Category: Political

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People Political

The evil that is Ashcroft

I have no comments to make after reading this article.

Mike’s Link Blog copied an article about Ashcroft, John Ashcroft’s Patriot Games by Judith Bacharach, in its entirey, from Vanity Fair. Before the magazine moves to have him remove it, you have to read it.

Remember, that this is a story about the Attorney General of the United States – the highest legal office in the land.

We have fallen so far.

Within weeks of Ashcroft’s arrival, the revolution began, although initially only his subordinates realized it, as it came in the form of a scolding memo. According to a former Justice Department lawyer, the phrases “We are proud of the Justice Department” and “There is no higher calling than public service,” both of which had been pro forma in certain letters sent out to citizens and congressmen above the attorney general’s signature, were to be excised. A call to Ashcroft’s office provided an explanation of sorts: “Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; therefore we could not have a letter going out that would have the word ‘pride’ or ‘proud.’” Moreover, “there is a higher calling than public service, which is service to God.”

The oddest details seemed to carry grave theological implications, even in the Netherlands, where Ashcroft attended an international anti-corruption conference in May 2001. There, a trio of Siamese cats scampering about the residence of Cynthia Schneider, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands, produced alarm in the Justice advance team, according to a highly placed source. “Are there any calico cats at the residence?” they inquired of embassy staff. Ashcroft, who would be dining with Schneider, considered such creatures “instruments of the Devil,” his people explained. (Ashcroft has denied any antipathy toward calico cats.)

Equally startling was the new composition of top staff. “To go from a Justice Department that was diverse, led by a woman,” recalls one ex employee, “to that first wave of primarily white guys, that was a major change.” Even after that first wave subsided (there was a flood of departures, including, after two years, Viet Dinh, the chief architect of the Patriot Act), the results were similar. Qualified female attorneys, complaining that Ashcroft “can’t look a woman in the eye,” found promotions to the highest levels almost nonexistent. Black men would be replaced by white men. In honor of Women’s History Month, Janet Ashcroft, once an outspoken opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, was asked by her husband to make a speech to women staffers. “Which is kind of a novel thing,” one listener says dryly. “And he introduces her by saying she’s the woman who taught him how to put dishes away. Yes, that’s what he said to the women lawyers. He said she taught him you should rotate your china, put your new plates on the bottom of the stack, so you don’t wear them out.”

I am speechless.

(Thanks to Teresa Hayden, who has copied another excerpt if the entire article has to get pulled.)

Update

From the Globe and Mail:

I am aware that many Americans are happy to trade their civil liberties for security, and as a visitor after 9/11, I’d rather an immigration officer erred on the side of precaution. But you do wonder where and when all this will end and what effect it will have on the ideals that once made America.

If the dissection of John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice in this month’s Vanity Fair is anything to go by, it seems that America will soon be at war with itself � because the application of the law is being invested with a moral zeal whose goal is, in the words of the U.S. Attorney-General, “not simply to investigate crimes but to prevent them before they occur.”

Second update *snicker

Calico cats admit fear of Ashcroft

The poll also revealed that other breeds, including Persians, short hairs, and even Siamese get their hackles raised when Mr. Ashcroft’s name is mentioned. “Strangely enough, only those funky hairless cats that look like skinned weasels seem immune to the Attorney General,” mused Miss Kelly. “I guess when you look like that, you don’t have much left to worry abou

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People Political

Ralph Nader: Unsafe at any speed

I’ve never been a huge fan of Ralph Nader. Of course, some of this is explained by my long ago engagement with a man who was an ardent member of the Seattle Corvair club. Nader didn’t kill the Corvair – American’s never could handle the unusual styling– but he didn’t help.

I am aware of Nader’s involvement with OSHA, as well as the EPA. I am aware of his battles for the consumers, the little guys like you and me. I know he’s written books about women in the marketplace, and how we’re not paid equally, or treated fairly. Every one of these things should guarantee that I support Ralph Nader, but I just don’t care for him. Never have. Never will.

Of course now with Nader throwing in as an independent Presidential candidate, my lack of enthusiasm for him might be more understandable. After all, some say he threw the race to Bush in 2000 by siphoning off votes from Gore. I don’t know if this is true, but I don’t think his race hurt Bush.

Now, I’m already hearing that some disappointed Dean supporters have switched their support to Nader since Dean semi-dropped out. Why? It’s all in the process. The thing with many of the Dean supporters is that the process is more important than the results. Some really are indifferent if we have four more years of Bush, as long as the process, in this case a fight against a–what does Nader call it? Duopoly– succeeds.

That’s why I just don’t care for Nader. To him, the process was always more important than the result. The general fight was always more important than the specific battles; more important than even the results of those battles.

Nader sees everything in black and white. Corporate bad. Non-Corporate good. Everything he does, is based on this simple premise. The fight for the environment isn’t ‘for’ the environment, as much as it is against those corporate interests that would exploit the environment. A fight for public forests, isn’t necessarily to help the forests, as much as it is to fight the logging companies.

The same extends to issues of civil liberties. According to Nader, the fight for rights for blacks, women, and now gays, isn’t a fight for these groups as much as it is a class fight. In some ways, you might agree with him. In fact, isn’t reframing this into a genderless, sexless, colorless, raceless issue more effective in the long run?

At first glace, it seems the appropriate thing to do, but this breaks down in reality. When you see these struggles as a struggle of ‘class’, you tend to discount the individual differences and cultural clashes that arise with each fight.

The fight for rights for blacks isn’t just a struggle to ensure that blacks are not exploited by corporate or other class interests; it’s also a struggle for acceptance by the poor white folks that live in the trailer flying a confederate flag amidst the hills of Iron County, Missouri. How does one frame this as a ‘class’ dispute, especially one connected in some way with evil corporate intent?

The fight for women’s rights isn’t just a struggle to ensure that we’re treated equally in the marketplace; it’s also a struggle to make sure we’re not raped by college football players because a coach doesn’t see any harm with women treated as objects, as long as his boys aren’t ‘distracted’ from winning.

And now, with gay rights. How does one reframe full rights for gays into a class struggle that ignores issues of personal perceptions and biases? Just saying so isn’t going to make it so.

Nader has said that there is no difference between the Democratic party and the Republican party – both are equally beholden to corporate interests. Bottom line, that’s all Nader sees.

In 2000, before the election, Todd Gitlin took a closer look at the issue of this claim by Nader, and Nader’s politics. He wrote:

At bottom, Nader’s all-or-nothing gambit is not politics, it is moral fundamentalism – as if by venting one’s anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so, despite all those recalcitrant people who happen to live here.

The arrogance of this “worsism” – the worse, the better – is chillingly expressed by a Nader voter in Portland, Ore., interviewed in Friday’s New York Times: “If Bush gets in, I feel that it might bring things to a head much more quickly. Pollution’s going to increase in the short term, but I think that will bring a lot more people into the environmental movement a lot more quickly. Sometimes you’ve got to hit bottom before you come back up.” Notice how the means – “a lot more people into the environmental movement” -has become the end. Notice the spurious assumption that the masses will rise up if things come “to a head.” It didn’t happen after Reagan’s depredations on the environment. It won’t happen now.

Well, we’ve had four years of Bush. I wonder what that Oregon voter now feels about the issue?

Ralph Nader is a man with a mission, always has been, to better the human condition. However, he does so by discounting the messier elements and focusing only on the bloodless aspects of our struggles. From the article, Nader Confronts Minority Critics:

But behind the political skirmishing there are some very real differences in approach towards race between Nader and his critics on the Left. Where they see a Green Party and presidential campaign made up largely of middle-class whites, he sees “constituency group” critics hooked on “symbolism” instead of progress.

Where some of his critics see a candidate who, in the words of writer Vanessa Daniel, “appears to be tiptoeing around an elephant when he fails to mention … race and racism,” Nader sees a more “systemic” class struggle against corporations, of which racial discrimination is an important but lesser component.

And when potential supporters all but plead for a warmer, more human personal touch, Nader stubbornly remains who he is: a solitary and frequently awkward man who brags that his campaign is “about ideas, not emotion.”

Do I disagree with this? How can I? I can understand what Nader is saying. We do focus too much on symbols and not the underlying causes. We’re distracted by specifics, when we should be working on universal cures.

At the same time, though, we only have to look at history to realize that change isn’t global. Like the pictures in the papers, change is the little dots that seen from a distance, form a solid picture. Change is local. Change happens one event at a time, based on the passionate acts of a people pushing through change regardless of cost to themselves.

Change is both emotion and ideas. Change is messy.

The odd thing is, I think Nader is closer to Bush in outlook than not. Both believe that everything boils down to corporate interests. It’s just that Bush thinks meeting corporate interests would be good for the people, and Nader thinks that not meeting coporate interests would be good for the people.

Take away corporations, and both would fall over.

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Political

Rape of woman and other spoils of war

Sometimes when you’re going through Bloglines looking at the excerpts, it seems like so many variations on a common theme. But then you click to another and you’re faced with What Causes Rape? Anatomy of a Rape Culture and the shock is staggering.

Ampersand at Alas, a Blog wrote an essay on rape culture, giving, as opinion, three reasons why rape occurs:

  1. The Myth of Masculinity
  2. Low Regard of Women
  3. Sexuality is something possessed by women, given to (or taken) by men

When humanity first breathed war, rape followed on the exhalation.

In ancient times, women were taken by conquering soldiers as spoils of war, sometimes becoming the wives of the victors, whether they wanted this or not. In many ways the fate that met many of these women was no different than if their lands hadn’t been overrun, except that their fathers would have made the determination of which man would own them.

Up until the last century or so for most cultures women were literally considered property, so it’s not surprising that a winning army would take the horses, the gold, and the women, usually valued in that order. This fits with Ampersand’s assertion that rape is a result of women being seen as little value, except, of course, in those cases when women were of value – just like the horses and the gold.

There was an additional reason women were raped in war: to humiliate the men. However, rather than taking the women, they would be left, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, as soiled reminders of the men’s failure to succeed on the battlefield. Rather than sympathy from her family and friends, though, the woman would be driven out of her home in shame because she didn’t die rather than submit. Rape is seen as the fault of the woman, not the man.

However, humanity is more civilized today, isn’t it?

During World War II, Russian soldiers raped hundreds of thousands of women – I’ve even read esitmates of millions of women, some being their own country women freed from German camps. In China, an estimated 80,000 women were raped by Japanese soldiers during the war, which was bad enough but there was at least some familiarity with this type of rape – the women were victims of wartime behavior. However, the Japanese government also, calmly condoned the concept of jugan ianfu or comfort women – women from many different countries but primarily Korean, kidnapped and or sold to the Japanese military to provide sex for the soldiers.

Supposedly these women were paid a small sum for each man they had sex with; I’ve read that they received 2 yen per man. Also supposedly after 500 or so men, they could buy their way to freedom. These women, many in their early teens, had to service so many men that sometimes they would fall sleep while the men were still using them.

Of course, the details were hushed up and the few photographs of the practice in the time showed Geisha-like girls winking at the camera, or signs showing:

`We welcome with our hearts and bodies the brave soldiers of Japan.’

US soldiers don’t escape the stigma of rape. The worst forms of rape can occur during civil war, and our own Civil War was rife with assault and abuse of women. As for modern times, you don’t have to look too far back to find an example in Tailhook, but even in Iraq, female soldiers not only have to duck bullets and bombs, they have to duck their comrades in arms.

But this is all war, and we know that in war behavior changes. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told. But what about rape in a peaceful society?

Rape is used to punish women who go against the norms of society. “She’s a slut”, the kid says on the streets of Bloomington, as if this is all the justification that’s necessary. Even now with high profile cases, the rape victim is treated as if it were her behavior that led to the rape, rather than the lack of control, or even interest in control, of the man.

In other countries, rape is used to enforce religious dictates. “She’s immodest,”, the kids say in Baghdad, as they kidnap 13 year old girls and gang rape them until they’re half dead. But this type of rape isn’t to punish the women as much as it is to punish the men. It sends a message: control your women or we’ll ruin their value to you.

Rape is also crime of poverty. This weekend, Jane Fonda and Sally Fields helped to publicize the mass rape, torture, and murder of young women in Juarez, Mexico, most of whom worked at maquiladoras, or border factories. Rather than go after the real criminals, most likely organized crime, the authorities are instead going after bus drivers and farmers, too poor to defend themselves.

While I find Fonda’s ‘vagina warrier’ rhetoric and decision to produce and star in the play “Vagina Monologues” to be inappropriate to the event, I can still appreciate what they’ve done. Unfortunately, though, the balloons will soon pop, the pink paint fade. Where will Fonda be tomorrow?

But let’s focus on the more personal forms of rape. Ampersand talks about rape as a way of men asserting their masculinity, but I’m not sure if that’s a reason for rape. Rape in schools or in frat houses seems to me to be more pack behavior than assertion of male dominance. Men have raped as a group, where they won’t rape as an individual.

I do agree with Ampersand’s belief that rape is at least partially based on viewing women as an object of gratification. And you don’t have to look further than something like the hip Fleshbot to see women treated as objects: nude women as art, women pictured in cartoons being raped, women in bonds, women as nothing more than vagina, ass, mouth, and breasts.

Fleshbot may represent the mainstreaming of porn, but oddly enough, there is no clear correlation between pornography and rape. In fact, I found a fascinating study that shows there may be more of a correlation between a magazine like Field & Stream and rape. In other words, between a heavily masculine environment and rape.

Rather than rape being a reaffirmation of masculinity, masculinity becomes a affirmation of rape.

Still, what about rape porn. Feministe wrote about rape pornography, and whether this can desensitize the act of rape. In her view, if there is no acceptable forms of rape, then there should be no acceptable form of rape pornography (sharing the same view on child pornography).

Ampersand lists as one reason that men rape is that women have sexuality and men want it – rape for pleasure. According to an FBI Study of serial rapists, though, most did not experience any significant pleasure from the act. In fact, many of the rapists were dysfunctional during the act.

However, I believe that Ampersand may be focusing more on so-called date rape with his essay. And with date rape, all the rules about serial rapists or wartime rape goes out the door. Except for one common point shared by all, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The date rapist takes advantage of circumstances, such as the victim being incompacitated. Usually the rapist is himself drunk or stoned on drugs. In addition, date rapists are aggressive in other interactions with the woman, and tend to see women more as sexual conquests and objects of gratification; even more so than the serial rapists.

Acquaintance rape is the most common rape in this country, and in most other countries. It is also the one least prosecuted and most tolerated by society; more likely to be blamed on the victim than any other form of rape – leaving the woman to be victimized twice: once by the rape, and the second time by society.

In fact, that is the common shared aspect of all rapes – a belief that if only the victim had changed their behavior (dressed differently, behaved differently, not stayed poor, not joined the military, fought back) the rape wouldn’t have happened.

Rape is the only crime where the victim is held partially, or wholly, accountable.

Categories
Political

Power to the ducks

Sunday after listening to Tim Russert interview President Bush, I was filled with a renewed sense of urgency to get involved with the Presidential race this year, but felt frustrated as to how I could make a difference.

I do write about politics in this weblog, and I thought that perhaps I should focus more time and effort on the race, but I haven’t felt inclined to do this kind of writing. I’d rather just write about what catches my fancy, but then I feel guilt – I’m not doing enough for the cause. However, it seems to me that no matter what I write, or how often I write it, it really makes no difference. Perhaps if I were one of the more well known pundits like Glenn Reynolds or Atrios or Kos Calpundit it would make more of a difference.

Thinking that I went to Calpundit’s site on Sunday and I read his post on the LA Times article on Howard Dean, and the Internet Echo Chamber effect. Kevin pointed out quotes from the illumanti who were mentioned in the article, including Clay Shirky and Dave Winer and Doc Searls and others and I noticed that in his writing, and in the article, there wasn’t a mention of a woman.

Well, huh, I said to myself. I thought it strange that there wasn’t one woman mentioned in the article, considering that there has been several women actively involved in the Dean campaign in one way or other – women like Betsy Devine, Halley Suitt, and Sheila Lennon.

It’s just this sort of thing that used to make me really angry in the past, but lately, I just don’t seem to have that same passion. Or at least, not it when it comes to what I read in weblogs. Still, I was feeling a bit peeved, and since the sun was out, decided to go for a walk and think about the situation before responding.

Most of my regular walks still had too much ice on the paths to safely traverse, especially when you’re still walking with a limp and are concerned about falling again. I decided to head to Tower Grove; I hadn’t been there for ages, and it usually attracts a lot of visitors – perhaps its walks were clearer.

When I got to Tower, the sidewalks were still too icy, but the area around the faux ruin and its lake was fairly clear so I walked around it, carrying my digital camera to get some shots because the late afternoon light was very pretty reflected on the snow and ice. The ‘lake’ is really nothing more than a clever pond, thick ice formed a bridge across the water every where except by where the water was disturbed by the fountain.

In this break in the ice, four ducks were swimming about, two mallards, and two ducks I couldn’t figure out their breed but one was dark gray and white, the other primarily white. I watched them for a bit, but then turned away to get a picture of the shadow of a tree across the ice, reaching between empty seats, reflecting the loneliness of the surroundings with just me, the four ducks, and an occasional squirrel.

snowday.jpg

As I was moving about, carefully, hands going red from the cold and nose running in what I’m sure was a most edifying manner, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye–the ducks had left the water and were climbing across the ice towards the bank, very near to where I was standing.

Well, three of the ducks were moving across the ice. The fourth one was still at the water’s edge, looking at me and looking at his friends and then back at me, sometimes making a hesitant move forward as if he would make a dash across the ice, but then holding back at the end.

I tried to stay very still to not alarm him further, and the other three ducks, now safely in the patch of the only bare ground in the entire area, were turned towards him, quaking like mad as if to say, “It’s alright George. Come on! She won’t hurt you!”

Finally, in a burst of inspiration, or hunger, George managed to find a solution to his quandry by flying over the ice rather than walking across it, thereby joining up with his friends without having to expose himself too much to the danger, which was me.

Unfortunately, landing on ice is not one of the easier things to do – at least it doesn’t look easy – and when George landed, he slid across the ice and ended up butt first in the bank rather abruptly and in, what I could tell, a very embarrased frame of mind. He shook his feathers out in a huff, stomped, not walked, up to his friends, and then turned around and glared at me.

I’d never been glared at by a duck before. I now have a whole new respect for this species of bird.

Leaving the group to their feast in peace, I carefully backed away and started walking across the ice crusted, snow filled lawn, enjoying the sound and the feel of breaking through the ice with my boots. I love to walk on snow, especially snow that’s not too deep. There’s something about putting one’s footprint where none has been before that leaves one feeling special somehow, even if the print will be gone in the next snowfall or melt.

I walked around until too cold to feel my fingers and headed home. I thought about writing my experience, but I wasn’t in a mood. Haven’t been in the mood to write about politics lately, either. It just doesn’t seem to make a difference. I’d rather just write about George and his friends. Or a new poem I found I decided to incorporate into my book:

HER even lines her steady temper show;
Neat as her dress, and polish’d as her brow;
Strong as her judgment, easy as her air;
Correct though free, and regular though fair:
And the same graces o’er her pen preside
That form her manners and her footsteps guide.

“On a Lady’s Writing”, a poem by Anna L’titia Barbauld first published in 1773

It was last night’s reading of Dave Roger’s most recent post discussing Joe Trippi’s appearance yesterday at the Digital Democracy Teach-In that insired me to write today. Trippi had said, There’s a reason Bush is vulnerable today. It’s because of the blogs.. As Dave writes:

One gathers Mr. Trippi and others like him would have us believe that somehow weblogs have made President Bush vulnerable. Apparently it’s not because of the loss of 2.2 million jobs during his term. It’s not because of Dr. David Kay’s revelations regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s not because of a half-trillion dollar deficit.

It’s because of the blogs. I couldn’t believe that Trippi would say something such as this, until I heard it myself in a recording . In it he talks in this vein for quite a long time, of how Dean’s campaign has revitalized the Democratic party and if Dean had never run for office, this wouldn’t have happened. He also talked about this new form of democracy and how the Internet is going to give democracy back to the people.

For some reason, this reminded me of my first protest demonstration, back when I was 15. Unlike most of my later ones, this one had to do with transporting spent nuclear fuel across Washington State, and a large group of us obtained permission to take our protest down the Express Lanes of I-5 in Seattle.

It was an astonishing experience – thousands and thousands of people, as far as the eye could see, all pulled together in common protest against a move decided by both the federal and state goverments in definance of the people’s wishes. I attended with the niece of one of the activists and he tried to get people to cross from the Express Lanes into the actual freeway to stop all traffic, but this crowd was a peaceful one. Besides – they made a much stronger statement by not crossing the freeway.

A strong enough statement to force a change.

That was a long time ago and the first of many political activities to come. I even worked on some campaigns, such as Senator Henry Jackson’s bid for the White House. Henry Jackson was an environmentalist before the term was popular, and a man I really liked. He didn’t win the Democratic nomination, but he still made a difference.

I didn’t always agree with him, but he was a good man. When or lose, he continued to work for the people.

Back to the here and now and Dean and this ‘new democracy’.

Dave Winer writes:

He did raise a lot of money on the Internet, and that’s interesting, for sure, and he taught us so much, and if he had gone all the way, I believe he would have survived the onslaught of CNN, ABC and NBC, who were his real competitors, not the other candidates for the Democratic nomination. Read that sentence again, please. That’s the core premise of this piece, and the point that all the analysis so far has missed. His challenge wasn’t to get the most votes, because that would inevitably follow, once he won the battle with the television networks, a battle which he failed to even show up for.

And from this we can only assume that Dave is saying that if Dean had stayed on the Internet instead of wasting money on commercials, he would have won.

David Weinberger writes:

I came away reinvigorated, with a sense that we’re going to be build an infrastructure that may de-boob the White House in 2004 and over the longer term could help revive a diverse, strong, democracy.

Jeff Jarvis wrote, in response to Trippi:

“This campaign was the first campaign really owned by the American people. Now we have to build a movement owned by them.”

Movements are, by definition, owned by the people.
These tools are not owned by one movement or one campaign. They will be used by anyone; that is their power.
I love what Dean created. But it’s not proprietary to any ideology. And I do have problems with the chronic anger, defensiveness, and hubris.

And I have a lot of problems with statements such as This campaign was the first campaign really owned by the American people.

I could go on and on, but the talk is the same and about the only person who really caught my attention was Joi Ito (who provided photos of the Teach-In) as quoted by Jeff Jarvis:

Joi notes that there have been a lot of white American males talking about blogs.

(later)

Joi says that when Americans want to spread democracy they mean putting it under American control. Unfair. In a more balanced audience, that would have gotten a loud moan.

A lot of white American men talking about blogs, and American democracy and American control. I wouldn’t have moaned – I would have applauded, and he would have probably been the only person I would have applauded. Would have given him a bit wet one, too.

All this fuss about the ‘new Democracy’ has got me thinking how Democracy has changed over the years. All the efforts of women to get the vote and blacks to get equality and protests for war and against war and all the changes that have resulted from a determined people coming together. I was reminded of the workers striking for decent conditions at the turn of the century, and the Chinese students run down by tanks, and the millions of people who protested wars and oppression even to today, and wonder what these people, many of whom died for their efforts, or had tubes shoved down their throats to force feed them, or who had lost loved ones, or been tortured, or now face a new form of McCarthyism – I wonder what they would think about claims being made that only now, and only in the Net and among weblogs is true democracy happening.

Rather than a Ghandi or a Martin Luther King, this year the hero of the revolution is the fired campaign manager of a failed campaign, and it makes me angry, the first time in a long, long while, I’ve been truly angry.

But out of that anger comes laughter, and why not? The two are next to each other on the emotional circle, and come from the same center in all of us.

I laugh because I think on what Joi said and how much of this new ‘revolution’ has been centered around white American males; and how we women, long used to it, can now sit back and enjoy watching how the men deal with being ignored.

I laugh because none of this really matters. Change comes from people, many people, walking the streets, and sometimes the streets are made of bytes, but most of the time the streets are made of concrete. The means doesn’t matter – it’s the passion that counts.

Democracy was not invented online, and there is no ‘new’ revolution – there’s only new methods of fighting the same one that’s been fought by countless people in the past. And if I want to write about George and his paranoia, I can – whether it be George the duck, or George the President. And it makes no difference in the great scheme of things that I’m doing the writing, and not Kevin Drum, or Glenn Reynolds, or Clay Shirky, or Dave Winer.

We’re all just ducks swimming in the same pond. Some may quake louder then others, have brighter feathers, and fly across the ice instead of walk, but ultimately we all just fly, float, fuck, eat, and shit – and do what we can to make sure our pond lasts a little while longer, our babies don’t get pecked by assholes, and try not to end up as someone’s dinner.

Quack. Quack.

Categories
People Political

Share the Wealth

Outsourcing, legal visitor worker programs, and immigration – these are issues that will hopefully become part of the political campaigns this year in the US. They should be issues talked about in every country; this world is getting smaller, and we have to start thinking globally. Time to share the wealth. Unfortunately, when it comes to sharing, it tends to be those who can least afford it who are required to give the most.

There was a tragedy in the news today–19 Chinese die collecting cockles (a shellfish) in a dangerous bay in England. Gangs had bussed the workers in, most if not all assumed to be illegal aliens, and then left them to die when the tides cut them off from shore.

Imagine paying someone all that you own to flee to a new country for a better life for your children, a country where you can’t speak the language, and don’t know the customs. Then, once you arrive, you’re coerced into backbreaking work in order to get enough money to feed your family. Rather than the ultimate prize you hope to get – citizenship for your children if not for yourself, safety, enough to eat–you get death.

And now we see that it happens in England, too.

In come the heroes on horses. The conservatives will say, “Let’s legalize the worker’s status so that they can come into the country and do jobs our people won’t do. They’ll have a better life, and our companies will prosper.”

What happens though is that a new underclass of worker is created and formalized; where before people could hope to break out of the status of being an illegal alien into being a citizen, now they’re boxed into that status forever. Yes, it may be safer, and they may live longer – but they’ll be consigned to a dreamless existence as a member of the worker Class. Paid enough to survive but not enough to hope. Living longer, but not living better. That’s what conservatives promise.

But the liberals are not much better when it comes to steedmanship as stewardship.

Protectionism doesn’t work, they say. Let jobs go overseas to help people in other countries. Open our borders. Help create new jobs in other countries. Spread the wealth.

So we create factories in Mexico through NAFTA, to provide jobs for the many people who need it and to funnel needed money into the Mexican infrastructure. And jobs are created, and there is some prosperity. But rather than the equalizing effect that was hoped for by NAFTA, we now have two countries whose people have been tossed from jobs: those in the United States because of jobs going to Mexico; and now those in Mexico, when these same jobs have moved to other countries such as China, because the sudden affluence and competition for workers in certain areas in Mexico have suddenly made them too expensive for corporations seeking a quick buck. What’s left is more colonias, empty factories, and broken promises.

Of course, Mexico’s loss is other countries gain. Countries such as China, Nicaragua, and Indonesia.

But no one has embraced outsourcing more than India. The people of India have prospered with outsourcing, especially in the IT field, and this has pissed some people off. They talk about how sloppy the work is from offshore efforts, but contrary to these disparaging viewpoints, the people from India I have worked with have been intelligent, well trained, capable, dedicated, and with terrific senses of humor. There is nothing wrong with the quality of the work, and, as a confirmed liberal, no, as a member of humanity, I don’t want to deny them work. I don’t want to see their country harmed.

Besides, you have to admire the sheer energy of the Indian people in their determination to not only embrace their new role in world economics, but to expand on it. Indian universities now include computer training for all degrees, and much of the college system has been regeared to this new economy, with a new emphasis on training engineers. Out of the two million graduates this year from colleges, over 200,000 will have engineering degrees.

The “Teching” of India is so pervasive, that it has even impacted on the culture of gender in the country. For instance, rather than more traditional beauty contests, the Miss High Tech Bangalore contest is opened to women in the IT industry, to show that women in IT can be feminine as well as competent. Instead of questions about world peace, the women have to demonstrate IT knowledge. And poise, and beauty, and look good in a bathing suit, that sort of thing. Well, it is a beauty contest.

There’s even a term for the new woman CEO: sheEOs.

And this new embracing role in India won’t stop with just call centers or IT jobs. Business process analysis has moved, as is accounting, some medical analysis, and upcoming biotech work. As Chris Anderson at Wired writes:

Today’s Indian call centers, programming shops, and help desks are just the beginning. Tomorrow it will be financial analysis, research, design, graphics – potentially any job that does not require physical proximity. The American cubicle farm is the new textile mill, just another sunset industry.

Chris thinks this is a good thing, freeing American workers to take on new roles of innovation and enterprise, leaving the debugging work, and spreadsheet calculations to others. Leaving aside the implications to the people in India, in actuality, what is happening in the US is that there is an erosion of the middle class, with a few escaping into the rarified atmosphere of those who make it, the rest slipping down into an ever increasing number of lower paid Wal-mart workers, literally creating and then eating themselves by only making enough money working at Wal-Mart to shop at stores like Wal-Mart.

The conservative heros say, but moving jobs to cheaper places is good because more profits mean more jobs and more taxes in this country, or other Western countries. The liberal heros say, well we’ve had our time in the sun, now its time to share the wealth. And look at how much it improves the situation for women in countries like India? Both groups jump up on their steeds and race away from what they see in an inevitable fact of life, each knowing that they have done good.

Both groups couldn’t be more wrong, because both see the workers having to be the ones to adapt, to pay the price. To share the wealth.

Just as with Mexico, as prosperity increases the costs of outsourcing to India over time, the same jobs that fueled that economy will begin to, have begun to, drift to other countries promising yet more cheap labor. What happens when a country the size of India stakes its future on the outsourcing needs of other countries?

In another article in Wired, this was addressed specifically:

“Someday,” Janish says, “another nation will take business from India.” Perhaps China or the Philippines, which are already competing for IT work.

“When that happens, how will you respond?” I ask.

“I think you must have read Who Moved My Cheese?” Aparna says to my surprise.

Janish gets up from the couch, and to my still greater surprise, pulls a copy from the bookshelf.

Who Moved My Cheese? is, of course, one of the best-selling books of the past decade. It’s a simpleminded – and, yes, cheesy – parable about the inevitability of change. The book (booklet is more like it – the $20 hardcover is roughly the length of this article) is a fable about two mouselike critters, Hem and Haw, who live in a maze and love cheese. After years of finding their cheese in the same place every day, they arrive one morning to discover that it’s gone. Hem, feeling victimized, wants to wait until somebody puts the cheese back. Haw, anxious but realistic, wants to find new cheese. The moral: Be like Haw.

Janish gave Aparna a copy of the book for their wedding anniversary last year. (He inscribed it, “I am one cheese which won’t move.”) She read it on a Hexaware commuter bus one morning and calls it “superb.”

The lesson for Aparna was clear: The good times for Indian IT workers won’t last forever. And when those darker days arrive, “We should just keep moving with the times and not be cocooned in our little world. That’s the way life is.” Or as Haw more chirpily explains to his partner, “Sometimes, Hem, things change and they are never the same. This looks like one of those times. That’s life! Life moves on. And so should we.”

If you’re among the pissed off, such advice – especially coming from talking rodents chasing cheddar around a maze – may sound annoying. But it’s not entirely wrong. So if Hem and Haw make you hurl, return to where Aparna began when I met her that first day – the sacred text of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita, whose 700 verses many Indians know by heart.

The Gita opens with two armies facing each other across a field of battle. One of the warriors is Prince Arjuna, who discovers that his charioteer is the Hindu god Krishna. The book relates the dialog between the god and the warrior – about how to survive and, more important, how to live. One stanza seems apt in this moment of fear and discontent. “Your very nature will drive you to fight,” Lord Krishna tells Arjuna. “The only choice is what to fight against.”

How to survive. That is the question of the new century, isn’t it?

According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSC) in India, this won’t be a problem because by the year 2010, there will be a population shortage in the United States, leading to a shortfall of 5.6 million workers:

The National Association of Software and Services Companies, India’s premier IT lobby, said in a recent report about 1.3 million US jobs will move offshore between 2003 and 2010.

The US, it added, would face a domestic labor shortfall of approximately 5. 6 million workers by 2010 due to slow population growth and an aging population.

“If the labor shortfall is not met, the US economy will lose out on growth opportunities resulting in an estimated cumulative loss of two trillion dollars by 2010. Global sourcing in the form of immigration, temporary workers and offshoring can overcome this shortfall,” it said.

Not only the US – according to the reports the NASSC is putting out, every Western country, from the Italy to New Zealand, will also be suffering labor shortages. The impact will be felt elsewhere, too. China will be undergoing its own labor shortage by the year 2020

This leads me to a recent article that came out in Business Source today. In it, the author, Paran Balakrishnan, talks about how India looks towards the future and its role in the world:

It was a Nasscom executive who put the New World Order in perspective. Yes, he said, in the coming decades India will face competition in fields like software services and business process outsourcing (BPO).

But by 2020 we will be the only country in the world left with enough manpower to meet global needs. ‘We have a sustained competitive advantage to 2020 because of sheer demographics. In terms of working age population India will be the only people-surplus country,’ he said.
…
But consider the fact that by 2020 the even the world-beating Chinese will be facing the unimaginable – a tiny population shortage. That will impair their efforts to compete in fields like high technology where India has a competitive advantage currently.

Other reports support this assessment based on the average retirement age of the existing working force, but with a caveat: human behavior tends to have a habit of screwing of labor projections.

For instance, some tasks will be automated to increase the productivity of workers, as has happened with our own timber industry in this country. Additionally, many of those who have left the job force now due to unemployment can return to it, and many older Americans are choosing to work past the retirement age. Shortages in specific types of work, such as the current ones in education and the health care industry will be met by retraining existing work force members – as is happening now. In other words, people adapt to meet the demand.

And hopefully what happens is that traditionally low paying jobs like teaching and nursing get a much needed and deserved boost in pay scales. That is, unless there’s a source of disposable workers that can be tapped in order to deliberately keep wages down.

This leads to the another option, which Balakrishnan writes about:

For as long as anyone can remember the Government’s slogan has been: Hum do, hamare do (ed: One couple, two kids). Is it time to take a re-look at that slogan? Should we still be campaigning to persuade poorer people in this country to have fewer children?

Or, is it time to look at the entire issue once again in the light of what’s happening in other parts of the world. Once upon a time these might have seemed like futuristic problems for the next century. But now in 2004 we are well and truly into the next century and its problems are racing to catch up with us.

Should we still be campaigning to persuade poorer people in this country to have fewer children?

These are words to chill your soul if you were to hear them spoken in a country like the US, much less the most heavily populated country on Earth. My dear Reader, meet the Disposable Worker Class.

Round and round and round we go and where it stops, nobody knows. This game of musical workers doesn’t end with the workers; it ends with the people playing the music, and pulling out the chairs.

Rather than thinking of a ‘decreasing labor pool’, we should be looking more positively to a decreasing world population with less stress on the resources of a badly overextended planet. Where now a child is a commodity to plug into a factory, or the window of a drive-in McDonald’s, in the future a child should return to being a gift.

Share the wealth. Yeah.

Where employers – from work gangs to major corporations – now shift jobs, or workers, around at the whim of a dollar, they should be the ones made to share the wealth, not to strip it from the skin, and the dignity, of the workers.