#366 Principalities and Powers

I've written about the government and big business policy of scratching each others backs before here.  Thanks again to Wikileaks, and no thanks to the free press, we now know this:

"A Wikileaks post published on The Nation shows that the Obama Administration fought to keep Haitian wages at 31 cents an hour... It started when Haiti passed a law two years ago raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. According to an embassy cable:

This infuriated American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss that pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes. They said they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, and they got the State Department involved. The U.S. ambassador put pressure on Haiti’s president, who duly carved out a $3 a day minimum wage for textile companies (the U.S. minimum wage, which itself is very low, works out to $58 a day).

Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers. If you paid each of them $2 a day more, it would cost their employers $50,000 per working day, or about $12.5 million a year ... As of last year Hanes had 3,200 Haitians making t-shirts for it. Paying each of them two bucks a day more would cost it about $1.6 million a year. Hanesbrands Incorporated made $211 million on $4.3 billion in sales last year.

Thanks to U.S. intervention, the minimum was raised only to 31 cents."

Some questions.  Since when did the Clinton state department become a division of Hanes and Levi Strauss rather than a function of the executive branch of our democracy?  Was this intentionally hidden by the Obama administration?  If not, why does the media scarcely mention this story?  Is the media fresh out of journalists?  Why am I asking rhetorical questions?

I'm not sure exactly why Clinton/Obama felt beholden to the underwear industry but both U.S. and especially Haitian citizens can have answers if they choose to seek them.  This choosing to seek answers is probably what our founding fathers meant when they said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  Certainly, the Haitian president felt obligated to act as a vassal to Washington due to the American outpouring of support after the earthquake last year and surely the Clinton/Obama team took advantage of this fact.

Those are issues worth investigating for someone with skill in such things.  But this leak really got me thinking about something else.  (And isn't that the value of leaks, Wiki or otherwise, in a democracy?  To get people thinking.  Thinking is dangerous to a totalitarian state, but healthy to a democracy.)  It got me thinking about the undershirts I wear every day to work.  I probably pay somewhere around five dollars for a pack of five.  But do these shirts really cost a dollar?

The obvious answer is yes.  Consumers simply look at the price tag and the resulting debit to their own personal bank account to determine the cost of any product.  Their questioning stops there.  Economists look a bit further and include things like opportunity costs and some measurable negative externalities.  Their questioning stops there.  But ethicists (which I believe all Christians are called to be) go even further.  They ask about the human costs, the environmental costs, and the moral costs.  A Christian ethicist has to see the world with wider eyes.

In short, this ethic asks about the true cost of things, not to the self only, but and even primarily, about our neighbor, especially the least of these.  What does it truly cost to get a t-shirt for a mere dollar?  Thanks to Wikileaks, we're closer to that answer.  My ability to get a cheap t-shirts cost Haitian textile workers the difference between a 31 cent an hour wage and a 61 cent an hour wage.  If I doubled my wage like that, I'd go from the very comfortable lifestyle I lead now to what I and most of the world outside America would consider a luxurious lifestyle.  But all in all, not a big deal to me.  I currently have the necessities and then some.  The difference between what I make now and what I make doubled is not a life and death difference.  It is not the difference between having health insurance and not having it.  It is not the difference between feeding my children healthy foods and just getting them by.  It is not the difference between providing my children with a decent education and making them work at a young age instead.

But for Haitians, I'd imagine it is all of these things.  The Clinton/Obama team has pulled the rug out from under the lowest of the low.  And the weighty thought is this: my decision to purchase a one dollar t-shirt from Hanes costs far more than one dollar.  It is just that, until I widen my eyes, the one dollar portion of the cost is the only portion I'll ever notice.

Why did the Haitian president make the decision he did?  He is beholden to the state department of course, thanks to an earthquake.  Why did the state department exert the pressure they did on him?  It is beholden to a big business, thanks to backroom dealings.  Why did Hanes and Levi Strauss lobby in secret as they did?  They are beholden to me, the consumer, thanks to a purchase decision.  As eating is an agricultural act and voting an ethical act, so purchasing is a moral act.  I am the principalities and powers.

Anyway, the next time someone tells you how benevolent America is, know that even charity has a price.  It just doesn't get media play.  Oh, but remember, they hate us for our freedoms.

#365 From Wikipedia

Super-centenarian Leila Denmark, who I was a patient of on a couple occasions, is still alive and kickin' at the ripe old age of 113.  I'd already decided that the ultimate secret to health is to simply avoid added sugars.  Everything else, I believe, will fall into place.  But this confirms it:

"On her 100th birthday in 1998, she refused cake because there was too much sugar in it. On her 103rd birthday she refused birthday cake, telling the restaurant's server she had not had any food with sugar in it (other than natural sugar like fruit) in 70 years."

Inspiring, but challenging for me since my favorite man-made product of all time, Coca-Cola (which turned 125 this year) contains a large quantity of a sugar-like substance.

#364 Interesting Links XLII

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), which studies products for the health and environmental impacts much like Consumer Reports studies the quality and durability of products.  They do a lot of good work and they have just come out with their 2011 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce based on their own testing.  The result is a list of the "Clean 15" and the "Dirty Dozen".  The "Clean 15" are the produce types that were lowest in pesticides (the three most clean being onions, corn, and pineapples), and the "Dirty Dozen" which contained the most pesticides and which it would therefore be better to buy organic (the three "dirtiest" being apples, celery, and strawberries).  This is helpful for consumers concerned about their own health and the health of those they are feeding.  The deficiency of the report however, is that while it provides information about what amount of pesticides end up on produce at the supermarket shelves, it doesn't tell us which produce requires the most to produce.  After all, it could be the case that while corn has almost no pesticides once processing is complete, they could actually require an inordinate amount applied to the land to grow.  By the same token, apples may hold or bond pesticides more strongly and so they rank as "dirty", yet they may not actually have as many or as much applied to them.  Who knows?  And that's where the report is lacking.  It helps us make better health decisions, but not better environmental ones.

Adam Smith, though probably thinking about his own experience as a British citizen, explains 200 years in advance,  explains why America has such a thirst for perpetual war.

More maps!  This one is a map of crime in San Francisco.  Each map represents a different type of crime displayed topographically so that the part of the city where that crime is most frequent appears to have a higher elevation.

Andrew Sullivan asks if the creation of Israel was a mistake, to which I reply, of course!

The phrase "That's what she said" is ubiquitous.  There is an archival project underway so as to collect the occurrences of this gem for posterity.  Here is what is arguably the first ever recorded version of an archaic form of the phrase.

Cool video of an 8 month old deaf baby hearing for his first time ever after the activation of a cochlear implant.

Quote on the death of God: "It is ironic that some of the people who express the most shock that anyone would say God is dead are the very ones who have most insistently and most cold-bloodedly killed God off in some of the basic areas of their lives. To say that God doesn’t belong in certain areas of life is to say that God is dead in those areas, at least."

Dan Ariely attempts to make a list of the 7 habits of highly ineffective people.  I think I succeed (or is it fail?) on most of them.

How pro-life was our federal spending during the Bush administration?  The GAO runs the numbers.

Here is a fantastic graph clearly showing how our energy economy works.

#363 Washing Hands, Shaking Feet

Two examples of absolution.  Pilate washed his hands.  Paul and Barnabas shook their feet.

Judges wash their hands.  Prophets shake their feet.

When Pilate washed his hands, he acknowledged that there is moral culpability in condemning someone to death even while not being the executioner.

Acts is the story of the apostles literally fulfilling Jesus command to go from town to town, and if necessary, to shake the dust from their feet.

#362 On Food, Inc.

"Eating is an agricultural act." -- Wendell Berry

And by way of extension, an agricultural act is an ethical act.  I watched the documentary Food, Inc. not because I'm concerned with the personal health consequences of the food I eat, but rather with the agricultural, environmental, and moral consequences.

Food, Inc. begins with scary propagandesque music and informs us that the labels we see on our food is merely the "Spinning of this pastoral fantasy."  What you see is not what you get from the industrial farm to the supermarket.  There were several horrifying scenes in the film.  A few of them were surprising, but most of them are known but just not pondered.  If the documentary is proposing that we slaughter our own pigs, I have to say that I'm glad that horrific job is left to someone else.  But instead, what it is doing is confronting us with the fact that by eating mass produced pigs, or any other animal for that matter, we are participants in the inhumane slaughter.  See Berry quote above.

We watching live chicks rolling off a conveyor belt and down a shoot, pigs being shoveled along for a mass killing, and chickens who have been modified so that their bones and internal organs cannot keep up with their weight.  They are grown like plants: strictly for slaughter.  The filming inside the Purdue or Tyson chicken houses was disconcerting.  Local farmers were being pressured by their consumers down the supply chain not to allow Food, Inc. to film inside the chicken houses.

"Why can you get a hamburger for 99 cents but you can't even get a head of brocolli for 99 cents?"  One organic farmer's answer: "Industrial food is not priced honestly."  Industrial food does not take into account the full costs of its production.  This is in part due to subsidies, but also a result of negative externalities which are born by society.  This has consequences: 1 in 2 minorities will contract early onset diabetes.

As a society, we've outsourcing food production to corporate board rooms thousands of miles away from the land where people make decisions and don't live with the consequences of their decisions.  Money quote from the same organic farmer: "We have learned how to plant, fertilize and harvest corn using GPS technology and nobody sits back and asks, should we be feeding cows corn.  We've become a culture of technicians.  We're all into the how of it.  And nobody's stepping back and saying, 'But why?'"

The size of that corn-field flown over in the film was unfathomable.  If the Bible was made into a motion picture, this would be the scene they would choose for Isaiah 5:8: "Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land."  Was the size a special effect or real?  The creation and propagation of E. Coli.  There was a heart-breaking story of child's sudden death as a result of eating a hamburger on a family vacation.  E. coli is not just something that happens naturally.  As we learn in the film, cows allowed to graze and thus fed grass, as they always had been, will fend off E. coli, even an existing infection.  However, our nation feeds its cows unnaturally, with corn.

The revolving door between government and big agribusiness (particularly Monsanto) is disturbing.  Monsanto owning patents on 90% of soybeans is disturbing.  Monsanto running farmers out of business is disturbing.  Monsanto acting like the Russian Mafia is disturbing.

While the widespread viewing that this documentary is receiving largely due to word of mouth is encouraging, it's sad that another documentary which reveals a small bit of what's become of us since 9/11, Taxi to the Dark Side, is hardly viewed by anyone, despite its Oscar win.  Could it be in part that the narrative of Food draws the viewer in as a victim of a force outside themselves, i.e. agribusiness, while the narrative of Taxi suggests that we are all under indictment?  But as Berry's quote suggests, we're responsible for all of our actions, and that includes eating.

#361 The Lense of Politics

Every cultural happening seems to only matter for its impact on politics, specifically for how it affects the horse race.  The farmer with the big glasses in Food, Inc. had a memorable quote: "We have become a culture of technicians."  That is brilliant.  What he meant was that we ask a lot about what, but rarely do we ask about why.  We'll probably see this played out as the end of this latest E. Coli outbreak.  They will find the source and mitigate the problem which is actually just a symptom of the problem.  And then we'll move on.  No one will question how or whether our large-scale modern agricultural practices are contributing to these outbreaks.

This is the distinction Plato was making in his shorter dialogues between the sophist and the philosopher.  The sophist looks at everything through the lens of politics while the philosopher looks through the lense of the good, the just, and the true.  It is what Glen Greenwald would call the difference between the journalist and the royal court stenographer.

I remember being as dumbfounded as both the farmer and the philosopher about the media's coverage of Wikileaks.  Rather than address the substance of the revelations and questions they raised about good governance and corruption, the supposedly neutral media was more concerned about how it made America look.  They were purely interested in aesthetics.  For them, the world is a beauty paegent.

When anything substantive threatens to happen in this country, the media is quick to ask... not about that substance but rather, "Does this make the president look bad?"  An example from a major cable news network:  After an airstrike in one of the many countries we manage which killed nothing but children, a correspondent was asked for his thoughts.  His thoughts?  He cited it as an example of bad publicity for the U.S. and the president.

#360 DFW on Boredom

I've posted before here about the soul-destroying nature of my chosen career as expressed by a choice quote from the Peter Gibbons character in Office Space.  DFW makes essentially the same, if less comical point in his posthumous novel about life in an IRS field office.  One the characters, Lane Dean, tries to recite the Jesus prayer to combat the monotony but only finds despair:

"He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices."

He is equating my daily existence with hell.  I can't say I disagree.  As the reviewer who posted this quote here says, his Kenyon College speech turned this coin over to its hopeful side:

"But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things."  In the same speech he said, "The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

Completely incidentally, the reviewer who posted these passages quotes DFW as saying that he wanted to write a book in which "something big threatens to happen but doesn't actually happen."  Sounds like the movie Jarhead.