Gup Shup

In a recent edition of the New York Times, op-ed contributor John Tierney suggested that, since Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts toward eradicating poverty, Walmart should also be put in the running for the award. He argues that no company has brought more people out of poverty than Walmart, and that Walmart should therefore be rewarded for their efforts (I’m not kidding). One laughs or cries according to one’s temperament, I suppose, but one wonders how even the New York Times could bring itself to allow such junk to be published within its pages.

To even hint at an analogy between Grameen Bank and Walmart indicates either that one is so simple-minded that one fails to see the world beyond pure dollars and cents or that one is a vile propagandist. Whichever of these Mr. Tierny happens to be, he seems to be fulfilling his role rather dutifully, apprarently unaware that his servitude to big business betrays his self-proclaimed libertarian perspective.

The Grameen Bank is not appreciated solely for its having lifted people out of poverty, but also for the way in which it has done so (and continues to do so). Explicit is a trust and faith in human skill, not just the skills of those educated in fancy Ivy League colleges but the inherent ability and desire of all humans to better their own lives once the shackles that constrict them are removed. This is indicated in the way it does business: the bank is mostly owned by the borroweres (around 94% ownership), the borrowers are covered under life insurance free of charge, loans are interest-free, with no strict time limits on repayment. There is, furthermore, an empowerment of traditionally neglected groups, such as women, who make up the vast majority (nearly all) of the borrowers. The goal is not just to raise the purchasing power of the poor, but to raise their living standards and quality of life rather broadly, with economic enrichment playing but one role within a broader context of empowerment of the downtrodden. The experiment has, of course, been largely successful, and the explicit trust in the ability of the poor to overcome their poverty and to live lives of self-worth and dignity has paid off. In fact, the loan recovery rate has been nearly perfect.

Whatever one thinks of the microcredit approach to finance, to even suggest a connection between this approach and Walmart’s approach to lifting people out of poverty is to discredit one’s writings as mere gibberish. The relationship between Walmart and its employees is not one of empowerment, but rather one of parasitism. Walmart exploits its workers to the fullest extent possible, it doesn’t offer free insurance of any kind, it does not aim to raise the living standards of its employers, it does not transfer ownership to the workers, it does not utilize or enhance its workers’ natural talents and abilities within the context of their labour.  Rather, it turns them into clogs in a machine, explicitly minimizing their inherent talents and just as explicitly aiming to make those on top as rich as possible. Furthermore, there is no prospect of the workers taking full control over the long-term betterment of their lives. We can go on indefinitely, but there would be no point. It is obvious to anyone with even the tiniest appreciation for the complexity of the human condition that Mr. Tierney’s suggestion is about as absurd as one will find in reasoned discourse. Another example of how you can count on elite institutions and Ivy League education to produce the most uncritical and conformist of thinkers.

This past Monday marked World Food Day and the beginning of Anti-Poverty Week. A Guiness World Record was established for the most people standing up against poverty in a single day, with about 25 million people taking part in events worldwide to voice their support for ending the debilitating poverty facing so many across the globe. It has long been known that hunger need not exist. There is more than enough food to feed everyone. Hunger exists because of social policies, not laws of physics. More than six million children a year die of hunger, according to Action Against Hunger. Further, only a handful of big businesses control the global pesticide market, one quarter of all food produced worldwide, and one quarter of all food sales. Small farmer get nothing, not in the North, and certainly not in the South.

The public is more or less universally opposed to the existence of such conditions, as polls and other measures indicate. Such conditions are not basic features of the universe, like gravity, or protein folding. Policies dictate the living conditions of us all. And by any measure, current policies are unfair, in fact criminal.

I believe one reason why such conditions are allowed to continue to exist is that the media continue to remain silent on these issues. It should be front page news, day in and day out, that our economic policies are directly causing worldwide malnutrition, illness, premature death, loss of dignity. If people were exposed to such information, in addition to the media actually informing the public that their government’s policies are not “lifting people out of poverty” but driving them into extreme poverty, as the media would in a real democracy, then there can be no doubt that citizens would not stand for it.

Michael Ignatieff is emerging as the front-runner for the leadership of the federal Liberal party in Canada. If selected as the leader in about two months time, it will continue the Liberals’ shift from a largely centrist position to one solidly right of centre. Ignatieff is well-known for his alignment with power centres. One example is in his approach to international relations, essentially amounting to nothing more than apologetics for Western war crimes. For example, he claims to have (unquestioningly) supported the invasion of Iraq for his concerns over Saddam Hussein’s atrocities. Since he no doubt knows that Saddam was supported throughout by the West, he’s either a hypocrite or a liar for not pointing those facts out, and for not condemning those who supported such atrocities. Crimes supported by or committed by the West remain off his radar and are wholly absent in his speech.

Another example is his stance on climate change, effectively a rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and an endorsement of “market-oriented” proposals advanced by the C.D. Howe Institute, a conservative Toronto-based think tank funded in large part by large corporations. The stance goes against broad scientific consensus, and the political will of the international community and the vast majority of Canadians, not to mention the fact that Canada has signed and ratified the treaty. But for Ignatieff, legally binding agreements are of no substance, as each of the above two examples illustrate.

We can go on, but I will not do so here. Suffice it that he stands far to the right of the Canadian public, essentially aligning himself with power centres. As he’s pointed out himself, as leader of the Liberals, we would be “well past the era of Pearsonian peacekeeping.” This approach, which earned Canada broad international respect and earned it a well-established reputation as an honest broker, would be replaced by a cost-benefit analysis style approach to human rights, of the kind one runs when buying tomatoes or deciding what to wear to a party. And it would remain hypocritical and unreflective throughout. The political climate would thus result in one very much like what is found in the U.S. — two major parties, both far to the right of the public, both functioning more or less as wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate world, leaving very little real choice for voters. With the large propaganda campaigns against the NDP, and with support for the Bloc Quebecois largely confined to Quebec, most Canadians would be left to choose between the Right and the extreme Right. Not much of a democracy there, continuing a twenty year trend in Canadian politics.  

Last night I was having dinner with some of my mates (Ali, Ben, Jabra, Igor, Federico), and the topic of racial discrmination came up. The coloured folk noted that they had all been subject to discrimination of various sorts (my most drastic recent encounters were being called “bin Laden” by some drunk imbecile in Buffalo, and being called a terrorist by an older woman here in Cambridge, both unprovoked). It goes without saying that discrimination can take on all shades, and there was no shortage of stories to be told. One thing we all agreed on was that African Americans still get it worse than just about any other racial subgroup, at least here in the United States.

Of course, the concept of race itself is not a natural kind. Here, I follow Ian Hacking’s masterly discussion of race in a recent edition of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and use race as a “useful” term for this discussion, without importing any statistical significance, meaningfulness, or ontological status as a natural Kind to the term.

Assuming it, what of racial discrimination? Anyone who pays any attention to facts knows that it’s still very much a real everyday concern, and is not at all a thing of the past. In his “Development as Freedom,” Amartya Sen discusses the horrendous statistic that African Americans have an absolutely lower chance of reaching mature ages than do people of many third world societies, including such economic powerhouses as Sri Lanka, Jamaica, and Costa Rica. Sen points to causal factors including medical coverage, public health care, and education, inter alia. There are also disparities among African Americans within the United States itself. For instance, Bangladeshi men have a greater chance of survival to mature ages than do African American men in Harlem, N.Y. Crucially, there is a sense in which African Americans are wealthier than those in these developing societies, and yet face a kind of deprivation due to the poor social arrangements in this nation.

Such facts are (should be) nothing short of scandalous. Americans are more likely to die from lack of access to health care than from terror attacks, for instance, but one wouldn’t know that from reading the NY Times. Such facts are not newsworthy, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans consider health care as one of the most important issues facing the nation.  Moreover, the overwhelming majority support a single-payer, universal health care system, such as that found in Canada, Australia, parts of Western Europe, etc. Such systems are more efficient both in terms of financial cost-benefit analyses, and in terms of lives saved, since the bottom line is human well-being, not how fat your wallet can become. This lack of access attacks the poor generally, but disproportionately hits coloured folk.

A recent study produced by the M.I.T. Poverty Action Lab by economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan showed that firms in Boston and Chicago absolutely disciminated against resumes designed to look like they were from African Americans as opposed to Caucasians. This paper, full of quite telling facts, can be found here: http://www.povertyactionlab.com/papers/bertrand_mullainathan.pdf. In a decent society, such obscene obstacles facing so many African Americans would be front-page news, allowing the public to know about it, to scrutinize it, and to eradicate its filthy existence.

Unfortunately, that task faces yet another obstacle, namely, the intellectual class. The success of intellectuals and news media to ignore these serious issues is quite extraordinary. It takes a fair amount of either blindness, or subordination to centres of power, or both, to suppress these facts from public discussion. This is not an issue of “political correctness,” as propagandists are wont to assert. Rather, the issue cuts into the heart of American democracy, and to issues of justice, equality, rights, and socio-economic well-being.

Of course, the NY Times (for example) occasionally writes on issues that address the concerns of the vast majoirty of the public, but such occassions are few and far between, the opinion of the public is not emphasized (instead, is often ridiculed), and there is no questioning of the established economic order. Others have, fortunately, noticed the insanity of the established order. John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn’t deliver the goods.” Such a thought was well foreshadowed by Adam Smith who, writing almost two centuries earlier, forcefully condemned systems which don’t enhance our inherent sympathies for the well-being of others. And of course, the endless contributions of great African American intellectuals, artists, and musicians have provided powerful and often moving critiques of the established order, from Maya Angelou telling us Why the Caged Bird Sings, to Cornel West’s wonderful discussions of democracitization and the African American experience, to Tupac Shakur’s (often controversial) lyrical essays:

I remember Marvin Gaye

Used to sing to me

He had me feeling like black was the thing to be

And suddenly the ghetto didn’t seem so tough

And though we had it rough

We always had enough

…

You know it’s funny when it rains and pours

They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor

Say there ain’t no hope for the youth

But the truth is, it ain’t no hope for the future

And then they wonder why we crazy

I blame my mother, for turning my brother into a crack baby

We ain’t meant to survive cause it’s a set up

And even though you fed up

You got to keep your head up.