For those who have asked about my weirdly-drugged seeming performance on Bloggingheads, the answer is not that I was drugged, but that I had gotten home at 4:30 that morning after a 36-hour trip from Vietnam. My lunatic scheduling of a Bloggingheads immediately thereafter is what accounts for the rambling debate of tangential, rather than the pointed dissection of John Bowe's book.
Therefore, pointed dissection here: I found the book oddly unsatisfying. Part of the reason the diavlog is muddy is that I found the book very muddy; it continually makes large, sweeping categorizations of things that aren't really alike, which makes it difficult to draw any conclusions.
Obviously, I am not predisposed to like the writing of a fellow who thinks that restrictive immigration policy and exporting our labor and environmental policies to countries that can't afford them, are the way to help poor people. But even saying that, the book was weirdly disjointed. It starts off with a case that is clearly slavery, or so close as to make no difference: workers were physically prevented from leaving until the picking season was up by an unscrupulous labor contractor who is now in jail.
But it then moves onto a case where the problem isn't physical coercion, but visa fraud and (arguably) fraud committed upon the workers. A plant in Omaha imported Indian workers on training visas who were forced (as is apparently common in India) to pay thousands of dollars to an unscrupulous subcontractor in order to get the job. They were then paid less than minimum wage, housed in crowded dormitories, given badly cooked food, and told crazy things about the neighborhood to discourage them from going off the premises. Nonetheless, they did leave the premises, frequently. And the main threat employed against them seems to have been that they would be fired and deported--i.e. that they would be fired, since an employer who terminates someone on a job-specific visa has a legal obligation to tell the government and otherwise take steps to ensure that the worker leaves the country. Is encouraging workers to go into debt that they then need to pay off by working for you slavery? It's certainly much less strong than the physical coercion argument.
But most of the book is about Saipan, and most of what he talks about has nothing to do with slavery. It has to do with Saipan's weird economy, which, as a US territory, was long based on labor-law arbitrage: Saipan could pay workers less than US minimum wage, but it was not subject to quotas under the multi-fiber agreement. It was thus flooded with guest workers who would never have been allowed to enter America, to the extent that, as in some Middle Eastern countries, local citizens became a wealthy minority elite, employing servants to do for them while they collected government handouts or worked at make-work government jobs. The guest workers, meanwhile, live in conditions that would hardly do for boy-scout camp in the US, work long hours, and have little fun. If they get pregnant, or lose their job, they get in trouble with their boss, and with the family back home. "What does this have to do with slavery?" you may be asking. So was I, all throughout the book.
Slavery self-referentially demands that we do something about it. Crappy jobs, on the other hand, evoke a more mixed response. Workers usually take crappy jobs because the alternatives are worse; self-evidently, this is true of the workers in the last two cases, because they don't want to go home. If you want to "do something" about those crappy jobs, it behooves you to carefully consider whether there is anything to be done that won't make a lot of very poor people worse off.
Among the many things that Bowe should try to tease out, but doesn't, are costs and benefits, cause and effect, winners and losers. Instead he simply posits that all the poor workers in the free market are losers out to rich capitalists, that globalization is the culprit behind their poverty, and that imposing higher wages and labor standards would make them all better off. Or, I should say, he implies those things; he never makes anything as indelicate as a conclusion.
Instead we get a great deal of bombast about democracy--while he lauds the notion that Americans should override the democratically elected governments of places like India, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Mexico, and of course, Saipan, when it comes to things like labor standards and wages. We also hear a lot about listening to people in the developing world, although not, apparently, any of the ones who say that they want to come here and work for less than minimum wage. And there is a great deal of muddled complaint about globalization.
Much of that is self-contradictory. Farmers want to protect their incomes from competition by people who offer goods more cheaply by working much longer hours for less pay; we both agree that this is bad. But somehow, when industrial workers want the same thing, Mr Bowe finds this admirable.
What is not self-contradictory is often plainly wrong. He blames globalization, specifically farm subsidies, for forcing people to leave farms to work in factories. Farm subsidies are at best an extremely weak influence besides overpopulation, environmental degradation, technological change, land titling problems, and the fact that factory jobs are vastly more productive than subsistence farming. He also frequently acts as if free trade were somehow responsible for developing world poverty, which is lunatic. Anywhere that poverty is worsening right now, you will find either terrible, terrible government policy (Cuba, Zimbabwe) or war (Gaza, Congo). At that, I suppose the latter is simply a subset of the former.
Anywhere that poverty is improving, you will find massive amounts of trade. Forcing the people with whom we trade to pay higher wages or enact higher environmental standards threatens to make their wages uncompetitive--a fact that Bowe should recognize, since he several times chronicles factories shutting down because the mandated wage is too high. Exporting our standards threatens to throw a spanner into the most effective--indeed only--poverty reduction mechanism we've ever found.
Bowe short shrifts this, first, by ignoring his own evidence. But when he can't ignore the fact that, for example, the workers in the welding case would have been stuck at low wage work in India without the visa fraud he decries, he comes down on the side of the comparatively rich locals over the comparatively poor immigrants. Too often the "slaves", seem to be less important than what their presence does to us.
Consider this, from his conclusion:
As we are seeing with global warming and the threats of increased temperatures, storm velocities, and ocean levels, we may, in time, come to see social pandemics as equally menacing--if predictable--threats. The issue will then become one of self-preservation more than justice. Never mind the question "Are you fine with your comfort relying on the misery of billions?" The question would be "Do you want them to come kill you?"In May 2006 O Globo, one of Brazil's leading newspapers, published an anonymous interview with an anonymous subject said to be a prisoner housed in one of the country's notoriously hellish prisons. Many readers credited the sources as Marcos Williams Herbas Camacho, also known as "Playboy", the leader of the PCC, one of the nation's largest prison gangs. Reigning from prison, the outfit has killed scores of people in the last year and has staged more than three hundred attacks on police, bus stations, and public forums, humiliating farcical government attempts to maintain order. I don't know if these words were made up or came from Playboy or anyone else from the slums. All I know is that they sound pretty credibly like what a person mght sound like after being born in one. Before becomeing famous for crime, said the intervieweee,
I was poor and invisible. For decades, you never bothered to look at me. People only heard about us when the slums collapsed, or from romantic music about "the favelas at sunset," stuff like that. Now we're rich, thanks to the multinational cocaine trade. And you guys are scared to death. We are the late blooming of your social conscience.We're at teh core of what is beyond solution . . . we're a new species, a wholly different animal from you . . . there's no more proletariat, no pitiful or exploited masses. There's a third thing growing out there, cultivated from the mud, schooled on absolute illiteracy, graduating from the prisons, like an alien monster hidden in the cities' cracks.
We're on the edge of a postmisery that has begotten a new murderous culture, propped up by technology, satellites, cell phones, the Internet, modern weapons. It's shit with chips and megabytes. My soldiers are a mutated social species, they're the fungus growing on a big dirty mistake.
We're on teh attack. You are on the defensive. You are obsessed with human rights. We are cruel and merciless.
The solution, he was asked.
There isn't one. It's too late.
I have a hunch this interview isn't real. I've conducted many interviews, and the words just sound to pretty. But it doesn't matter. Because the sentiment they contains sounds very, very real.
Osama bin Laden, to my thinking, is just another name for Osama bin jobs, Osama bin minimum wage, Osama bin social justice. The poor will find ways to revenge themselves on the rich. And the ideology that provides the most comfort and justice to the largest number of people will prevail. If the revenge motive of brand Osama holds greater appeal than brand Freedom, well, I guess that means brand Freedom didn't do such a great job of delivering on its promises.
. . . when I first started writing this book, I considered myself a liberal. I thought it was mean that people and corporations with power aren't nicer to people with less power. Now I laugh at the idea. There are so many billions of poor people out there. They are not educated, but they're certainly not sutpid, and I very much doubt they can be lied to or angered indefinitely.
But to anyone in this world today who feels compelled to go on TV and talk about freedom or tell us all about hte glories of globalization and free trade and democracy--any writer, any politician, any corporate advertising person invoking htat stupid word freedom over and over again--I have some advice. Go out into this newly globalized world you're profiting from, go visit the people being "lifted" out of poverty, the workers who are making your products. Go live in their huts, eat their rice and plantains, squat on their floors, and listen to their babies cry. Sniff some glue and pray with them. Try to get justice from their police if someone hurts you. And then come back and let's talk about freedom.
I don't know if an author should take policy advice from a murderous thug, particularly one who seems to have honed his political philosophy in the fetid swamps of the slush pile at RKO's noir unit. All I know is, empirically, this is nonsense on stilts. Osama bin Laden, like the suicide bombers on 9/11, was not poor. Nor did they come from poor countries; most of them are Saudi. In fact, had he consulted Alan Krueger, he would have learned that richer, more educated people are more likely to support, and commit, terrorism than are poor illiterate ones. And describing brand Freedom as having failed in any country where al Qaeda is popular is . . . well, words fail me. Since John Bowe is so fond of listening, I suggest he go talk to people such as the ones in Egypt's Kadima movement about their attempt to do a market launch of brand Freedom in the face of resistance from local monopolist, brand Dictator.
The world's poor aren't coming to kill us--they can't, because we won't let them over our borders. And so regardless of what else we do, too many of them will be stuck with bad governments, abusive police, and all the other miseries of the developing world. And it seems to me very likely that if we let the John Bowes of the world run things, they'll also be stuck with subsistence farming, while journalists like John Bowe and me periodically go squat with them in their huts, harvesting colorful copy from their poverty.
This article is a contrast in confusions.
Not worth deciphering. All Horsepucky,which is akin to bullpucky. Try writing something plain spokem and understanble on the same subject matter? Thanks!
As I read this novella post I was wondering who the heck John Bowe was. My Google search turned up this interview with him as the third link:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/09/the_th_interview_john_bowe.php
Obviously I haven't read the book (nor do I intend to) so I don't have much to go on. But nevertheless I do have a couple of things to say.
I think "conditions that would hardly do for boy-scout camp" may be too light-hearted a description of the living conditions of these people:
"According to U.S. government reports and information contained in lawsuits, garment workers from China, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Thailand and elsewhere pay $2,000 to $7,000 per worker to obtain jobs in the Mariana Islands that frequently have them working 12 hours a day, seven days a week for $3.05 an hour, often without overtime pay. The largely female work force is usually housed in prison-like barracks, six to eight people to a room. Inward-facing barbed wire surrounds the barracks. In many cases workers are prohibited from leaving the compound."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_38_37/ai_78728651/print
That doesn't sound like Camp Edgewood to me; more like Manzanar. As far as "What does this have to do with slavery," if you can't comprehend the similarities between the treatment of workers as described in the book (I assume), the interview and article I linked, and slavery, then I question your definition of "slavery."
Well boo freaking hoo! Is your answer then that we should simply accept that the people with whom we trade will pay lower wages and have lower environmental standards than OUR workers (and businesses!) have to deal with, simply because it might make THEIR workers' wages uncompetitive? Breathtaking!
Skipping further down:
Quite true. How many of the Pakistani tribesmen ready to die to protect Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan because they believe in his cause are similarly well-off?
Leaving aside the estimated 12 million poor who successfully came over our impervious borders at the current moment (that'd be a pretty respectable army if some bright boy gave them all guns, wouldn't it?), let me borrow a phrase from our current Vice President and say that that is pre-9/11 thinking. No, the angry poor don't currently have a massive armada of ships poised to invade our shores. That doesn't mean they might not get one. Look how close Osama is to getting his own atomic bomb; if things fall his way in Pakistan, he just might.
Here is John Bowe from the interview I linked:
And all it takes, really, is the right guy (or gal) to come along and organize those people, equip them minimally, whip them into a frenzy of righteous indignation at their mistreatment, and point them in the right direction. Maybe it sounds preposterous to you that that keeps John Bowe awake at night. It has something of a racist "fear of the brown people" feel to it, I agree; but it also has a kernel of truth to it. Desperate people are susceptible to demagoguery, and few are more desperate than these exploited workers.
You are quick to dismiss John Bowe, and maybe he is a kook. But his message deserves to be given a close look before you rush off to that judgement.
Is your answer then that we should simply accept that the people with whom we trade will pay lower wages and have lower environmental standards than OUR workers (and businesses!) have to deal with...
Yes. The only advantage these people have that makes them attractive for traders is their ability to work cheaply. Take that away, and they are stuck subsitence farming forever, because they aren't productive enough to justify UAW-level wages and they can't make themselves more productive without foreign investment. If you want to raise them out of poverty and toward our standard of living, then low wages are (perhaps counterintuitively) the place to start.
Now, maybe you don't want to do that; that's a different discussion. But demanding that they get $7/hr won't actually get them $7/hr, it will get more productive and closer-by Americans $7/hr (or it will mean the cheap goods don't get produced at all because they won't be cheap enough to attract buyers).
This reminds me of the adage that you shouldn't start an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Pulled no punches, eh Megan?
She tipps this off: "Forcing the people with whom we trade to pay higher wages or enact higher environmental standards threatens to make their wages uncompetitive."
Yet, thinks the situation, under Hussein, in Iraq, necessitated our direct military intervention...(in thread/post nearby)
the only thing I can ask... wtf?
Well, it would be nice if the critique by Megan was not riddled with straw men, bad faith arguments, and, in general, a desperate attempt to avoid facing the truth about how abuse produces hatred and ultimately violence. What else would you expect from a column that peddles reductive conservatism mixed with babble about the ideal kitchen? Brutal capitalism, as opposed to "enlightened" capitalism, is ultimately premised on the inability of the poor to muster enough firepower or social leverage to force the rich to treat them more humanely. What happens when the libertarian conservatives finally destroy the state that protects them? Do you really think that the abused will decide to discuss matters? If so, you deserve the fate that awaits you.
The revolution will come! Any day now!
"She tipps this off: "Forcing the people with whom we trade to pay higher wages or enact higher environmental standards threatens to make their wages uncompetitive."
Yet, thinks the situation, under Hussein, in Iraq, necessitated our direct military intervention...(in thread/post nearby)
the only thing I can ask... wtf?
Posted by Mark E Hoffer"
And those two things are related to one another based on...?
She's not saying that all foreign intervention is bad in this post; she is saying that attempting to intervene "for the poor" might not actually help the poor. I'm sure there's a snappy comeback about Iraq in there, but that would obscure the point that the positions have nothing to do with one another.
Policy preference on Iraq has tended to be based on national security, which isn't a primary criteria in the debate about trade.
Anywhere that poverty is worsening right now, you will find either terrible, terrible government policy (Cuba, Zimbabwe) or war (Gaza, Congo). At that, I suppose the latter is simply a subset of the former. Anywhere that poverty is improving, you will find massive amounts of trade.
I basically agree with this, but there are some nuances that shouldn't be ignored. Basically, there's a big difference between Africa and Asia. Africa can't compete with Asia in most fields, particularly industry. And so there are examples of countries in Africa which have relatively decent governments but are poor in resources and have high birthrates, and where poverty is, at least, not alleviating much right now, if not actually worsening. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso come to mind; the latter two have governments that are no worse than, say, Indonesia in the '80s, but Niger is facing chronic famine where Indonesia was building shoe factories.
And, in some of those countries, it seems possible that freer trade is actually doing more harm than good, because it's become freer in the areas where they can't compete, while remaining restricted in the areas where perhaps they could. Textiles, for instance -- there used to be a Nigerian textiles industry, but Pakistani competition has wiped it out. And the only thing Nigeria can competitively sell abroad is oil; agriculture is too heavily restricted. Maybe this is just the old "resource curse" of having too much oil for their own good. But it certainly feels as though when you look at Asian countries, the statement "trade fights poverty" is unambiguously true, whereas when you look at Africa, things are more complicated. Not that the answer is more trade barriers in Africa, but that trade liberalization by itself doesn't seem to help them the way it helps most of Asia.
I agree with 99% of what you say here, Megan. So why did you come out in favor of farm subsidies as long as they helped your mother?
Has poverty really improved in the US?
As to the whole Osama buisness I think that what Bowe is saying is that bin Laden's motivations are to some extent economic - whatever his background is. Are rich people not concerned about the poor simly because they're are (or were) rich?
Also, Bowe is not saying that Saudi Arabia is a free country - he's saying that the solution to Saudi problems can't be found in parroting freedom over and over.
To Ditch's point, I don't see how anyone can honestly argue that the global economy isn't in our national interest. It seems like a great deal of US foreign doesn't support this idea.
Maybe it sounds preposterous to you that that keeps John Bowe awake at night. It has something of a racist "fear of the brown people" feel to it, I agree; but it also has a kernel of truth to it. Desperate people are susceptible to demagoguery, and few are more desperate than these exploited workers.
I'm reminded of the predictions of a "long hot summer" full of urban riots if Reagan was elected. Somehow, the riots never materialized.
liberalrob:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_38_37/ai_78728651/print
That doesn't sound like Camp Edgewood to me; more like Manzanar.
Very few people paid two to seven months' wages to get into Manzanar.
Megan,
Go to Gaza. Then tell me that poverty does not abet terrorism.
Rickm, I'd say poverty was more the result of terrorism in Gaza. If not for the suicide bombers, Gaza could piggyback on Israel's economy.
I'd say you are wrong. Israel's first violent attack on Gaza was in February 1955. The first suicide bombers used against Israel were in the early 80's, as a reaction against Israel's invasion and occupation of Lebanon.
The fact that children play in the street in Gaza under the fear of being run over by tanks probably isn't helping the current situation.
So Rickm, would it help or hurt Gazian poverty if the residents were able to get minimum wage jobs in Israel? Would it help or hurt if they could trade with an active economy right next door? Would it help or hurt if they could build cheap tourist hotels on the Med?
It would help. I don't see how that supports your point that 'poverty was the result of terrorism in Gaza'.
You know, not being able to travel to nearby areas and having your house bulldozed contributes to poverty.
You know, not being able to travel to nearby areas and having your house bulldozed contributes to poverty.
So, OK, why travel restrictions and house bulldozing? Because of terrorism.
I concede that my first comment was badly worded, poverty being the natural state of mankind and thus not really "caused" by terrorism or anything else. But if the residents and leaders of the Gaza strip were more interested in improving their lives than in blowing up Jews, they wouldn't be nearly so poor.
Ok I got it. So the Palestinian people deserved to be impoverished, have their houses bulldozed, and have their basic human rights routinely violated, because a small number of political activists commit terrorism against Israel.
Thanks for the history lesson.
I make no judgments about what anyone "deserves," being somewhat less than God-like arbiter of universal justice. But I do note: a small number of popularly elected political activists.
Poverty is a natural consequence of terroristic (or even just criminal) activity. Development and wealth require a certain degree of trust which deliberate mass murder destroys, not only between communities but within them as well. Would you try to collect an ordinary business debt from Hamas?
"Poverty is a natural consequence of terroristic (or even just criminal) activity. Development and wealth require a certain degree of trust which deliberate mass murder destroys, not only between communities but within them as well."
Wonderful. I'm glad to see you concede that Israeli terrorism against the residents of Gaza impoverishes those residents.
I give up.
Which only compounds the tragedy, in my mind. Either Manzanar represents a step up for these people, or they didn't expect that a beacon of freedom and human rights like the United States would allow a Manzanar to exist in modern times, much less subsidize it. Welcome to the free world, indeed.
Often the best option when trying to defend the indefensible.
Often the best option when trying to defend the indefensible.
It is pretty indefensible to call a terrorist organization "political activists," but that's Rickm for you. Also, to describe Hamas as a "small number" of people.
Also, his description of Israeli attacks on Egyptian military forces in 1955 as a "violent attack on Gaza."