How American Power Works in Haiti
I’ve long been fascinated with how the American government exerts power on the ground. We focus on the big events for obvious reasons, but I think you can make a legitimate argument that the full force of American authority comes through behind the scenes.
An anecdotal example: A couple of years I ago I had dinner with a priest who was once the Franciscan representative to the United Nations. He had long experience in Bolivia and was friends with the Bolivian ambassador to the UN. According to priest, the Bolivian rep was in a meeting when news came out about Ariel Sharon’s provocation to the Palestinians that led to the Second Intifada. Instantly, UN delegates voted to condemn the action. That evening, this priest called up his friend’s office to give him support for his vote. But the Bolivian delegate had already been fired. The State Department had called Bolivian president and puppet of globalization Hugo Banzer (who had earlier that year privatized the Cochabamba water system and sold it to Bechtel, leading to massive protests that eventually helped bring Evo Morales to power in 2006) and ordered Banzer to get rid of him. The Bolivians complied immediately. Like within an hour.
This kind of behind the scenes power I’d argue causes, at least in aggregate, as much resentment toward the American government as giant screw ups like the Iraq War, the drone bombing of Afghani and Pakistani civilians, or awkward attempts to overthrow Hugo Chavez. But how this all goes down rarely comes to light.
Here’s an example in Haiti that came out in a Wikileaks cable. In 2009, the Haitian government passed an increase in the minimum wage, from 24 cents an hour to 61 cents an hour. US apparel companies flipped their lids. Many apparel companies have factories in Haiti and pay them nearly slave wages. These companies, including Haines and Levi-Strauss pressured the State Department. After the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti went and talked to the president, the Haitian government created an exception for American textile companies of a $3 a day minimum wage, which for an 8 hour day works out to something like 37 cents an hour.
2 major points about this. First, why would the United States do this? I know that one role of the American government is to facilitate good international business conditions for American companies. But does such a move promote stability in the Caribbean for the long term? When the Haitian earthquake took place, Americans poured millions in donations into the country. For an international story in an impoverished nation, the earthquake story stayed in the media for quite a long time. But if we want to help the Haitians, allow them to build a stable society, and bring them closer to something more than extreme poverty, why would the United States support decimating a 61 cent an hour minimum wage? Doesn’t that lead to more instability in the nation, more refugees fleeing to the United States and other nations, more international problems? Stupid, short-sighted, and immoral. Not that the apparel companies care about any of these things.
Second, even a lot of progressives seem to talk of globalization as this unstoppable trend with a self-powering propulsion engine pushing it forward ever faster. How can you put the genie back in the bottle, they say. There’s of course some truth to this. But neoliberal globalization is also a series of discrete decisions made by individuals, bureaucracies, organizations, and governments. The U.S. government could very easily tell the apparel companies that they will not use pressure to push down the minimum wage. It could enact policies to protect American workers. It could pressure corporations to enact decent labor and environmental policies when they do build a factory abroad. It could do any number of things to make the increasingly globalized world a better place.
Instead it forces Haitians into continued extreme poverty.
Lovely post. I disagree, however, on the Progressives and globalization. At least as I read the larger political geography of these United States, the theorist of inevitability are either full on Neo-conservatives or their fellow traveling Neo-liberals.
Well globalization has left once before, but that was really due to WW1 — it was the 1990s before global trade surpassed 1913.
and if a worker makes 10 shirts an hour, the extra cost per shirt is about half a cent compared to about 0.1 cents for the agreed upon rate for US textile companies. So they did it for 0.4 cents a shirt, some portion of which will turn into political contributions
One thing I noted is that that the exception that the American Textile companies got was for a daily rate instead of an hourly rate. So this gives the the Americans a direct incentive to have their employee work very long shift because the extra hours are “free.” If I understand the law, all work after hour 5 of the day is “free.”
Dr. Loomis, you mentioned that $3/day converts to 37.5 centers per hour for an 8 hour day. If the workers are made to work 12 hour shifts, then they’re getting paid 25 cents per hour which means that their pay effectively unchanged. If they work longer shifts than that, the Americans have managed to have a pay-cut legislated into existence.
I have no idea what hours clothing workers actually work in Haiti, but it’s an obvious exploit of the law that occurred to me in a few seconds thought. I’m sure that it and more alos occurred to the lobbyists who worked the changes to the minimum wage law.
I believe the law in Haiti specifies an 8 hour day with overtime paid for work in excess of 8 hours. Don’t know at all if that is enforced.
I agree with your thoughts, but do you know anyone who makes shirts? 10 an hour, not so much. Still that doesn’t change your meaning and final point.
I do not know anyone who makes shirts. 10 was just a nice round number
That’s cool. I commented because I actually suspect the sewers are on a piecework scale and not an hourly. That’s very common in the garment industry. And it’s really how you get people to work. Plus it provides a metric for the owners to select only thefastest workers. Since odds are the companies get paid by the order, piecework offers another neat way to increase profit at a price only to the workers.
I’m guessing that Levi Strauss told the government that if the law were applied to them in Haiti, they would move their factories out of Haiti and to another country where labor costs were cheaper. This isn’t the type of labor that can’t be done in other countries or that depends on the natural resources of the country in question. And that, as a result, Haiti would be less well off. Assuming they said that and assuming that the threat was real (the latter being a big assumption since it would be very heard to determine if they were bluffing), then the government’s rationale for pressuring Haiti would be that allowing the law to go into effect without an exception for Levi Strauss would lead to more poverty and more instability. I’m not justifying the decision (either of Levi Strauss or the US government) but that is likely the rationale and why the decision may not be stupid, short sighted and immoral
Well, that would be if Levi Strauss pressured the Haitian government to change the law. Then that would be their justification.
The justification for the US government exerting political pressure doesn’t exist. Why should the US government “protect” Haitian factories from being moved to Malaysia?
The fact that these companies used US lobbying to change the law suggests they had no sincere plans to pack up and move.
I don’t think that follows at all. Lets assume that Levi Strauss employs 3000 employees in Haiti and told the Haitian and US governments that it would move to Malysia or China if the law passed. Lets further assume that the US government believed the threat was real and that the loss of 3000 jobs would significantly impact the Haitian economy. And that based on that assumption about the effects on the Haitian economy, the US put pressure on Haiti to exempt Levi Strauss and other American economies and thus save jobs in Haiti. I don’t see how this scenario indicateds that the companies had no sincere plans to pack up and move. And the rationale for the US exerting political pressure would be to help the Haitian economy and also accede to the wishes of American companies who use the goods manufactured in Haiti to sell goods in the US. The US may have been sold a bill of goods by Levi Strauss and I’m not saying I agree with the US’ decision but characterizing it as stupid, short sighted and immoral is clearly hyperbole
Let’s assume your head is entirely up you ass. You total shit bag. What does that tell us?
Thank you for the well reasoned argument.
Right back atcha.
In Richard’s world, the Haitian government is completely incapable of passing its own laws for the benefit of its own people. It needs the wise beneficent US government to advise it that its actions are hurtful to its own people and to pressure it to change those actions.
Certainly, Richard would believe similarly if China suddenly refused to trade with the US unless we repealed our pesky First Amendment, which, based on Richard’s comment alone, is clearly not in our best interest.
Look at my argument again. I’m not saying that what the US did was right. I actually think that we should not have pressured Haiti to amend its law. If it maade a mistake in assessing what is in its own economic interest, it has a right to do that as a sovereign nation. And I think that Haiti was probably in a better position to determine if Levi Strauss was bluffing. But I think characterizing what the US did as stupid and short sighted certainly implies that there could be no reason for its actions other than to further impoverish the Haitian people and that I don’t believe is the case.
But I think characterizing what the US did as stupid and short sighted certainly implies that there could be no reason for its actions other than to further impoverish the Haitian people and that I don’t believe is the case.
Of course it was not the only reason, or even the primary one. the primary reason was to further enrich the non-US subsidiary of a US company, which will probably never repatriate any taxable profits and pay US taxes.
Characterizing what the US did as “stupid and shortsighted” does not in any sense imply that the only reason for US action was to further impoverish Haiti. It doesn’t even imply that even part of the reason was to further impoverish Haiti.
At most, it implies that the US is indifferent or deluded about the poverty of the Hatian people and their democratic processes to the point that the US is willing to disregard those issues when a major US company asks it to do so.
The idea that the US’ actions in this case were undertaken, even in part, to improve the well being of Haiti is both hopelessly naive and extraordinarily arrogant.
I am trying very hard not to play the race card, but I have a really hard time imagining that anyone would think this way if the US was dictating the laws of a first world country at the behest of US corproations.
Well, it has done that a lot with bilateral ‘free trade’ agreements in relation to intellectual property laws. Australia’s copyright system has been pretty much overhauled to suit the Disney Corporation, with serious effects on Australian publishing, scholarship and etc.
The US government interferes in all sorts of countries, first or third world doesn’t really matter.
Right. But no one ever suggests that the US is intervening in the Australian copyright system out of a desire to help Australia. We all recognize such US action as pure economic self interest.
Only when the US acts the same way in the third world does bullshit about helping the poor impoverished people get trotted out as justification.
Not to the same extent, I agree. But all the rhetoric about ‘free trade’ that was put about by our lapdog government, and the way the Australian (Murdoch) press carried on about historic agreements, and our great and powerful friend implied it. Maybe not at your end, but certainly at ours.
In Richard’s world, the Haitian government is completely incapable of passing its own laws for the benefit of its own people. It needs the wise beneficent US government to advise it that its actions are hurtful to its own people and to pressure it to change those actions.
Well, Anonymous, it’s the standard “Blame America First”, even if you have your own government and can pass these laws.
even if you have your own government and
can pass these lawsspent twenty percent of the last century occupied by American troops because you were not quite friendly enough to American corporations.Fixed to correct for the appalling ignorance regarding actual events in the real world.
Well there you go, mindlessly blaming America for stuff America actually did.
Now, now, you’ll sound like Hugo Chavez and upset Professor Farley if you keep bringing up the US military’s history in Haiti like that.
I have to say in their defense, that it is rather a step up from the days when the US routinely invaded Latina American countries for the benefit of United Fruit and others. That said, our policies remain short sighted, reprehensible, and morally bankrupt.
It’s all about the soft bigotry of lowered expectations!
It is still “stupid, short sighted and immoral”. The US government has a policy of accepting imports untaxed regardless of how poorly the labor is paid. The government could just as easily say to Haynes and other companies “You must pay workers a minimum wage of $x per hour or face tariffs.”
What are Levi and Haynes going to do, abandon the US market because they can’t pay workers less than $2 an hour?
What are Levi and Haynes going to do, abandon the US market because they can’t pay workers less than $2 an hour?
No, they will simply donate large sums of money to candidates who know how to say “Smoot-Hawley!” “Protectionism!” “Higher prices because of government red tape!”. Even economists as far “left” as Krugman and DeLong will agree with them.
So we can add “spineless” to the list of charges? ;)
Seriously, I get that argument a lot. There is no distinction made between “Enforcing minimum wage competition on imports” with “Punitive fees to restrict competition on quality and features”.
Then again, we live in a time where there’s no distinction between a democratically regulated market economy and STALINISM!!1!
They wouldn’t be abandoning the US market. Levi Strauss is not manufacturing shirts in Haiti to sell to the Haitian market. They are using Haiti as a manufacturing site for shirts to sell to the US market. If they move to China or Malaysia, they would still sell the goods to the US (just like when they initially moved manufacturing sites off shore they weren’t abandoning the US market). But I’m not justifying the Levi decision. It seems they could easily have absorbed the wage increase with little or no competitive disadvantage.
Right. But what I’m saying is that the REASON they can move to any other company is because of US trade policy, which is dictated by the government. Instead of changing trade policy to prevent this predatory behavior, they proceed to enforce it.
I assume you are in favor of fairly strict portectionism (punitive tariffs against goods or countries without strong laws protecting workers) which I think is a failed policy and doesn’t produce the results which you believe it will. But that argument is for another day.
Let me dissaciate myself from any of the comments of the troll .NormThomas. Those are not the arguments I am making.
I’m Psychic.
I’m talking about equalizing tariffs, not punitive ones. To my knowledge, that sort of policy has not yet been tried.
And no, I am not associating you with Normy in any way.
The US government has a policy of accepting imports untaxed regardless of how poorly the labor is paid.
Errr….that’s because these people are not US citizens and as such do not enjoy (nor should they enjoy) the advocacy of the US. They have their own government to advocate.
Irrelevant. The reason for a federal minimum wage is to prevent companies in one state from holding jobs ransom for lower wage demands. If minimum wage protections stop at the borders but trade doesn’t, the companies simply move to Mexico instead of Delaware.
Enforcing a minimum wage-based tariff would keep US citizens from being out-competed by the desperate poor in other countries, standardize prices through market pressure around living wages, while still allowing for international trade of goods and services. This policy would be good for America, but in a way that also helps people around the world.
But since you can’t your jollies from the suffering of foreigners that way, I don’t expect you to listen.
Enforcing a minimum wage-based tariff…
For starters, what others pay their workers is simply none of our business. these are sovereign nations.
You somehow belive that you can squeeze the balloon on one end and not have something happen on the other end.
Economics is not just a good idea..it’s the LAW
:rolleyes:
Absolutely. Right up to the point where the goods and services go on sale in America. Then it’s taxed to match the difference between the foreign wage wage and federal minimum wage.
You want access to market prices made possible by the income generated by wage standards? Then you pay to play.
“For starters, what others pay their workers is simply none of our business. these are sovereign nations”
so why did we interfere with Haiti’s minimum wage law?
so why did we interfere with Haiti’s minimum wage law?
That would leave a mark, if Normy were clever enough to understand.
A better troll would have made this vacuous point in far fewer words; keep practicing.
I don’t see how richard is trolling. There’s a natural human tendency when you hear something this horrible that you want to rationalize it so that it’s less horrible. The idea that the US government just does the bidding of individual companies, no matter the human cost, is so awful that I can understand the impulse to explain it away as misguided.
I dont think dangermous is accusing me of trolling (at least I hope he isn’t). I think he is referring to .NormThomas.
I do believe you are correct.
Sorry, I’ve trained my mind so that I’m no longer able to see anything posted by that pseudonym or any of its variants.
That is a truly sad story. Of course, it doesn’t make sense for the US government to pressure Haiti into accepting policy that ensures desperate poverty, but you are looking at it in a collective sense. For the politicians accepting bribes from lobbyists and for the companies represented by those lobbyists, it is a net win.
“This kind of behind the scenes power I’d argue causes, at least in aggregate, as much resentment toward the American government as giant screw ups…”
Only if it nets out in the negative. Positively received uses of American power are equally unlikely to make headlines. Indeed, some of the ongoing efforts that we all ‘know’ about, such as the Peace Corps, are almost never in the news yet have an aggregate effect as well.
Damage caused is still damage, regardless of whether or not it is ultimately made up for by our positive efforts. The work of the peace corps, by your own terms, would certainly net out to be much more positive if it weren’t undercut by backroom power plays like this one.
And the positive work of things like the Peace Corps is undermined by the perception that given the overall direction of US policy, any positive aspects are probably window-dressing, or worse, spying under the cover of philanthropy. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that the Sydney American Studies institute is a spy-recruiting outfit I’d be a rich woman. I don’t think it is. Probably. But given the history of CIA funding of right wing Australian ‘policy’ organisations, it remains plausible.
Fair enough, mouse and Emma. Reading the post, I was struck by the apparent assumption that any use of American power is, in and of itself, negative. I wanted to put in a small counterweight.
“…a priest who was once the Franciscan representative to the United Nations.”
How did this come about?
Accredited NGO?
“How many divisions has the Pope?”
Not to be flippant, but replacing other countries’ leaders through coups(Haiti), assassination(Chile), and intimidation(remittance law in Nicaragua), also tends to make people resentful of your country.
The implementation of capitalist slash and burn in the US is opening people’s eyes here as well. The financial emergency powers in Michigan, the union-busting in Wisconsin, and the dozens of austerity bills working their ways through the states are leading to the same type of anger at the global hierarchy here.
I remember reading the argument that the world wars of the 20th century took destructive capabilities that had been developed in the colonies and returned them to Europe. This seems analogous – the radical plutocratic policies tested out in the developing world are being attempted on Americans.
I remember reading the argument that the world wars of the 20th century took destructive capabilities that had been developed in the colonies and returned them to Europe.
Trench warfare, barbed wire, aerial bombardment, “strategic bombing”, machine guns, armoured warfare, mass conscription, nuclear warfare, naval blockade, explosive artillery shells: none of these were developed or first employed in the colonies.
The argument, most recently seen in I. Hull’s Absolute Destruction, has to do with the total war, or genocidal warfare, waged in colonies by colonial powers with that attitude of mind, kill the brutes, playing a key role in the soldier on civilian violence in WWI at least. Obviously, as air power developed bombs were, in fact, dropped by colonizers. I can’t find the reference but I recall that the Brits dropped bombs on one or another of the religiously inspired anti-colonial uprising. As well, American Gen Sheridan used the tactics of total war, starvation, slaughter, and etc, during America’s westward expansion and so forth. The fact that the machine gun was invented during the Civil war suggest, at the very least, that it was, in fact, used during “pacification” of recalcitrant natives.
are you sure. trench warfare, naval blockades, explosive artillery shells, aerial bombardment, armoured warfare (at sea) and machine guns were parts of the American Civil War, although they could have been developed and used before this. Nuclear weapons and barbed wire were certainly not a European invention or used by them first. Well the use of barbed wire in war maybe was
Which leaves mass conscription and strategic bombardment
Mass conscription was also part of the American Civil War. Cf. the New York Draft Riots.
According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) barbed wire was first used in the Spanish American war and the Boer War, so in the colonies. Though against white Europeans, mostly, so hard to tag with colonialism.
Sure, I was just thinking it started well earlier than that — perhaps as early as Persian Empire
Also, the Boer War had machine guns, Concentration Camps, trenches, and related etc.
Levee en masse was first a feature of the French Revolutionary wars.
Pretty sure.
Trench warfare is as old as projectile weapons: digging a sap and hiding in it. Trench warfare outside the context of a siege – first seen in the US civil war. Not the colonies.
Naval blockades – also a very old tactic, not one developed or first used in colonial warfare. First use as a deliberate tactic of starvation against an island nation enemy: WW1. Not the colonies.
Explosive artillery shells – used in mediaeval warfare in Europe and around the same time in Ming China. Not the colonies.
Armoured warfare at sea – as you say, US civil war, and before that in the Crimea – not the colonies.
On land – obviously, tanks were first used the First World War, on the Western Front – not in the colonies.
Machine guns – first used occasionally in the US civil war, more often in the Franco-Prussian war – not in the colonies.
Nuclear weapons: first used against Japan, not the colonies.
Aerial bombardment of civilians: Balkan War, which was of course in Europe; 1914 Mexican revolution, not a colonial war; and German attacks on British towns in 1915.
Mass conscription: in the modern sense, that’s the levee en masse of Napoleonic France.
Barbed wire – OK, maybe that was first used in colonial war.
Camouflaged uniforms? Rifle Brigade in the Peninsula. Not a colonial war.
Deliberate mass slaughter and depopulation? Also a very old tactic of war; also not an innovation of colonial war.
All the “destructive capabilities” employed in the World Wars were developed either specifically for those wars or for previous non-colonial wars. Which is really what you should expect anyway.
“First use as a deliberate tactic of starvation against an island nation enemy: WW1″
Syracuse blockaded by Charthage?
ps
As a general point, I’m not even saying you are wrong
There is a big difference between “first use of X” and “first time x was a common feature of the time”
One quibble: Trench warfare outside of a siege was exceedingly common in the Roman world. See Actium and Pharsalos and Crassus vs Spartacus. Not to mention one of the greatest generals in world history who no one has heard of Belisaurius outside of Darra against the Persians
“none of these were developed or first employed in the colonies”
Trench warfare – true but then again, the Zulu didn’t have their own artillery
barbed wire – sparkly used in US Civil war, heavily used in colonial wars, notably the Boer war and by Spain in Cuba
aerial bombardment – first used by the Italians in 1912 in north Africa
“strategic bombing” – define please, if you mean terror bombing of civilian targets see above, if you mean destroying enemy factories, then true but then again, the Henero didn’t have any factories
machine guns – “Whatever happens, we have got: The Maxim gun, and they have not”
armoured warfare – Tanks your right, Armoured trains not so much
mass conscription – ok,
nuclear warfare – you got me on that one
naval blockade – goes back thousands of years, not a 20th century thing
explosive artillery shells – Omdurman
then again, the Zulu didn’t have their own artillery
No, but the Sikhs, the Marathas, the Sindhis, the Pathans, the Bengalis, the Chinese, the Egyptians and the Abyssinians sure as hell did.
first used by the Italians in 1912 in north Africa
Or not, as it actually turns out.
machine guns – “Whatever happens, we have got: The Maxim gun, and they have not”
explosive artillery shells – Omdurman
That’s not really an argument.
“Or not, as it actually turns out”
Was it 1911? so sue me
“That’s not really an argument.”
ok, fair enough
Late 19th century Britian was a late adopter of advances in artillery technology
When they finally switched to modern quick-firing BL’s with exploding shells they gave poor preformance in Egypt (shells buring in the soft sand b4 going off)
but at Omdurman, the “Fuzzy Wuzzies” got ripped to pieces by HE long b4 they got into range of the rifle fire of the “The Mad Miniute”
“Whatever happens, we have got: The Maxim gun, and they have not”
opps sorry
you claim that machine guns were not developed in colonial warfare
I would say that the fact that there is a well known school boy diddy about C Rhodes containing a reference to MGs is an argument
Actually I think that the Italians invented aerial warfare in Lybia in 1911.
Marines in Nicaragua in the 1930s, check it out.
Césaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, has a famous passage in which he says:
Orwell in 1939:
What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so. One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita annual income in England is something over £80, and in India about £7. It is quite common for an Indian coolie’s leg to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arm. And there is nothing racial in this, for well-fed members of the same races are of normal physique; it is due to simple starvation. This is the system which we all live on and which we denounce when there seems to be no danger of its being altered.
Famous, but wrong. Honestly, his argument is that no European nation had ever been brutally occupied, humiliated and colonised before Hitler? That’s just amazing. How on earth did that get past an editor?
He’s talking about people’s attitudes toward Hitler at the time and after. So I don’t think the 30 Years War matters to the argument.
I think he’s saying that there was a Europeon consensus that you only perform genocide against brown people, but Hitler did it against white people, which forced Europeons to think about what they had recently done to the rest of the world.
I tend to the think the first part is right and the second part is wrong.
But you don’t even have to go back as far as the Thirty Years’ War. You just have to have some vague knowledge of recent European history to know that he’s talking nonsense. This supposed consensus against genocide had been most recently broken less than twenty years before Hitler came to power for heaven’s sake.
Furthermore, he isn’t talking about genocide, or anyway not exclusively; he’s talking about “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa”.
‘Reserved exclusively’ is plain nonsense.
Clearly the world would have been a better place had “ajay” been allowed to edit Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism.
The argument from authority is listed under “fallacies” for a reason, John.
If you would have said “hmm, my reading of the relation of colonialism and European history seems to clash with that of a true giant of the 20th century, author of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, co-originator of the Négritude movement with Senghor, teacher and mentor to Frantz Fanon, etc. So maybe I should ask some questions of the LGM community to see what’s going on about this apparent discrepancy,” instead of what you did say, then you wouldn’t get snarked at. A little poltico-espistemic modesty never hurt anyone did it?
Were the Armenians considered “European”?
Well, since they lived in Asia, and always had, that would be a bit of a stretch, no?
Well, I’m assuming they are the genocide to which Ajay had referred. And it is a bit more ambiguous than you seem to imply.
P.s. try Mazower’s Dark Continent for an effort to work these arguments through at a level beyond flippant repartee.
And his Hitler’s Empire, in particular.
Thanks, I will check them out.
I think that many historians would disagree with the idea that Hitler was the first European attempt to wage a genocidal effort against Jews and Roma. He might have been the most systematic at it but he wasn’t the first to attempt it. Many would also debate whether Jews or Roma were seen as being white by those that killed them.
I think there’s a strong case to be made that the United States is expanding the scope of the internal colonization policies (particularly as to economic exploitation) already tried on Appalachian whites and African Americans and Latinos nationwide.
I think this was more or less the point of Naomi Wolfe’s “The Shock Doctrine”. I didn’t get very far into the book. It got depressing, life intervened and I decided to read some SF to feel better.
I think you mean Naomi Klein.
I’m trying to imagine ‘the shock doctrine’ written by Naomi Wolfe.
It’s cheering me up immensely.
I’d also seen the Wikileak leak[?]. I would guess I wouldn’t feel so bad about it if we used our government power, not for good, but just to help the average American citizen as opposed to the corporation citizens only.
Does that make me a hypocrit?
Why would the United States not do this?
You assume the goal is to help Haiti, and the action taken represents a stupid mistake.
I assume the U.S. Government is entirely about promoting the interests of U.S. corporations at the expense of everyone else. Intervening to keep Haitian wages down wasn’t a mistake, it was precisely what the corporations needed. Not baffling at all, or even out of the ordinary.
Yeah. Slavery is a feature not a bug.
The choice is basically do what we say and you can live very comfortably with hundreds of millions of dollars, the promise of US military protection of your family and assets, etc. Or do right by your people and the US will empower the elements of your society that will gladly accept the first proposition.
This is not coincidentally the same choice offered to the President and Congress.
Agree
Excellent post, Erik. On the globalization issue, interested parties should check out both Frederick Cooper’s “What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perpective” (African Affairs 2001), which provides a critique of the inevitability thesis historically, and Laura Briggs, et. al. “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis” (American Quarterly, 2008), which seeks to get beyond thinking of globalization in terms of good vs. evil. If one answer to global corporate imperialism is attempting to force the corporatations back into a national frame where they can be regulated (as you suggest), another is to embrace a strategy of globalized anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist resistance and organization.
Ya’ know…for all of the whining about how all of this is the fault of the US, don’tcha think it would be a good idea to teach a person to fish rather than be constantly dependent on others?
Move industry to Haiti. Let them make market wages, big or small. More companies mean competition for those workers and the wages improve.
Norm!
You’re right. It’s a great idea to teach American-based corporations not to be dependent on the American state when it comes to negotiating with foreign states. Indeed, it would have been even better if, as some one or another used to croon, if when those corporations ran into difficulties with foreign states not to send the Marines.
That’s what you meant, right?
That’s the absolute worst strawman I have ever seen.
Try to do better.
Really? How so? I mean, after all, if the straw man is so obvious you could use examples and argument to expose the badly-stuffed sweated-labor tee-shirts and dungarees.
As we know the American state has, in fact, intervened militarily in the interest of business again and again and again when foreign states threatened profits and/or ownership. Whether it was bananas, sugar, oil, or, as the above post makes clear, clothing. If Levi Strauss or whomever doesn’t need the state department or the marines to defend their interests how come they depend on the US state or the Marines to defend their interests?
“don’tcha think it would be a good idea to teach a person to fish …”
Start a man a fire and he’ll be warm for the night
Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life
Well done, sir.
Feed a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Feed a fish a man and he’ll eat for weeks.
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day.
Give a man a rifle to shoot the rich guy who claims to own the fishing grounds, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.
DNFTT.
not mine, it’s Pterry Pratchet’s
Dear Norm, that ain’t how it works on the ground, honey. The typical thing is to find a Somoza, kill a Sandino, and hire a National Guardia which will shoot anyone uppity enough to protest.
Somoza was in partnership with most American firms operating in Nicaragua during his regimes. This is a fairly typical pattern, as is murdering people who don’t agree to play ball with US corporations.
Move industry to Haiti.
There is industry in Haiti. That is, in fact, the subject of the post.
Sweet Bleeding Jesus.
Back to not feeding you.
Your comprehension is off. I indicated that they needed MORE by moving industry (goober).
Please try to keep up.
So much projection, so little actual knowledge.
I recently viewed a Canadian television series named “Intelligence”, now on Netflix streaming video, about Canada and it’s problems with being overwhelmed by America. Americans had infiltrated their government, American corporations were overpowering Canadian corporatons, the CIA and U.S. State department were acting in concert with large American corporations to further American interests at the cost of Canada. There was even a subplot about a meeting between American, Mexican, and American fronted Canadian companies with the goal of selling Canadian water to Mexico — which turned out to be based on a true story.
Anyhow, it was interesting to learn how a popular Canadian show viewed its neighbor to the south — and also interesting to find the show was canceled not because of ratings, but because of pressure from the new conservative Canadian government allegedly with some pressure from the U.S. The show was an ironic portent of its own demise.
For a better understanding:
1. http://www.haiti-info.com/?Aristide-s-American-Profiteers
2. http://solutionshaiti.blogspot.com/2007/02/wall-street-journal-haiti-file.html
How the heck did you get 2 links in 1 post!
I’m really enjoying “.NormThomas–”
Great post! (And let me note that one of its virtues is its utter lack of handwringing over Wikileaks, which hasn’t always been the case around here.)
Anyone wanna see Brad Potts aka BKP aka Brad P. in a mermaid tshirt????
http://www.shareapic.net/content.php?id=25095902&owner=MrsPotts see it here!
An anecdote (it’s about a somewhat different kind of abuse but I think also helps explain why the US is not always well-liked): I used to live in a Latin American country. A friend of mine worked for the national airline. As a perk, she got a couple of free plane trips a year. She arranged for a trip to the States. Then came getting the tourist visa. She had to gather up a huge number of documents: proof of employment and income, bank statements and many others. Like many, maybe most, unmarried young women in Latin America, she lived with her parents, and so was able to save quite a lot of her salary. The American embassy official in charge of tourist visas (denying them, for the most part), looked through her documentation, and said, “You don’t earn enough to have this much money in the bank. Who are you sleeping with?”
[...] and on “normativity”: It comes to queer theory through Foucault by way of Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological. Its importance to me and Michael Warner was to think not just about the statistical norm or the moral/conventional norm but the practices on which conventional modes of social intelligibility rest that become naturalized and moralized. Judith Butler calls them regulative norms. They govern by standing for common sense, by providing a tacit or seemingly foundational sense of scale and appropriateness for collective life. We wanted to call the regime of sexuality under which we currently live heteronormativity rather than heterosexuality, in “Sex in Public,” because the point wasn’t to attack people with a particular pattern of object choice but the whole social regime propped on that pattern, which saturates the fantasy of the good life so thoroughly and in so many domains of social existence that its very robustness seemed to atrophy the skills for imagining alternative social and economic relations and institutions of intimacy, let alone what it means when we identify with any pattern of desire. In those days, as now, people tended to see sexuality as cordoned off from the infrastructure of nationality and capitalism; they tended to see its appearance in those contexts as a scandal rather than as a revelation of an ongoing situation. Suturing normativity to heterosexuality was an attempt to remedy that, as well as an attempt to continue integrating radical political critique with a sex positivity that was not pastoral, that did not subtract the dangerousness and strangeness of sex. Erik Loomis on how American power works in Haiti. [...]