Month 4, Day 20: Their Cash, Our Trash

A version of yesterday’s letter, this one to Harry Reid.

Dear Majority Leader Reid,

As financial reform legislation comes to the floor of the Senate, it’s important to recognize that the gutting of America’s economy is deeply and powerfully linked with the destruction of America’s environment. Irresponsible short-term thinking, motivated entirely by considerations of immediate profit, is at the root of both our financial crisis and our climate emergency.

Only a vigorous regulatory regime can keep giant corporate interests from exploiting legislative loopholes to the detriment of our financial and environmental health. Economically and environmentally destructive behavior is rooted in a systemic bias toward short-term economic thinking. As long as it is based on a model of unregulated consumption, our economy will remain unsustainable. Big banks buying and selling incomprehensible credit derivatives; cheap plastic junk that winds up in oceanic garbage patches — this is the face of unrestrained and short-sighted consumption, and it’s profoundly damaging to our country and to the world.

We need our corporations to focus on long-term thinking, something which is currently discouraged by the terms of corporate charters. We only have a little time left to determine whether we will leave our descendants a meaningful future or an exploitative dystopia. To fix the climate, we must transform our economy, making it essential that the largest economic forces in the country give back more to the Earth than they take out.

We can’t afford to lose this one.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders