The Conscience Industry

by Alexander Cockburn

Take that morning cup of coffee. Maybe it comes courtesy of the self-congratulatory Thanksgiving, or Equal Exchange, an outfit in Boston that, as its name suggests, claims it has smoothed out the inequitable wrinkles in the coffee trade between the Third World and the First.

The coffee is perhaps consumed at a table made of choice hardwood certified as having been harvested under "sustainable" forest practices. The coffee machine is powered by "green electricity" offered by Working Assets. And who knows? The coffee pot was perhaps acquired with a credit card sponsored by The Nation.

Next to the virtuous cup of coffee on the virtuous table lies the morning mail, probably containing fund-raising appeals from those veteran mendicants at virtue's knee, Morris Dees and Bernard Sanders.

We'll stop with this little morning scenario but not because there's a shortage of material. For every decision in the liberal day, there's a certificate of good behavior being flaunted by some of the most disgusting corporations on Earth.

Which gas station to patronize? Dimly, into the mind of our person of good will, comes the memory that the World Wildlife Fund last year nominated Shell Oil as a company of conscience for its drilling procedures in British Columbia. Buying a car? Don't buy American, and feel good about it, too. Our person of good conscience may opt for a costly Mitsubishi four-wheeler, nourished by the recollection that Rainforest Action network last year issued its imprimatur to two Mitsubishi subsidiaries for agreeing not to use old-growth timber as material for its packaging and pallets.

There's nothing wrong with rewarding businesses for decent behavior. The trouble is that the hucksterism so rarely gets questioned, and the good behavior consists in promising to mug two old ladies instead of three.

Take Equal Exchange. Here is a business in Massachusetts that makes the very big claim it is rectifying the iniquities of First/Third World trade in coffee beans. "Feed your soul as well as your body," an Equal Exchange ad proclaims in The New Yorker, raising the battle standard of fairness. It buys "direct" from small farmers, it says, thus eliminating the middle man.

No, it hasn't. It has taken over the function of "conscience" middle man from the ordinary First-World coffee brokers, and there's really very little evidence that the Third World growers, as opposed to the soul-fed coffee drinkers at First World tables, do better because this organization is doing the brokering. Equal Exchange buys from grower co-ops, it boasts. But so do ordinary First World coffee brokers, paying the same prices.

But if Equal Exchange is having little or no impact on conditions of production in the Third World, it certainly is having an effect, a baneful one, on small local businesses across America. Equal Exchange flies a buyer from a First World co-op grocery store on a two-week jaunt to Costa Rica. The group tours the coffee fincas, and a good time is had by all.

On return, the buyer might expand the coffee rack of Equal Exchange, with bins provided by Equal Exchange. This means less business for the small local roaster, local sales people, local distributors. Lo and behold, what do we have but the conscience industry's equivalent of General Foods or Procter & Gamble, with Equal Exchange's executives scarcely paying themselves starvation salaries.

"Sustainable" logging practices, yielding lumber for that virtuous coffee table? Start with the word "sustainable." These days, fund-raisers and grant writers string it around each sentence like an adjectival fanny pack, bulging with self-congratulation. Mostly, the term is meaningless or a vague expression of hope. In the case of timber, it's a haphazard and often highly debatable designation that amounts to little more than a vague pledge that the timber is not virgin old growth.

Working Assets' offer of "green" power has been an astounding piece of effrontery, since the consumer has not the slightest way of knowing whether the electricity thus provided comes from solar or nuclear, hydro or coal-burning generating stations. The Nation's credit card offers a low-interest charge, to be sure, but you'd better not be late with your payments. Two slip-ups in six months, and Victor Navasky and his pals at the bank will slap a 22.99 percent rate on your debt.

Imagine singling out a major oil company as morally in good standing! It's far less rational than pumping Amoco's gas because Johnny Cash stands behind the product. At least that's an aesthetic decision. World Wildlife thus singled out for praise Shell last year, the same oil company in whose interests, absent any bleat of protest by Shell, the Nigerian generals hanged Ken Saro Wiwa and his companions. And imagine giving Mitsubishi, as Rainforest Action Network did, the opportunity for this prime destroyer of Asian forests the chance to hang a "good behavior" sign around its neck.

The problem here is that because the left barely exists, fake politics have taken over. Morris Dees has raised an endowment of almost $100 million with which he's done very little, meanwhile frightening elderly liberals into ponying up contributions with the fantasy that the heirs to Adolf Hitler are about to come marching down Main Street, lynching blacks and putting the Jews into gas ovens. The fund raising of Dees offer a banefully distorted view of the American political landscape. There isn't a public school in any county in the United States that doesn't represent a menace to blacks a thousand times more potent than what remains of the KKK.

As for Rep. B. Sanders of Vermont, whose fund-raising letters this election time have once again been touting Congress' only "independent progressive socialist," his latest achievement has been to give the cold shoulder to delegations traveling all the way from Texas to Vermont to challenge the conscience industry in one of its most self-satisfied redoubts.

Sanders has been prominent among those in the Northeast congressional delegation trying to export the region's nuclear waste to a poor, largely Hispanic community in Texas, Sierra Blanca. The only merit in dumping the waste there, as opposed to, say, Burlington, Vt., is that the people in Burlington are richer and have more clout. When the Sierra Blancans turned up in Vermont, Sanders put out the word that he would quit any platform graced by any of their members. If you truly like "independents" in Congress, better by far to send your money to Ron Paul, who acts upon his proclaimed beliefs, unlike Sanders.