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.For every 1% rise in the jobless rate, thereis a 2% rise in the number of cardiac deaths, a 3 to 4% rise in infant mortality,a 4 to 5% rise in suicides and homicides, a 5 to 6% jump in admissionsto psychiatric hospitals.[and] an elevated relative risk of mortalityfrom cancer of 2.07. 30 The recently disemployed man s probability of heartdisease or cancer, in fact, doubles within five years with 40 49-year-oldAmerican men.31 Adolescent suicide and prostitution rates escalate asfuture employment prospects become darker (as with the 12 19-year-oldage group across first world nations since the late 1980s).32Most visibly, ethnic wars, racist attacks, armed violence, urban riots,beatings of women and children and in general mass murders ofunknown others rise in social sites where the unemployment of youngmen or clearances of subsistence farmers has become endemic.Thispattern can be observed from the slums of North America to the cities ofIndonesia, El Salvador or Brazil.The life-loss on the psychological plane THE SOCIAL IMMUNE SYSTEM 111to people separated from a committed function to perform for thecommunity to which they belong expresses itself in physical morbidities,but is a distinct plane of the systemic life decline, the most central fromthe standpoint of the felt side of life.The mental torments of those whoare deprived of any function or value in their society can only at this stagebe guessed at as a social epidemic across all able-bodied age-groups andeven entire societies (for example, indigenous peoples).Where no recognizedwork for a wider community is or can be performed, the member of thesocial body is made a superfluous being who has no reason to live.(3) The Environmental Life-Host: Maintenance of the biophysicalcarrying capacity and reproductive diversity of the externalenvironment.There has been wide recognition of the crisis of environmental sustainability.I will not reiterate the specifics of thisglobal life crisis here.What has not been widely recognized, however, isa foundational connection: that global market use of environmentalresources determines their depletion, pollution and destruction.It is true that the Soviet societies were at least as ecocidal as marketsocieties in their five to seven decades of operation.But we should bearin mind that they were imitative of centuries-old practices of large-scalecapitalist extraction systems, and competed to outperform them at thismode of relationship with nature s life resources.Despite these explanatoryclues, the money-sequenced exploitation of the environment issystematically excluded as a determinant of species and habitat distributionand extinction by environmental biology and ecological research.33We need not collude here with this profound block against recognizingthe connection between cause and effect.We can from an independentsurveillance of life-environments discern a general principle of correlationbetween industrial, private-profit use of environmental resources and theirdecline.This principle of correlation can, like other causal relationships,be tested.We can, that is, observe across the laboratory of the globalmarket s implementation whether this principle is confirmed, ordisconfirmed.The cause effect relationship here asserted for test byobservation is:As global market use of the environment has advanced and advances across globallife conditions and elements, these global life conditions and elements theatmosphere, fresh waters and oceans, top soils, trees, animal habitats andspecies and mineral resources have in direct proportion to its penetrationdegenerated in their capacities of life-carriage and yield.An effective international regulatory regime to protect regional and globalenvironmental life-hosts might prevent this accelerating pattern ofdestruction of its biophysical carrying-capacity and life-habitats.But,revealingly, the global market exploitation of the environment increases 112 THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISMas its harms increase.One example is that five transnational Asiancorporations which have largely destroyed their own region s rainforestshave entered into purchase agreements with Latin American governmentsto exploit 20 million more acres of rainforest in the Amazon Basin withno limits on the destruction of life habitats to be permitted for increasedmoney-value returns to stockholders.34More revealingly from a systemic standpoint, global market exploitationof the environment seeks at the threshold of its cumulative environmentaldamage to avoid or to further reverse effective environmental regulation.This trend is evidenced in even the most prosperous First World societiessuch as Canada where environmental agencies have, as we have seen,been stripped of scientists, research programmes, police, independentmonitoring requirements and recycling programmes.This effectivederegulation was done in imitation of the US Republican Congress attemptin 1995 to dismantle the US Environmental Protection Agency by blanketrescindment of regulations and corporate rewriting of environmentallegislation.The difference, which worked, was to disguise the assault bypublic relations slogans like resources for life.35On a world scale, volumes of exact rules of the World Trade Organizationand North American Free Trade Agreement protected the unrestrictedrights of private corporations to access and exploit natural resources andsell their products across boundaries.But not one of this mountain ofregulations included a binding regulation protecting the world or regionalenvironments against increasing pollution, destruction, wastes, exhaustion,homogenization, or extinction.The 1998 Kyoto pact to reduce potentiallycatastrophic emissions of global warming gases of carbon dioxide,methane and nitrous oxide succeeded by instituting a new marketregime for private corporations to buy and sell rights to pollute the planet satmosphere.Here again, we can observe the paradigm s enclosure withinitself where only what fits the selector principle of money profit bycommodity exchange can enter public-interest regulation itself.Thatchaotic disturbances of global weather patterns had already been unleashedby this model s restructuring of nature did not deter its reimposition asthe solution to its disastrous effects.The invasiveness of such a regime may be discerned by the followingpathologies of its outcomes.The air may be increasingly unbreathablein the miracle economies of the East and the South.No-one on the globemay be able to be in the sun without cancer danger.Ocean bottoms andcoral ecosystems may become lifeless in multiplying regions across theplanet
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