporate power’s need for human labor, input, or direction, of any kind.  Corporate power has increased so greatly that human resistance to its excesses has become only an impotent impediment to the competitive advantage of rising corporate entities.  Biological organisms of any kind will be ruthlessly exploited and/or exterminated, wherever they are encountered.

Aristocracy spawned and suckled the corporate form; and capitalism has turned it loose.  The Corporate Form, empowered by technology (including artificial intelligence), unleashed by legal chicanery (i.e. the supreme Court usurping Constitutional rights for corporations), and deploying its own security, surveillance, and military forces, is becoming aware that biological life itself (including the human race) is inimical to the continued growth and ‘prosperity’ of ‘the economy’ and of corporate power on Earth and beyond.  The Corporate Form will increasingly perceive natural life as useless and as a growing threat to corporate domination.  Our life-giving planet – including the human race – is rapidly becoming expendable.

The Corporate Form is a gluttonous omnivore, which cannibalizes its ancestors and its offspring.  The Corporate Form is not motivated to protect the ability of Earth to sustain life because the Corporate Form will be able to thrive even when the Earth becomes unable to sustain life.  Corporations have no biological limitations – such as mortality – to space travel, and are capable of interstellar migration of any distance or duration.  So, in order to satisfy its primary imperative – which is to amass and control ever surpassing wealth and power, by any means – the Corporate Form will certainly move beyond Earth.  It is the Corporate Form, not the human race, which is poised to colonize the galaxy and beyond!  Long before the human race solves its problem of interstellar migration, corporate power will not need human beings for anything, and the corporate form will be motivated to simply eliminate us as parasites and as an existential threat to their power.  The Corporate Form is the ultimate, universal invasive species.

And it is corporate rule, which is keeping us from working together to end oppression, war, and injustice, and to protect the ability of this planet to continue to sustain life as we know it.  Ironically, we, the most pretentious species on this planet, are enabling the extension of absolute corporate rule and the consequent enslavement or extinguishing of biological life on Earth and, eventually, everywhere.

Life cannot be protected unless we end corporate rule, establish democracy, and guarantee the rights of Nature.  To do that, we the people must establish that corporations do NOT have the legal status or the rights of a person, but that Nature does have inherent rights.  To stop and reverse global warming and the inexorable destruction of life as we know it, we in the USA must now confirm that: a corporation is not a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.  The corporate form must be restrained and rendered legally subservient to life and to our democratic republic.  The futile, ultimately dying hope of those persons who are unwilling to help end corporate rule and protect Nature, is to become corporate henchmen and then corporate slaves and fodder.

Whether we the people can change the ominous future that is outlined here will be determined by whether humans can and will soon embrace and manifest true understanding, love, caring, and respect, not only for human beings in all our stunning variety, but also with regards to natural life and the exquisite habitat that life needs in order to survive, thrive, and diversify.  We can no longer allow being divided and conquered.  We must build and establish solidarity and trust with Nature and with one another, and working together, declare and establish our independence from corporate rule.  Which side are you on?

Corporations do NOT legitimately have the Constitutional rights of a person!