See No Evil

There are some things we all would rather not know about, for example how that meat on our table got there.

Most of us at least know that animals die so that we can feel satiated, but we would like to believe that they were treated humanely up until the moment they were...hmmm, put to sleep?  We've all seen how chickens and pigs are caged in factory farms, without even enough room to turn around or roll over. We know how cattle in feedlots frequently live in shit and mud up to their calves (pun intended). But we would rather that information would just go away.

In another post I wrote about the U.S. clothing manufacturers who profit from slave labor in Haiti and how our very own State Department went to bat for them. Now there is a story in The Nation about one woman's protest against how U.S. firms profit from the violence against garment workers in Cambodia, workers who earn about $2.75 per day, which isn't even remotely a living wage there.

None of us, understandably, want to have to do the research to ensure that the clothes we buy are not made with what is essentially slave labor. Just as we don't want to have to do research about the conditions at the slaughter house(s) where our hamburger originated. This is one of the reasons we have governments for crissakes.

I don't know what laws might already be on the books that prohibit profiting from slave labor. You would think such laws exist. But, if they do, they are clearly ineffective.

The answer is activism, but instead I prefer to live in Brasil. In the meanwhile, I have nothing but praise and admiration for women like the one in this video.

A Review of a Book Review

Thomas Edsall has written a really intriguing op-ed article in the NY Times based on a new book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, the basic premise of which is that a growing inequality is the natural outgrowth of free market capitalism working exactly as it is designed.

There are a number of key arguments in Piketty’s book. One is that the six-decade period of growing equality in western nations – starting roughly with the onset of World War I and extending into the early 1970s – was unique and highly unlikely to be repeated. That period, Piketty suggests, represented an exception to the more deeply rooted pattern of growing inequality.

Of course this is the exact period that capitalism's strongest defenders love to point to, and to claim as prove of its virtue. But what if that one period when the rising tide did lift a lot of boats (no, not all), was merely an anomaly, an exception? Certainly there wasn't much in capitalism's prior history to recommend it to anyone but the holders of the capital. Karl Marx's work didn't grow in a vacuum, and there was/is a reason for its enduring popularity.

 This next point is so obvious that one feels in need of a dope slap for not having thought of it: 

 Piketty proposes instead that the rise in inequality reflects markets working precisely as they should: “This has nothing to do with a market imperfection: the more perfect the capital market, the higher” the rate of return on capital is in comparison to the rate of growth of the economy. The higher this ratio is, the greater inequality is.

The period when capitalism actually worked to reduce inequality in the U.S. was a period of confiscatory tax rates on the highest incomes. As I understand Piketty's argument from this article by Thomas Edsall, in order for economic  inequality to be addressed in today's global economy it would require a global tax structure to ensure that the rate of after-tax growth on capital was minimized so that more money would flow into actual economic growth. Such a structure would have to be global for the obvious reason that capital would always move to the friendliest politcal-economic environment.

Although the Piketty book is apparently getting rave reviews from economists around the world, including a 20-page review in one economic journal, it does have some critics, and the Edsall column gives them their due. Generally, it seemed to me from Edall's description that many of the criticisms fall into the category of sniping around the edges, although it is unfair to say that without having actually read them.

Unfortunately, there is as yet no e-version of Piketty's book.

This Should Not Be Allowed To Blow Over...But It Probably Will

Since I continue to believe this is the biggest news story this side of Chris Christie and might still lead to some meaningful discussions about the need for greater regulation (and maybe reform of the absurd bankruptcy laws that the scumbags who make up Freedom Industires [yecch] are playing games with) :

The Constitution as Metaphor

I was thinking the other day about how christians make excuses for the ridiculous parts of the bible because, after all, they realize the world and the way people think about it has changed in the last 2000 years. But many of those same people think our 200-year-old constitution is sancrosanct and meant to be taken literally, as if nothing has changed in the interim.

On the other hand, I think a flow chart like this would work for the way most of us think of the constituion too, even for the so-called originalists. As someone pointed out recently, people like Scalia and Thomas are originalists up to the point at which they are not.

Pandering

If we needed evidence of the devolution of the Republican party over the past few years, since the rise of the Tea Baggers, you need look no further than Mike Huckabee.

As Gail Collins reminds us in her column today, Huckabee was the likable candidate in the 2008 Republican primaries, the one who smiled a lot and wanted people to get along. As governor he signed a law requiring employers to cover contraception in their insurance plans. He supported a plan to allow children of illegal immigrants access to college scholarships. He was in favor of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

 But that Mike Huckabee lost and he learned his lesson: angry and mean is the way to get ahead. Now he is against “amnesty,” against subsidized school breakfast programs, and against requiring health insurers to provide birth control coverage in their prescription drug coverage for women who “can't control their libido or their reproductive systems.” And he said this at a meeting of Republican National Committee that was ostensibly meeting to come up with a strategy to close the gender gap. He thinks he has a winning message for Republicans to take to the country.

It reminds me that the lesson a lot of Republican strategists and analysts took away from the last election was not that there was anything wrong with their message, but only with the way they had tried to sell it to the country.
 

This Republican progression from anti-abortion to anti-contraception seems to encapsulate the way in which the party has doubled down on stupid. If politicians must pander (and they probably must), why not to reason and sensibility?

Trust Us, The Water Is Fine

Although I haven't watched any U.S. news channels in ages, I suspect the chemical spill in West Virginia is not getting as much time in the national spotlight as it deserves. It certainly isn't in the print media.

This situation is giving the local citizens a real-life opportunity to decide how much they trust their governments...local, state and federal. The water in most effected areas was declared safe to drink last week when the concentration of the MCHM chemical tested below the level of one part per million, the level declared to be safe by the CDC. But other public health officials say, in effect, that the CDC pulled that number out of its ass, that there simply isn't enough data on this chemical to determine a safe level.

After citizens were told their water was safe to drink, they found that their tap water still had a strong licorice smell, which is a characteristic of MCHM. So public health officials then told people to run their water inside and out and repeatedly flush their toilets for fifteen minutes, and their water would be good to drink. Other public health experts pointed out that this was an even more egregious instance of officials pulling numbers out of their individual and/or collective asses. Where did they come up with fifteen minutes? it was asked. But not answered.

Now the apparently-worthless Governor, Earl Ray Tomblin (Dem), has told people the use of water is "your decision." If people aren't comfortable drinking the water, he said, they should drink bottled water. The profundity of the man!! Anybody offering to help defer the cost of bottled water? Probably not.

By the way, even as officials were telling people the water was safe to drink, they were (and still are) telling pregnant women not to drink the water. It seems like that should raise some eyebrows. It seems typically american to protect the fetus while it is in the womb, and start slowly poisoning it once it is born.

Of course Freedom Industries (I still say yecch to that) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and will be "reorganizing."

If this spill had been the result of an individual opening a valve on a storage tank, that individual would be headed for prison. If it is the result of negligence by the individuals at Freedom Industries (yecch), as it seems to have been, why aren't those individuals charged with a crime? Intent or the lact thereof is not relevant except, perhaps, at the time of sentencing. That used to happen. Now we just charge corporations and they consider fines as just another cost of doing business.

As someone said, I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one. Or in this case, when the state of West Virginia just puts one in jail.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet

Roger Cohen has written a good reminder about the unpleasantness of technological curmudgeons, as well as the futility. It's called Twitter-Bashing Bores. The cardinal rule:

Thou shalt not complain about social media or judge the habits of a generation you do not understand.

I don't know that Cohen says anything you haven't already thought of on our own, or certainly heard before, but it is probably good to remind ourselves on a regular basis of these things.

Of course I still believe that the U.S. is going to hell in a handbasket, but it's probably not becaue of twitter. It's actually because of the least technological citizens, not the most technological. And, taking Cohen's commandment literally, I presume I have enough knowledge of Facebook to criticize it.

Actually, from what I've read lately, Facebook will probably become the social media for people of  "a certain age," as younger users abandon it.

Slave Labor in the Global Economy

Thanks to Wikileaks we now know that the U.S. State Department intervened on behalf of the Hanes and Levi Strauss companies to keep the Haitian minimum wage at $0.31 per hour. One wonders why it takes Wikileaks for this "highly sensitive" information to be made public.

Sarcasm
After the next hurricane or earthquake in Haiti, we can all wring our hands and lament the dreadful living conditions there. Talking heads can analyse the reasons and lay most of the blame on a corrupt Haitian political system. We can even pack up some Levi jeans and Hanes underwear to send as relief to the beleaquered people, and feel better about ourselves as we head for the mall where there is a clothing sale.

Reality
Of course most of our clothes are made is sweat shops somewhere in the world. If not Haiti, then Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, Honduras....or wherever. Possibly conditions in some countries are relatively better than in others, but U.S. consumers who might like to have this information do not, or at least not conveniently. There is always Google.

There Oughta Be a Law
I presume, but don't know, that there are laws preventing U.S. companies from directly operating slave-labor sweat shops abroad. There ought to be laws preventing companies doing business in the U.S. from profiting even indirectly from slave labor.

Racial Democracy

 Is the United States a 'Racial Democracy'? is the title of an excellent essay from the online forum The Stone in today's NY Times. Please read it and get pissed, if you aren't already.

These are brief excerpts.

There is a vast chasm between democratic political ideals and a state that is a racial democracy. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues that when political ideals diverge so widely from reality, the ideals themselves may prevent us from seeing the gap. Officially, the laws in the United States that govern when citizens can be sent to prison or questioned by the police are colorblind. But when the official story differs greatly from the reality of practice, the official story becomes a kind of mask that prevents us from perceiving it. And it seems clear that the practical reality of the criminal justice system in the United States is far from colorblind. The evidence suggests that the criminal justice system applies in a radically unbalanced way, placing disproportionate attention on our fellow black citizens. The United States has a legacy of enslavement followed by forced servitude of its black population. The threat that the political ideals of our country veil an underlying reality of racial democracy is therefore particularly disturbing.

 About 9 percent of the world’s prison population is black American.... If the system of justice in the United States were fair, and if the 38 million black Americans were as prone to crime as the average ethnic group in the world (where an ethnic group is, for example, the 61 million Italians, or the 45 million Hindu Gujarati), you would expect that black Americans would also be about 9 percent of the 2013 estimated world population of 7.135 billion people. There would then be well over 600 million black Americans in the world. If you think that black Americans are like anybody else, then the nation of black America should be the third largest nation on earth, twice as large as the United States. You can of course still think, in the face of these facts, that the United States prison laws are fairly applied and colorblind. But if you do, you almost certainly must accept that black Americans are among the most dangerous groups in the multithousand year history of human civilization. (my emphasis)

Ishmael Beah. What's Not to Like?

I won't subject y'all (y'few) ou to another book review so soon after the last ones, but merely point you toward a couple of books which you may already be aware of.

The first, A Long Way Gone, was published in 2007, which is more or less when I read it. It is a powerful and moving story about the author's life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone beginning when he was 13 years old, and his good fortune to escape after a couple of years, thanks to Unicef, and end up in the U.S.

The second book, Radiance of Tomorrow, was just published a few days ago. It is a novel that deals with Sierra Leone after the war and with the question of what makes people return and reconstruct their lives and culture. I've bought it but not yet read it.

As soon as I saw that Beah was scheduled to be on the Colbert Report, I googled him to find out what was up, and saw that his novel had just been released. I bought it immediately. Beah appears to be one of those truly remarkable and beautiful persons who we can only look at with wonder and shake our heads at his joy and hopefulness. I will buy anything he cares to write.

I wanted to attach a clip of Colbert's interview with Beah, but I'm having problems. Here at least is a link that will allow you to watch it. 

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/431966/january-08-2014/ishmael-beah

Finally, there are some people who one would just like to....oh, I don't know, use your imagination. What should be done with the anal-retentive person who wrote the following on Wikipedia?

Controversy

 The accuracy of the events and chronology presented in "A Long Way Gone" have been called into question, particularly the claim that Beah became a child soldier in 1993, rather than in 1995 as the timeline of events in Sierra Leone's civil war suggests.

Supposedly Beah's rescue by Unicef can be dated and one can work backward from then. But I would imagine that birth (and death) records would be poorly maintained in the midst of a violent civil war, and I would also think it reasonable that a teenager, whose parents had been killed years before, may have some dates confused in his memory. Who cares? As if the heart of Beah's war memoir is the chronology. Is this really a controversy?

It's All About Accountability

There is an interesting article in the latest New York Review of Books by Jed S. Rakoff, a Federal District Judge in New York, who asks why no high-level executives have been prosecuted for their role in the financial crisis that led to the most recent Great Recession.

Obviously, as a judge he is not presuming the guilt of  anyone. He recognizes the possibility that there may not have been any illegalities or fraudulent practices at all; maybe there was just a hell of a lot of negligence. But...

....the stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary. For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.

As the commission found, the signs of fraud were everywhere to be seen, with the number of reports of suspected mortgage fraud rising twenty-fold between 1996 and 2005 and then doubling again in the next four years....

 While officials of the Department of Justice have been more circumspect in describing the roots of the financial crisis than have the various commissions of inquiry and other government agencies, I have seen nothing to indicate their disagreement with the widespread conclusion that fraud at every level permeated the bubble in mortgage-backed securities.

The judge examines and shoots down the most common reasons given by Justice Department officials for the lack of prosecutions. Have you heard the excuse that "fraud is hard to prove?" Forget it; the Supremes have upheld the concept of "willful blindness" or "conscious disregard" as recently as 2011. Rakoff also examines a number of systemic realities which have worked to discourage prosecutions, such as inadequate investigative and prosecutorial resources and other cases with understandably-higher priorities, and he examines the unfortunate trend toward prosecution of corporations instead of the individual decision makers within those corporations.

Rakoff also points out that both the Executive and Legislative branches of the Federal Government helped create the conditions under which fraud could easily occur, and this seeming "complicity" might act to discourage prosecutors from going after individuals who would then pay very expensive lawyers to claim they were just doing what they thought was expected.

Still, fraud is fraud and Rakoff points out that the junk bond frenzy of the 1970s led to prosecutions up to the level of Michael Milken. The S&L scandal of the 1980s led to prosecutions, including that of Charles Keating. More recently the CEOs of Enron and WorldCom were successfully prosecuted. But, because of a five-year statute of limitations it is almost a certainty that no one will be prosecuted for any role in bringing about the recession whose effects are still being felt.

 In conclusion, he say that perhaps the financial crisis was not caused by fraudulent practices, 

But if it was—as various governmental authorities have asserted it was—then the failure of the government to bring to justice those responsible for such colossal fraud bespeaks weaknesses in our prosecutorial system that need to be addressed.

Just after reading this article by Judge Rakoff, I saw a story about a chemical spill in the Charleston, WV area from a storage tank owned by a company called, yecch, Freedom Industries. The number of people effected, and how serious the risks, are apparently not yet determined. But it seems on the face of it that a law has been broken. It clearly must be illegal to dump 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol (it just has a very unhealthy sound to it, doncha think?) into a river, whether intentionally or not. We'll see what happens, accountability-wise. Why do I suspect the penalty will be unjustifiably light?

In the meanwhile, imagine being told by the supplier of your city water that the only acceptable use of the water that comes into your house from the city main is to flush your toilet. And imagine your likely response to the city's plea not to horde bottled water. How many bottles of water to take a bath? one wonders. Or imagine the anxiety of the pregnant woman who was blissfully drinking city water just minutes before the announcement was made not to drink city water.

Depressingly Apt

This is a quotation from Amos Oz. He was talking about Israel in 2002, but it seems to me to be 100% applicable to the U.S. in 2013...oops 2014.

Our biggest problem is the disappearance of social solidarity. A gross egotism is developing here, that isn't even ashamed of itself. Twenty years ago a girl from Bet Shean said on television "I'm hungry", and the doorposts shook (Isaiah 6:4). Yes, partly it was just lip service, but at least there was lip service. Today, even if she died of hunger on a live broadcast, nothing would happen, apart from high ratings and copywriters using the incident for their purposes. Anyone who once naively thought that the engine of the entrepreneurs and the rich would pull behind it a long train in which the rear cars would also go forward, was mistaken. That didn't happen. The engines are moving, and the rear cars are left behind on the rusting tracks.

 The italics are mine.

Book Review Time Again

In case your New Year's resolutions involve a commitment to read more history, here are a couple of books you might consider putting in the pile.

The first, by Madhusree Mukerjee is subtitled The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II. It made me think about the way in which we select our heroes and the way in which that is reflected in our recorded histories. In a very real sense, World War II made Churchill. If he hadn't become the hero that we know today, he would justly be remembered as the architect of the horrendous WWI campaign at Gallipoli, where 43,000 Allied troops and 60,000 Turks died (not casualties, deaths)!!

But all of that is overlooked and we don't even think twice when we read that Churchill was the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. We accept without question the first sentence in Paul Johnson's biography: “Of all the towering figures of the twentieth century, both good and evil, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable. It is a joy to write his life, and to read about it.”

No one who reads Mukerjee's book will ever think of Churchill in quite the same way. What is sad is that many people still resist looking at our heroes, warts and all, as if that diminishes their other accomplishments.

This book starts by giving an overview of the British Raj and the Indian resistance to it. It then details Churchill's complicity in the Indian famine of 1943-44 that killed at a minimum 1.5 million people and realistically more like 3 million Bengalis. Interwoven in that story are the efforts Churchill's government made to play the Muslims against the Hindus in an attempt to defuse Indian nationalism. One of the results of those efforts (games, really) is the fact that the end of British rule brought about two countries instead of one. For more on that, see the second book, about Pakistan.

What this book made me realize, over and above the hitherto unknown historic details, is that Churchill was a dinosaur, a relic, a representative of an epoch that was already dead, even if that wasn't fully apparent at the time. He was history, in the slang sense, even as he was making it.

The second book, subtitled Pakistan, the United States and an Epic History of Misunderstanding, was written by a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S and current professor at Boston University. It details sixty-five years of two countries deluding themselves about each other. In its simplest form it comes down to sixty-five years of Pakistani deceit and outright lying and U.S. gullibility. Needless to say, the author isn't going to be going back to Pakistan anytime soon.

Although the description I just gave doesn't seem compelling enough to make one dive into a longish book, the details and insights in the book are actually fascinating.

Even if you didn't resolve to read more history, Happy 2014.