Some Damned Infamous Ducks!

08 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, History, Native American Themes, Politics

Tags

Alaska, Alaska Natives, Civil Disobedience, Ducks, Economics, Hunting, Indigenous People, Native Americans, Subsistence Hunting

We Americans really love our independence, don’t we?

Or at least the thought of it!

Independence can be measured in any number of different ways, but in American politics, it typically means you earn your keep. Maybe you start a business and make a profit, or maybe you have a job and earn your pay, or maybe you speculate on the stock market (without or without the benefit of insider knowledge) and turn a profit without really contributing much of a product or service. Either way, the point is that we typically define our economic independence in terms the ability to pay our bills without asking for help (or at least not asking for that help through any medium short of the highest paid corporate lobbyists). Anyway, the point is, we pay our own bills right?

This is an incredibly ironic measure of independence.

This measure enables a real-estate tycoon to say that he built a structure when he didn’t lay a single brick. It also enables the average person to find shelter without building a house, to cloth himself without making the fabric or fashioning it into a shirt and pants, and it enables us to feed ourselves with all manner of meats and vegetables that we neither grow nor harvest ourselves. We have no idea where most of these things comes from or how it got to the stores where we bought it, not our food, our tools or any of the essential supplies we used for much of anything. Some folks may know a thing or two about fixing a car or building a table, but the fact remains that most people in the developed world lives our lives surrounded in mystery at the very nature of the stuff we use to get through the day. This we count as independence!

Because we paid for it!

It is ironic.

Contrast this with the indigenous peoples of the Alaska who until relatively recent history would have housed themselves, clothed themselves, and feed themselves. To varying degrees, many still do. In times past, the skills necessary to do so were common knowledge in any of these communities, and those skills turned what non-native Americans have typically called a ‘wilderness’ into a wealth of resources ready and waiting to be transformed into food, clothing, tools, and even housing. Small wonder that people so often described by outsiders as living in poverty would see themselves as wealthy. To someone without the skills to hunt, a caribou on the hoof is nothing until it finds its way into his freezer. To someone with the necessary skills, it is fine just where it is, at least until it is needed.

I do not mean to paint a utopian picture here, not by a log shot, but my point is that this is a very different vision of what it means to be independent. Here, the question is not whether or not you can pay for your stuff but whether or not your stuff becomes yours by your own hand, or at least that of your friends and family.

I also don’t mean to suggest that this is entirely unique to Alaska Natives. I reckon it would be true of indigenous people all over the world, depending to one degree or another on the impact of colonization.

***

One sees this conflict between a world of consumerism and a world of subsistence activities and play out quite regularly in the relations between Alaska Natives communities and outside institutions. Also in cultural conflicts between Alaska Natives and non-natives with or without the involvement of government entities. Sometimes, you have to look carefully to see it; sometimes, it is loud and clear for all to see.

The Barrow “duck-in” is one such time.

This story is told best by Rachel Naninaaq Edwardson, I think, in her documentary, The Duck In. Michael Burwell’s article, Hunger Knows No Law, is also an excellent source. If the quick & dirty version I am about to offer interests you at all, then by all means, check out either or both of these sources.

***

What happened?

In 1916, the United States entered into treaty with Governing governing the hunting of migratory waterfowl. A similar treaty was signed with Mexico in 1937. In 1918, Congress passed passed a law enacting the term of the first treaty into Federal law. This in effect made it illegal to hunt migratory waterfowl in the U.S. from March 1th, to September 1st.

Why is that a problem?

Because that’s when those birds are here on the North Slope of Alaska.

I mean a duck or two may head south a bit late, but no, for the most part, that’s when migratory waterfowl are present in this area. To say that hunting ducks and geese are a substantial part of the native subsistence economy is putting mildly. It does not appear that subsistence hunting was ever contemplated in the treaty negotiations, nor in the Congressional actions which codified the treaties in U.S. law. Both were intended largely as a means of controlling sport hunting, much of which would take place in the lower 48. So, a law passed for the purpose of controlling the leisure activities of weekend warriors who mainly feed themselves store-bought food had effectively banned the hunting activities of people who actually need that meat to get through the year.

Alaska Natives were out of sight and out of mind when the laws were made.

Luckily enough, they were also out of sight and out of mind (for the most part) for many years when responsibility for enforcing these laws fell upon federal officials. Thus selective enforcement helped to correct the errors of selective attention, for a time anyway.

When Alaska became a state in 1959, things started to change.

To make a long story short, state officials decided to enforce the law, even in the North Slope of Alaska. According to Burwell, some of these officials were convinced that the Iñupiat population of the north slope had become less dependent on hunting as local stores made produce available. The prospect that the Iñupiat community might be using the stores in limited ways while seeking to remain self-sufficient in others (and particularly, with respect to food) does not seem to have occurred to them. Resistance, they figured, they could be resolved by educating the population (which reminds me of the Navajo livestock reductions, but that’s a story for another post). In 1961, Wildlife officials began to arrest people caught hunting waterfowl during the proscribed period of time.

As it happens, that was a rough year for the North Slope insofar as the annual whale harvest had yielded only a two catches and other likely sources of game were not yet available.

…just the birds flying overhead.

To make a long story short, one of these agents, Harry Pinkham, emerged from his room at the Top of the World Hotel to find; “every man, woman, and child standing in front of my door with a duck in his hand.” Flustered to find an entire town demanding that they be arrested, he went to the local Magistrate Judge, a native woman, named Sadie Neakok (who provided the quote above). Neakok instructed him to follow the law. In all, 138 hunters self-reported their crimes and Pinkhman ended up confiscating 600 pounds of eider ducks (it took two separate plane trips to transport them out of town). State Senator, Eben Hopson (also a local Iñupiat) wired then Governor Egan to ask for welfare personnel to take care of the children once all the adults were taken into custody. Thus, what wildlife officials had hoped would be a matter of handing out fines and lecturing a few natives quickly escalated into a case threatening to overwhelm state resources.

Nobody actually spent time in jail for this, of course.

Instead wildlife rediscovered the virtues of selective enforcement, providing advanced warning whenever their officials were coming up to the North Slope and staying only for 3 days at a time. With these measures in place and well publicized, they really couldn’t have done much more to help hunters avoid getting caught. In time, of course, the laws and treaties were changed to accommodate the cycles of subsistence hunting.

For the indigenous community of the North Slope, this was a win.

A damned good one!

Don’t get me wrong! Conflicts over subsistence hunting rights are a still common, here and in the rest of Alaska, but in 1961, at least, the Iñupiat community of North Slope successfully fought off a threat to their subsistence activities by means of civil disobedience.

***

One of more interesting things about Rachel Edwardson’s work on this comes at about 16-minute mark in her documentary wherein she includes a series of public statements on the issue, all of which foreground the different political economies in question. Outsiders, of course, assumed that hunting, or at least subsistence hunting, would simply cease at some point along the inevitable march toward civilization. Was it not time, even past time, for folks to simply give up the hunt and buy their food?

“The Eskimos have claimed that the ducks leave their northern area before the legal hunting season opens. They also use such phrases as ‘hunger knows no law’ to justify their taking the ducks illegally. In this age of assimilation, where is the point at which the natives must forfeit must forfeit their old rights in favor of the rights of modern civilization?”
(Anchorage Daily Times, Editorial, June 15, 1961.)

“These people were from established communities where ample food is available. The basic conflict is the desire of the natives to continue certain primitive customs and yet live in civilized communities. All of us, including the Eskimos, must realize that the development of any country in the world brings with it advantages and disadvantages. This is true in any civilization, and it must have become obvious already to many of the native people of Alaska. Sincerely, Ralph A. Duncan, Special Assistant to the President.”
(Extract from Whitehouse Response to the United Presbyterian Church, Barrow Alaska)

Edwardon answers these statements with Eben Hopson’s statements on the subject (from his wire to the Governor, I believe). For his own part, Hopson begins by telling stories about people who feed themselves, whether by hunting or farming. He then turns the whole issue, on its head, he asks if anyone would accept a law forbidding the buying of meat at the store?

“We have survived from this land by hunting, just as any other John Dick and Harry have survived from the land by plowing the fields where they could raise crops. If there was law enacted without your knowledge making it unlawful for you to buy meat at your local store, and you continued to buy it because you needed it, I can see and hear you screaming up and down about that law being unjust, and discriminatory, the minute you found it out. If the meat was a matter of survival for your, would you stop eating meat for 3 months out of the year and wait for some disinterested person to come along and try to amend it for you without having assurance that the problem would even be solved.”
– Eben Hopson, State Senator.

I really don’t think the different visions of independence could be more clear than they appear to be in these letters. Those expecting the indigenous community of the North Slope to simply accept the laws in question clearly envision a future in which “Eskimos” buy their food at the store, just like the rest of us. This of course means that people will also get a job instead of spending their days out hunting or preparing for the hunt. It is a world in which people satisfy their needs by first first earning and then spending money. Those organizing and supporting the duck-in consistently envision a world in which they feed themselves. The modern world complicates both visions, of course, but this was a moment wherein the outside world appears to have forced the issue; as if to say; “Stop hunting and buy your food at the store.”

And the native community said ‘no.’

‘Hell no!’

Gaming the Market and Kitbashing The Old Landlord’s Game

12 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Gaming, Politics

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Economics, Equity, fairness, Free Market, Libertarianism, Monopoly, Poverty, The Landlord's Game

Poetic injustice!

The forerunner to monopoly was intended to demonstrate the evils of …well, monopoly. It was particularly intended to show the long-term consequences of private land ownership in America, and one of the games more interesting features included an option to pay rent into a community pot instead of private landowners. Needless to say, that is not the game we play today.

If Elizabeth Magie intended the Landlord’s Game to illustrate the evils of a real estate market, the end result of her efforts has been a century of people celebrating that very thing. When all the dice of rolled and all the mice have been moved, the end result of this game is one player joyously happy with his acquisition of everything in sight. Far from mourning their own financial tragedy, the losers are often eager to start again, each hoping be the bad-ass rich-guy the next time around.

Christopher Ketcham detailed the evolution of Magie’s creation into the modern game of Monopoly last year. As Ketcham makes very clear, the modern version of Monopoly celebrates precisely what The Landlord’s game decries, but that is not merely something as simple as the ‘free market’ or ‘capitalism’; it is rather the defeat of the market by the development of propertied interests:

A few weeks before the tournament, I’d had a conversation with Richard Marinaccio, the 2009 U.S. national Monopoly champion. “Monopoly players around the kitchen table”—which is to say, most people—“think the game is all about accumulation,” he said. “You know, making a lot of money. But the real object is to bankrupt your opponents as quickly as possible. To have just enough so that everybody else has nothing.” In this view, Monopoly is not about unleashing creativity and innovation among many competing parties, nor is it about opening markets and expanding trade or creating wealth through hard work and enlightened self-interest, the virtues Adam Smith thought of as the invisible hands that would produce a dynamic and prosperous society. It’s about shutting down the marketplace. All the players have to do is sit on their land and wait for the suckers to roll the dice.

Smith described such monopolist rent-seekers, who in his day were typified by the landed gentry of England, as the great parasites in the capitalist order. They avoided productive labor, innovated nothing, created nothing—the land was already there—and made a great deal of money while bleeding those who had to pay rent. The initial phase of competition in Monopoly, the free-trade phase that happens to be the most exciting part of the game to watch, is really about ending free trade and nixing competition in order to replace it with rent-seeking.

What strikes me most about the passage above is just how much more subtle it is than common notions of equity guiding popular (and particularly conservative) media. Today’s defenders of the free market are tone deaf to any real difference between the creative bargaining characterizing the early phase of a Monopoly game from the rent-vacuuming process that comes to define its actual victory. I cannot help but wonder if this isn’t to some degree because much of Libertarian thought is actually a defense Aristocracy, a calculated holding action against anyone who might have noticed the game in America (and the world) has long entered the phase at which a final outcome is clear so to speak. The creative possibilities which may have defined the early growth of market economies have long since given way to a process wherein we all simply watch the wealthy take their profits.

…from us.

When I hear people defending the free market, I see little sense for such distinctions. Too often, such folks advance a vision of equity summed up in the phrase “equal at the starting gate.’ It is a mantra used most often to hold off affirmative action, progression taxation, and any number of attempts to help those on the losing end of the market, and it is a mantra that reassures us of the basic fairness of equal treatment under the law. It is a mantra that calls to mind that early moments in a monopoly game; the ones in which ever player can still imagine the possibilities, still see themselves as a potential winner.

The phrase “equal at the starting gate” could only apply to the outset of something, but in economics, there simply is no starting gate. The production of inequality is always an ongoing process into which each of us is dropped and out of which each of us will be taken without any real resolution of the game, so to speak.

This is one respect in which the game of Monopoly absolutely fails to illustrate the nature of capitalism; it doesn’t show people living with the consequences of inequality. It doesn’t emulate a life lived in the red so much as the struggle to achieve a life lived in the black (preferably including Park Place). Perhaps that is one reason for the success of monopoly; whatever its original intent, it has proven to be time-honored promotional piece for the social orders embodied in modern capitalism. For a little while, anyone with a few good die rolls and a smart purchase can be captain of commerce, and to most people that sounds pretty cool.

In real life, we don’t get to start over. We just keep right on playing long after some folks have bought up the world around us, and the frustration of paying fees with every step you take and falling further behind with every turn becomes for many a forgone conclusion. That sense that comes toward the end of a losing game, the moment you realize that your money will be going to another player until it’s over thus becomes an absolute reality from the cradle to the grave, …just add the urgency of food, medical bills, and any hope of accomplishing anything before death itself tells you it’s time to leave the table.

But of course the game goes on.

And the child of yesterday’s winner does not start with the same bank as those who lost to him. Indeed generations upon generations simply keep building up their leverage over the total market and those who start with nothing can count on little comfort from rules that supposedly treat them just the same as the guy with all the cash. In the real world, we do not begin with equal cash and equal opportunities. In the real world player A begins with millions and player B begins with a few thousand Player C starts in debt, and Player D has a few hundred.

There now start rolling the dice!

But the prospect of using Monopoly to comment on economic realities remains interesting, if only as a thought experiment. To model the actual market, we have to add a few other quirks to our Monopoly Game.

Let us take out Millionaire (Player A), name him Joe (Donald would be just too obvious!). Our several thousand-air, we shall call Anne (Player B). The poor chap who started in debt (player C) we shall call Ralph, and the almost-lucky gal with a few hundred we will call Marcy (Player D).

The first thing we have to do is connect the differences in wealth to differences in the health and education of the participants. For this purpose, we’ll will show Ralph and Marcy only about half the rules. The rest they will half to figure out the hard way. It is tempting to model inadequate health care by making Ralph sit on a thumb-tack and forcing Marcy to slam a couple of Long Island Ice Teas just before the start of the game, but that would be just cruel. So let’s just go with the incomplete rule thing. Now when our less privileged players make mistakes on account of their lack of knowledge, Joe will no doubt make fun of them, or at least laugh when his smart-assed buddy Rush makes fun of them from a spot across the room. Anne may not be so mean, but both she and Joe will no doubt count their mistakes against them when Marcy and Ralph end up doing poorly. To complete the analogy here, let us just imagine that Joe’s friend Billy will sit through the whole game provide a full-time commentary on just how bad Marcy and Ralph are at the game. Billy is of course quite the wit.

…is friends usually just call him ‘Fox’.

But it’s worse than that, because of course all of this assumes that the rules are set in stone. Not a chance! No the rules of play are constantly evolving. We have to model that somehow, and we want to be totally fair about it, so each of the players gets to vote on a single rule change every so often (say after each player has taken a turn). Of course a democratic rule process would make each of their votes count equally, but we have to find some way to model the impact of the media and campaign finances, personal connections, etc. So, we’ll just say that you can get an extra vote for every $250.00 you put back in the bank. Marcy and Ralph will soon have a host of rules working against them, and they will no doubt complain about the unfairness of each such rule, at which point Billy will call them ‘special interests’, and another commentator named Antonin will be happy to explain that the rule-making process must be allowed to continue unfettered by anyone pretentious enough to think she might know fair from figs.

I suppose we should add another spectator named John who will be happy to tell Anne that she shouldn’t help Marcy out; that would be enabling bad play.

If we want to get really serious about this, then we have to find a way to replicate the laws of supply and demand, making the property values shift up and down depending on the interests of the players, but our game of 4 makes that a little hard to do. Plus, we have to questions of elasticity, and, well… nevermind. This is over-extending the metaphor.

But of course I am loading the comparison up in favor of a morality tale in which Ralph and Marcy get screwed by the system. To be fair, they should enjoy a range of public utilities police, fire departments, education (however inadequate). All of these provisions may be skewed to favor Joe and Anne yes, but they do exist, and we may add to them a certain range of welfare provisions designed explicitly for the purpose of keeping Marcy and Ralph in the game. But maybe that is the real point of this meditation, because such measures are precisely the features of our real economy most commonly attacked in the name of the game rule vision of fairness. Why should Joe have to pay for Ralph’s laziness? And why shouldn’t Anne and Joe get a better education (a more complete set of rules) if they can pay for it? And so on…

Any attempt to help the unfortunate would seem to run up against a vision of fairness as a procedural matter, as a set of rules which must treat everyone equally, and I can’t help but think an awful lot of people are using games such as monopoly as a source-model for their thinking of such issues. A significant portion of the general public seems to begrudge the provisions for public welfare, the few things that might give Ralph and Anne a chance. Let’s be honest I do not mean a chance to become wealthy, to win at the game so to speak. If there ever was a time when the free market afforded the poor (or even the middle class) a meaningful chance to move up in status, that time is well past. Barring the lotteries of celebrity fame what we are talking about is a chance to live one’s own lives with a measure of dignity, perhaps to own one’s own home and to control one’s own life.

…or simply to receive adequate healthcare.

We can talk about the pros and cons of any number of policies, but those debates are always skewed by the voice of those who would have us believe in the essential fairness of the game, so to speak. Such voices are quick to point out the unfair edge that any attempt to help Marcy and Ralph will give them, but they are damned slow to acknowledge the unfair edge that the game itself gives to Joe and Anne.

And of course the worst thing about all of this is the notion that it is all just a game, that our economy is here to help us sort the winners from the losers.

…as if the sorting were not itself an act of violence.

Irritation Meditation Number Whatever: I Love the Smell of New Propaganda in the Morning!

02 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Irritation Meditation, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Capital Day, Capitalism., Economics, Foundation for Economic Education, Justice, Labor Day, Larry Reed, Libertarianism, Politics, Propagada

So, here I am surfing along the wifi challenged net of my lovely hotel room and what do I find in between 404 notices? Well it appears to be the latest talking point from the right wing echo chamber; a snappy little infographic promoting the virtues of a national day devoted to the celebration of Capital!

It seems that labor and capital both need each other, at least according to this catchy little visual. So, in the interests of fairness, we really ought to have a national Capital Day, at least if we are going to have a national Labor Day. And if we can’t have that, well then we should at least celebrate them together.

I mean it’s only fair!

I found this on Tumblr, a account for The Bill of Rights Institute, … so, Koch Brothers, yep! The visual has the stamp of FEE on it, which leads us easily enough to the Foundation for Economic Education, an unsurprisingly Libertarian bastion of economic chatter, and once there it doesn’t take long to find a whole article (penned by none other than the President of the foundation, Lawrence Reed) touting this movement to counter-balance the celebration of labor with that of capital.

Now to be fair, Lawrence does tell us he will be celebrating Labor Day. Apparently, that’s okay, just as long as we don’t dip into any lefty labor union kinda thinking. Good workers know their place, and their place is working for capital! …without complaints and collective bargaining power. And of course Reed does want to reassure us that he is NOT engaging in class warfare, no. He loves labor. Hell, workers too can become capitalists if they save and invest.

I wonder what Reed thinks the average worker has to invest in today’s climate?

Apparently, we aren’t supposed to think of capital as something deployed only by bankers, because of course workers COULD invest in stock themselves. And in the classic tone-deaf stylings that have become the hallmark of libertarian thought, that little bit of formal equivalence is supposed to help us forget the massive difference between the economic power of the investing classes and those who might have a chunk of their fragile retirement fund riding on the fate of a corporation or two.

I could wonder a lot of things about the fairy-tale land of free market fundamentalism this preacher sells from his think-tank pulpit, but for the present it is enough to meditate on the vision of fairness he has in mind here. It is somehow unfair, he and the folks at FEE seem to be suggesting, that Americans should think about labor and not give a happy nod to capital as well. I wonder where that sense of fairness can be found when paychecks are measured against dividends, personal bankruptcies to corporate bailouts, and second homes to rental properties? I wonder where that sense of fairness is when people like Donald Trump talk about building this or that casino with hardly a nod to those who actually did the dirty work? I wonder where that emphasis on interdependence can be found when folks talk about ‘job creators’ as though they were the unmoved movers of the economic world? And I wonder where all this painfully important need for balanced credit falls when we measure the access of workers to the ear of public officials against that of capitalists? Today, it seems we must be reminded that workers and capitalists work hand-in-hand; on most days that same vision of cooperation is deemed to mean every-man-for-himself, and shame on those who fall short at the end of the month.

No doubt the fine folks at FEE will protest (as Libertarians often do) that they are against sundry special treatments for big business as well. And I suppose, one can indeed imagine a world in which the libertarian scheme of things offers a fair chance to everyone and a better more efficient economy for all. That world is every bit as real as the communist state. In the world we live in though, Libertarian intervention always seems so much more focused on the denial of benefits to the lower classes. Bail out a corporation and they will tell you that sucks and things are not supposed to work that way. Offer health care to the working poor and they will burn the country down around our ears if that’s what it takes to stop you.

And just as a small petty footnote in economic history, they may even find a way to begrudge working men and women a single day of acknowledgement.

Sweatshops and the Invisible Hand of Satan: A Few Thoughts on Some Not-So-Invisible Fires

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in History, Politics

≈ 32 Comments

Tags

Adam Smith, Bangladesh, Diplomacy, Economics, Free Market, Sweatshops, Tazreen, Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Walmart

A hundred and twelve people died horribly last weekend. They died so that you and I can look fabulous.

…at a discount.

I am of course talking about the fire that broke out in Tazreen Fashion Factory in Bangladesh on Saturday, November 24th. Employees were hard at work in the factory, making clothes for Walmart, Disney, and perhaps other American labels when the fire broke out. Under normal circumstances, these people face working conditions unheard of in the contemporary U.S. According to one source, they earn 18 to 26 cents an hour and put in 72-81 hours a week, experiencing physical and mental abuse from managers on a regular basis. But of course last Saturday, all that ended, at least for 112 of them.

So, is it fair to suggest that these people died for you and I? After all, you probably didn’t decide their hours or their wages, much less pick their managers, lock an exit, or order them back to work when word first broke out of a fire. Neither did I. Someone else did all of that. You and I merely chose what clothes to wear; we were not consulted on the conditions under which they were made.

But of course that is precisely the point.

Events such as the Tazreen fire, or the horrible working conditions which preceded it, do not occur because any malevolent human being wills them to happen. They are the outcome of countless individual decisions made by perfectly reasonable human beings. You and I want quality clothing at a reasonable price. The retailers wants to make a profit, as do the distributors, and so on. All these seemingly innocent decisions combine to create a market for labor manufactured under conditions which constitute a living Hell for the workers in those factories. Last Saturday the fires of that Hell claimed the lives of people condemned not by the conscious choice of any living person, but by the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Just to be clear, I do not wish to deny the other, more familiar, metaphor of the invisible hand. At least I do not mean to deny the realities which Adam Smith used the metaphor to describe, the process by which individuals pursuing their own self interest may indeed contribute to the common good. I do not deny that such things happen. I deny that they are always the case, and I assert that they occur right alongside a process that is far more insidious than the common metaphor suggests. If the market may be thought a God, that God is a Janus-faced deity at best, content to restore market equilibrium regardless of the human cost. Market Equilibrium is simply not a standard of moral value; it may be achieved with tears as easily as it does with a smile.

Or worse.

What happened in Bangladesh is hardly a new story. A sweatshop full of workers, locked inside, people burning, others jumping to their deaths. Last week’s tragedy recalls the events of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. Then it was primarily Jewish immigrants plunging to their death, or burning in the flames. Last week it was foreigners living in their own country. Either way, it is people without much say over the workings of American government laboring to supply goods for the American public (and other nations to be sure). Separated by half the globe and a hundred years, the stories could hardly be more similar if an evil genius had produced them as a message for all mankind to see.

But who would see it now that couldn’t have seen it before the fire happened? The dynamics at stake in this fire have been clear for the better part of a century, if not longer still. It is a question of political boundaries, and the way those boundaries limit government response to exploitive working conditions.

In the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, America has seen countless reforms aimed at protecting the rights and safety of workers. Quite a number of these have carried the force of Federal Law under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The rationale for laws protecting workers remains simple enough. They exist to protect workers from conditions deemed unacceptable by the public at large (and one is tempted to say by decent folk anywhere).

Some would maintain that the nature of a free labor contract requires no such regulations, nor tolerance of unions. Workers are free to decline the contract, so the argument goes; is that not enough? Such arguments ignore the realities of job conditions like those in Tazreen or the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. But the problem with such an approach is less that it fails to deal with the inequalities of labor contracts than it is a willful dismissal of the lives of workers who end up in such places. It is less an approach that fails to account for the limitations of the market than it is an approach that sees in the lives of people working themselves to death little other than a unit of value in a mathematical equation.

Thankfully that argument has been defeated in every Federal Law regulating maximum hours, child labor, workplace safety, and a host of other protections, however inadequate they may sometimes prove to be. But why do such laws need to be made at the Federal level? The Supreme Court nailed the answer to this question damned well in United States v. Darby, 1941.

…interstate commerce should not be made the instrument of competition in the distribution of goods produced under substandard labor conditions which competition is injurious to the commerce and to the states from and to which the commerce flows.

Simply put, if we are to leave the protection of workers to the states, then the end result will be a race to the bottom, with that state granting the least protections becoming a magnet for factory work, all at the expense of workers in that state. And in the long run no state could long hold to high standards in the treatment of workers without risking a good deal of lost commerce. In the end, the only plausible hope of resolving the problems of exploitative (or even dangerous) working conditions lies in the prospect of Federal laws preventing trade in products made under those conditions.

We still have those laws in America, and American workers are (at least in theory, and commonly in practice) relatively safe from the scale of exploitation leading to events such as the fire of 1911. But of course many of the world’s developing nations do not, and that is precisely what many large scale corporations like about them. Several generations of American political leadership (Democrat as well as Republican) have done very little to protect American markets from competition with the products of such factories. We’ve already seen the deleterious effects of that process in the slow drain of jobs outsourced to other nations. And last weekend we saw the harmful effects on people now getting those jobs.

In effect, the free market as American diplomacy has envisioned it has opened up opportunities for exploitation on a scale most Americans can now hardly imagine. And of course we don’t have to, because it happens so far away to people we will never know. We notice the scarcity of jobs; we do not notice the lives wasted doing the work that has left our shores, at least not until events like this. But this is the cost of a global market wandering freely across the political boundaries of nations.

Simply put, there is a link between the difficulties American workers have in finding jobs and the difficulties of workers like those in Bangladesh have in finding a working exit from their own jobs.

The public is hardly capable of stopping such events as public pressure is always behind the curve. We learn about such working conditions through disasters, but not in time to stop them. The self policing efforts of companies like Walmart are hardly sufficient, and their conflict of interest should be perfectly apparent to anyone capable of reading the price tag on a shirt or a skirt. But then we pay the price in lost jobs all the while wage slavery flourishes in other parts of the world, driven by demands shaped here, at least while what’s left of the middle class still has money to spend.

I’m not arguing for any particular solution to this sort of problem, but I am increasingly impatient with those who don’t see this sort of thing as a problem at all, with those who see in the workings of the market a uniformly benevolent force, those who would pretend that all will be well, or as well as it could be, if we just keep governments from interfering with business.

If we just let the market run its course, some would say, the world will in the long run be a better place.

Last weekend the market ran its course.

It consumed a hundred and twelve people.

Snakes, Death Panels, and that Damned Kenyan: An Ode to the Power of the Free Market!

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Anthropology, Politics

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Amazon, Anthropology, Economics, Free Market, Healthcare, Libertarianism, Obamacare, Politics, Rhetoric

Steve Sheldon told about a woman giving birth alone on a beach. Something went wrong. A breech birth. The woman was in agony. ‘Help me please! The baby will not come,’ she cried out. The Pirahãs sat passively, some looking tense and some talking normally. ‘I’m dying! This hurts. The baby will not come!’ She screamed. No-one answered. It was late afternoon. Steve started toward her. ‘No! She doesn’t want you. She wants her parents,’ he was told, the implication being clearly that he was not to go to her. But her parents were not around, and no-one else was going to her aid. The evening came and her cries came regularly, but ever more weakly. Finally, they stopped. In the morning Steve learned that she and her baby had died on the beach, unassisted.

Daniel L. Everett uses this passage from Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes to illustrate the ideas of an Amazonian people about personal responsibility and their attitudes towards the suffering of others. In context, this story is a little more subtle than it may appear on this page, because Everett tell us that Pirahã will devote great effort to helping one another under the right circumstances. The point is that under this circumstance, Pirahã did not consider it appropriate to aid the woman in question, even though her need was obvious. It was the sort of trouble that Pirahã felt an individual must face alone, or with the aid of family. Since no family was there to help her, the woman in this story had to face this struggle alone.

I read a lot of stories like this, and some still have the power to shock and anger me. I can think my way to an understanding of the behavior in question, but in some cases (like this one) I lose my interest at least momentarily in learning about the cultural context behind it, and I want desperately to confront those responsible. The image of a woman and her child dying alone on a beach because people would not help her is just too much to bear. How could anyone, ANYONE, countenance such a thing?

It doesn’t help that Everett follows this with another story about an orphan girl he had been nursing back to health from a near coma, that is until her father killed her with the aid of his fellow villagers. To them this was a mercy killing, as Everett tells us. The villagers had become convinced the little girl was too sick to survive. His efforts to nurse her back to health had in their eyes accomplished nothing except to prolong her suffering. So, they killed her. I read that story, and I understand the point, and still stories like this fill me with rage. I want desperately to do something about a death I didn’t witness, to confront people I’ve never met, to stop them, to beat them, to punish them. No explanation will suffice for such things, I sometimes feel, and I cannot imagine living in a world in which I must abide such behavior.

But of course I do live in such a world; we have it right here in America.

Oddly enough these passages have helped me to understand something I have been struggling to grasp since the last election, the old yarn about death panels. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly understand the fear and horror that comes from the notion that some committee may have the power to make life and death decisions for other people. What I could never grasp was just how anyone could be so alarmed at the prospect that such a panel could operate under the auspices of government authority while remaining unconcerned about the reality of such entities in the private sector today. Insurance companies make such decisions every day which effectively sentence people to death or suffering, and this is at best a matter for reform; it is something we have to work on, because maybe there is room for improvement. Yet the mere hint of such a committee operate under the auspices of government authority is enough to render the man responsible for it into something of a vampire.

The case for the existence of Death Panels in Obamacare was never much more than a highly malicious rumor, at least as outlined by Republicans in 2008. Yet people die in America every day because they cannot get coverage for important procedures, or they suffer needlessly from lack of care. Think of dental care alone. For years I struggled to find a safe tooth to use for chewing before I finally got a decent dental package, and now I see friends and family doing the same thing. None of this is necessary. They aren’t screaming down at the river, and perhaps they won’t die, but their suffering is absolutely unnecessary. So much the more so for those who cannot get treatment for serious ailments.

So, how is it that folks could be so accepting of deaths resulting from lack of medical care in the present economy while falling over themselves at dark rumors about Obama’s heath care package? I’ve come to understand this sort of thing as one of the powers of the Free Market.

Yea verily!

“The power of the market!” I often wonder if the people uttering this little mantra recognize its religious overtones. You would swap “Jesus” in there for the market if you like, or perhaps “the mind” if you prefer to think of yourself as “spiritual but not religious.” Either way, it is an expression of wonder at the power of an entity to work miracles. Those uttering this phrase usually mean it to suggest something to the effect that free markets will bring about good things if only they are left to themselves.

My own suggestion is sarcastic, of course, but I do think it is the rhetoric of free markets that works this miracle, perverse as it may be. It is what separates the horrors of some deaths from the natural occurrences of others.

Time and again, one hears folks (and by ‘folks’ I mean ‘Libertarians’) assuring us that government actions aimed at correcting some remedial evil will only create more difficulties in the long run. If wages are too low, raising a minimum wage will only lead to a reduction in jobs, and if banks are charging ridiculous overdraft fees, rules against this can only lead to other fees. To correct such horrors is to fight the tide itself. The course of the market is thus a perfectly natural, inexorable force, and government action to correct it can only lead to greater harms on down the road.

And of course there is a certain degree of evidence to back this up. By a certain degree of evidence, I of course mean scads of economic analysis regarding details such as those above. We can see the adjustments that market values make in the wake of government changes quite regularly, and it isn’t hard to see just how often those adjustments prove the undoing of many well-intentioned policies.

And yet the rhetoric of Free Market Fundamentalism seems to stretch a little beyond this evidence, turning tendencies into laws and social behavior into the tell-tale signs of a god passing in the night. It is not merely that supply and demand react to one another, but that they do so under the command of an entity of sorts, one with great powers. Somewhere along the line, reasonable arguments about the particulars give rise to a mythic narrative, one which simplifies the choices in front of us.

All of this begs the question of just how simple it is to keep government actions out of business. Money, like government office, is a vehicle of power, and there is no inherent reason why we should moralize the one and naturalize the other. But of course that is precisely the point of so much talk about the power of the market; that market will do what it does, and individuals seeking profit will do what they do. Neither morals, nor governments, nor all the devils in Hell will alter the course of self interest. What is left for us to do but acknowledge in stoic terms the limitations of humanity and civic service? …and hence to let things run their course? A virtuous government is thus one that does not interfere. Likewise with virtuous politicians!

And damn those who would trespass against the will of the market.

Thus a man who dies because an insurance company will not pay for an expensive operation has in effect passed away of natural causes, but one who has died because a government panel denied him the operation? Well, his death is the result of arcane forces. Worse still, a life prolonged by such a committee must also be an unnatural event, a form of undeath, sustaining itself by draining the life from others. And if folks stop short of blaming those whose health is the result of government programs, well we can certainly point a finger at the necromancers who created those programs.

Cough, …Obama!

This is the attraction of a narrative that separates the world of power into forms about which we can make decisions of right or wrong and those about which we can only hope to adapt. Government is thus saturated with moral significance; there are good politicians and bad politicians, even evil ones. But market forces? These are as natural as the tide itself. One might as well urge reform on the laws of gravity as hope to change the nature of business.

It is for this same reason that welfare queens elicit so much more effective anger than corrupt bankers. We can understand someone fudging the numbers to make a profit, but a woman who lives off the coercive power of government authority? That is an abomination. Likewise with all manner of horrors resulting from poverty; they are natural. We might shed a tear for those that die of such things, but we expect them to handle it themselves, or to turn to family.

“She doesn’t want you; she wants her parents.”

If you want to help your neighbor, so one hears, then do so with your own money! Give to charity, or pay your brother’s bills, but don’t force others to do the same. But of course the market in its infinite wisdom sets the price for the necessities of life too high for such personal action, at least if one hopes to get ahead in life. And so neither government nor private individuals can really do much about this man’s teeth or that woman’s liver. The result is natural, so the narrative goes, and there is nothing for us to do but go about our lives as people all about us suffer.

We can only hope they will do it in silence, behind a door somewhere, not screaming down at the river.

This is, after all, a nation of civilized people.