GLOBALIZE THIS!

Friday, August 20, 2004

TRADING AWAY HUMAN RIGHTS

Originally posted 2/26/04:

What I'm Reading Today: State Department Report on Human Rights Practices 2003

Since the brouhaha over the trade and jobs issue that erupted when Bush's chief economist Greg Mankiw accidentally revealed to America how economists view the world, the global punditocracy has responded to the call of duty, circling their wagons and decrying protectionist China bashers.

Just out of curiousity about what these "China-bashers" are charging (that Chinese exports are being subsidized through egregious human rights violations, etc., etc.), I went straight to the source. No, not The Nation. I'm talking about that bastion of knee-jerk liberalism and ire of conservatives everywhere, Collin Powell's State Department.

Here's what I found out about what is going on in China:

The report mentions no less than 40 times by my count (I may have missed some) the cheery sounding reeducation-through-labor camps widely used in China (and it ain't talking about an AFL-CIO activist training). Rather, Chinese citizens (some 250,000 of them) were confined without judicial process and force to work "in facilities directly connected with penal institutions...[or in some cases] they were contracted to nonprison enterprises. Facilities and their management profited from inmate labor." Who were these prisoners? Activists for religious freedom, democratic reform, labor rights, women's rights, people who fall out of favor of the party, people who protest to demand back pay for wages that are withheld (more on this below), and generally people who rake too much muck. "Chinese prison management relied on the labor of prisoners both as an element of punishment and to fund prison operations."

"In 1992, the U.S. and Chinese Governments signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU)...express[ing] the intention of the governments to cooperate to assure that Chinese prison-made products were not exported to the United States. However, Chinese cooperation under the MOU and SOC has been poor," meaning, of course, we have no way of knowing whether all those cheap wares adorning the shelves at Walmart are made by compulsory labor. (Regardless, the mere existence of forced labor undermines the rights and protections of all workers in China and the countries with which China trades).

In case you were wondering, China has not ratified the ILO core labor standard prohibiting forced compulsory labor, although they are bound to it via other treaties and, not to mention, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. US law (Section 301(d) of the Trade Act) specifically regards such human rights violations as an unfair trade practice.

But wait, there's more. It is common practice in China to keep workers in "bondage" by withholding their pay (which is by default forfeited if a worker decides to quit). Since workers in China have no right to associate freely in trade unions, to bargain collectively or to strike (all also established as universal human rights), they have little recourse but to submit to this exploitation. Even so, spontaneous "protests by workers seeking unpaid wages continued throughout the country" are common place throughout China. Protesting workers have resorted to blocking roads and railways, to threatening suicide, and even to self-immolation. (The reason we don't hear too much about it is because it is illegal in China to photograph and film labor protests, or even groups of unemployed people standing around).

This is just the tip of the iceberg: human trafficking, children sold into forced labor, women sold into prostitution, workers exposed to dangerous chemicals and unsafe working practices, and so on. It is really horrifying reading. Don't read it right before bedtime as I did. This little excerpt from the report kept me up for hours last night:

"Some students worked in light industrial production within or for their schools. In March 2001, an explosion in Jiangxi Province at an elementary school that was also used to manufacture fireworks killed 42 persons, most of them schoolchildren who worked to assemble the fireworks."

All this comes just from the 2003 report, but the State Department has reports posted on its website going back to 1993.

So, as this government report clearly proves, all those whacky China-bashers are protectionists looking out for their own self-interest in their effort to send America back to the economic dark ages. End of argument.

¶ 8/20/2004 09:08:19 AM

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Thursday, August 19, 2004

MODERN MERCENARIES

Original air date 2/4/04:

For some time, private industry has walked hand in hand with the military sector: providing consulting and strategic advisory services; providing technical and military training to personnel; providing civilian logistical services, supply-chain management and technical support for frontline troops; and, of course, those sweet, sweet deals to develop and mass produce all those expensive toys. And sometimes, governments even use completely private armed forces.

This is the topic of interest for Peter Singer of the ideologically schizophrenic Brookings Institution. Private military corporations (PMCs) are now a multi-billion dollar global industry. Their ascendency results from a confluence of supply and demand spawned by the fracturing of the geopolitical order. At the same time more states are failing and small arms are proliferating--creating civil disorder and humanitarian crises--there is less political will to intervene in crises for states with the capacity to actually stop them. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a supply of advanced military hardware available at bargain basement prices from Eastern European governments financially strapped amid their transitions to market economies. The end of apartheid in South Africa and the end of communist state opression left a reserve army of military grunts highly skilled in thuggery (for example, soldiers who committed war crimes or egregious human rights violations).

It was a match made in heaven, and PMCs such as the euphamistically named South African firm Executive Outcomes profitted splendidly by having a hand in almost every civil war in Africa in the past fifteen years. PMCs were employed in the Liberian war in the early 1990s (International Charters, Inc. of Oregon), in Ethiopia in the 1998 war against Eritrea (Sukhoi of Russia), in Sierra Leone in the mid-1990s (Executive Outcomes of South Africa). Who employed these PMCs is a matter of debate, but it is clear that multinational mining, mineral and oil interests have backed PMCs or backed governments to hire PMCs. EO was able to accomplish a rout of the RUF and establish stability in Sierra Leone while the UN could not, despite having a 20 times larger budget and personnel. These groups have even formed an industry lobbying group: the likewise euphamistically named International Peace Operations Association.

Singer is interested in whether PMCs could be used in place of multinational UN peacekeeping forces on the ground in situations where public perception of injustice demands international attention, but the politics of national governments or international organizations prohibit the risk of intervention. Singer is quite aware of the pitfalls of PMCs and confering on them the legitmate use of force otherwise reserved for the domain of nation-states: questions of authority, legitimacy, accountability, and conflicts of interest between the profit motive and the demands of the mission. What Singer lacks, however, is a vision to provide moral guidance through the morally nebulous world of PMCs.

While Singer sees PMCs as a palatable option for Western bourgeois liberal internationalists who can't stomach the costs of humanitarian intervention, supplanting multi-national peace-keeping forces with soldiers of fortune undermines the whole credo of humanistic liberal internationalism: that the dignity and freedom on universal human rights should be bestowed equally on people everywhere irrespective of per capita GDP. They are not a problem that can be bought off to appease Western guilt. Have we all forgotten satyagraha?

¶ 8/19/2004 01:10:20 PM

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SUMMER RE-RUNS

Yep, it's the heat of summer and I'm swamped trying to get ready for grad school, which starts on Monday, moving, and tying up loose ends in DC. Rather than trolling the press for the latest tidbits on globalization political economy (which is being drowned out by Iraq and the presidential campaign anyway), I am taking a cue from my television colleagues and re-running some of my better and time insensitive entries, drawn from some of my most Googled posts. If you've already read them, I apologize. New posting will be sporadic for a little while until I adjust to life in the wilds of Western Mass.

¶ 8/19/2004 12:56:31 PM

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Tuesday, August 17, 2004

CASUAL ELECTORAL PUNDITRY

Been devoting most of this last week to my in-laws and playing with my adorable nieces in Eastern Washington (state, that is). They are Vietnamese-Americans, many of the older men fought in the South Vietnam military before the fall of Saigon. For understandable reasons, all are ardently anti-Communist and many have been life-long Republican voters (since being wrested from their war-torn home and arriving on these shores). To a person, they have had it with Bush and are now ardently pro-Kerry (although for some of the older folks, "Kerry" becomes "Jerry" somewhere in the translation).

Back in Seattle, west of the mountains, Kerry is all that. By my non-scientific survey one in four cars has a Kerry bumper sticker and yard signs abound. After three days of driving all over the city and battling I-5 traffic, I saw less than a handful of Bush stickers (including one car that had both a Bush 2004 sticker AND a "No War In Iraq" sticker...go figure).

At National Airport, when I left DC last week, the news stand was selling Bush and Kerry campaign buttons. Kerry's were sold out. Bush's remained piled high in the bin.

Election fever is running high. People who I've never known tohave a political bone in their bodies are scanning polling results like they were baseball box scores. Everyone wants to talk about the election, about how much they loath Bush. People want to know what they can do to help put Kerry in the White House.

Can you feel it? The tide is turning.

¶ 8/17/2004 08:16:05 PM

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