Forgive me. Accept my apologies. For the first time in 11 years, I missed not one, but two weeks in a row. I was overtaken by events and in the midst of the overtaking, I realized this is a signature symptom, perhaps the signature symptom, of contemporary life. So I’m trying to fight against it, in part by backfilling commentaries for the weeks I missed. (If you’re so motivated, you can find them at markfloegel.org.)
Being overtaken, as I have been, feels like being caught in the surf. I was so overtaken – by events, work, obligations – that I had very little awareness of things beyond my immediate scope of attention. This was not altogether bad. I didn’t, for instance, pay much attention to the Pennsylvania primary, which I hear was simultaneously boring and gruesome.
Two things that managed to penetrate my wall of busyness were both about slavery. That they should have caught my attention is not surprising: I’m fascinated by slavery, particularly that it survives in our modern, “civilized” world and that our governments and media seem to have trouble registering outrage over it.
The first slavery piece popped up in the Denver Post in early April, when Bob Schaffer, Republican candidate for the US Senate, recommended that the US adopt a guest worker program modeled on the one used in the North Mariana Islands, a US protectorate in the Pacific. Problem is, the factories in the North Marianas are sweatshops where workers – young women from China, the Philippines and southeast Asia – were kept in barracks surrounded by barbed wire, were often used as sex slaves, were forced to have abortions, were not paid if they failed to make quotas, were paid less than minimum wage if they did make quotas – in short, they were slaves. Because the North Marianas are a US territory, clothes made in those sweatshops have a tag reading “Made in the USA.”
In 1998, an investigation by the Interior Department exposed many of these abuses. In 1999, Mr. Schaffer visited the North Marianas on a fact-finding trip arranged by the now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose clients were the sweatshop owners. Mr. Schaffer, in 1999, declared no problems in the North Marianas. Today, he wants to import that brand of slavery to the mainland as his solution to the issue of undocumented workers. Nice guy.
A week ago, CNN reported on a labor group’s study of shrimp processing facilities in southeast Asia showing that many of the workers there are held in the same slave-like conditions that exist in the North Mariana sweatshops. Long hours, low or no pay, squalid living conditions, beatings, barbed wire – it’s “Roots” for a new generation.
Do we really need shrimp? The clothes sweatshops are kind of a deliberate sleight-of-hand by Jack Abramoff and his cronies, but shrimp? Once a luxury, now because of the ubiquity of chain restaurants like Red Lobster, shrimp is everywhere and most of it comes from shrimp farms in southeast Asia that are run, apparently, by slave labor. If you’ve read these commentaries for several years, you know most of our chocolate – another product we don’t need – is also produced with slave labor.
Which brings us back to the signature symptom. We’re all of us overtaken by events. Some events, like the Pennsylvania primary, are important, some like the latest Hollywood or sports whatever, are not. They all come at us just the same and as a result, nothing sticks. Nothing. Not even slavery. Not even slavery in the US, as is the case in the North Marianas.
The world is much smaller than it used to be; in another sense it’s much larger. We all hear how it’s smaller because of airplanes and the Internet. It’s a larger place in that we have so many things crowding into our sphere of attention. There are so many brokers and middlemen between us and the people who make our clothes or process our shrimp. There are so many lobbyists and PR professionals who are so more than greedy enough to take money to hide the most grisly truths, like slavery.
Perhaps the reason I tend to obsess over slavery is because it is – or should be – clearly over the line. Something we in a civilized society should not abide by. It should be a straightforward proposition: “We do not enslave people or in any way support those who do.” How hard is that?
And if we can’t get that one straight, how do we solve a complex problem like global warming?
© Mark Floegel, 2008
Symptoms
Forgive me. Accept my apologies. For the first time in 11 years, I missed not one, but two weeks in a row. I was overtaken by events and in the midst of the overtaking, I realized this is a signature symptom, perhaps the signature symptom, of contemporary life. So I’m trying to fight against it, in part by backfilling commentaries for the weeks I missed. (If you’re so motivated, you can find them at markfloegel.org.)
Being overtaken, as I have been, feels like being caught in the surf. I was so overtaken – by events, work, obligations – that I had very little awareness of things beyond my immediate scope of attention. This was not altogether bad. I didn’t, for instance, pay much attention to the Pennsylvania primary, which I hear was simultaneously boring and gruesome.
Two things that managed to penetrate my wall of busyness were both about slavery. That they should have caught my attention is not surprising: I’m fascinated by slavery, particularly that it survives in our modern, “civilized” world and that our governments and media seem to have trouble registering outrage over it.
The first slavery piece popped up in the Denver Post in early April, when Bob Schaffer, Republican candidate for the US Senate, recommended that the US adopt a guest worker program modeled on the one used in the North Mariana Islands, a US protectorate in the Pacific. Problem is, the factories in the North Marianas are sweatshops where workers – young women from China, the Philippines and southeast Asia – were kept in barracks surrounded by barbed wire, were often used as sex slaves, were forced to have abortions, were not paid if they failed to make quotas, were paid less than minimum wage if they did make quotas – in short, they were slaves. Because the North Marianas are a US territory, clothes made in those sweatshops have a tag reading “Made in the USA.”
In 1998, an investigation by the Interior Department exposed many of these abuses. In 1999, Mr. Schaffer visited the North Marianas on a fact-finding trip arranged by the now-jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose clients were the sweatshop owners. Mr. Schaffer, in 1999, declared no problems in the North Marianas. Today, he wants to import that brand of slavery to the mainland as his solution to the issue of undocumented workers. Nice guy.
A week ago, CNN reported on a labor group’s study of shrimp processing facilities in southeast Asia showing that many of the workers there are held in the same slave-like conditions that exist in the North Mariana sweatshops. Long hours, low or no pay, squalid living conditions, beatings, barbed wire – it’s “Roots” for a new generation.
Do we really need shrimp? The clothes sweatshops are kind of a deliberate sleight-of-hand by Jack Abramoff and his cronies, but shrimp? Once a luxury, now because of the ubiquity of chain restaurants like Red Lobster, shrimp is everywhere and most of it comes from shrimp farms in southeast Asia that are run, apparently, by slave labor. If you’ve read these commentaries for several years, you know most of our chocolate – another product we don’t need – is also produced with slave labor.
Which brings us back to the signature symptom. We’re all of us overtaken by events. Some events, like the Pennsylvania primary, are important, some like the latest Hollywood or sports whatever, are not. They all come at us just the same and as a result, nothing sticks. Nothing. Not even slavery. Not even slavery in the US, as is the case in the North Marianas.
The world is much smaller than it used to be; in another sense it’s much larger. We all hear how it’s smaller because of airplanes and the Internet. It’s a larger place in that we have so many things crowding into our sphere of attention. There are so many brokers and middlemen between us and the people who make our clothes or process our shrimp. There are so many lobbyists and PR professionals who are so more than greedy enough to take money to hide the most grisly truths, like slavery.
Perhaps the reason I tend to obsess over slavery is because it is – or should be – clearly over the line. Something we in a civilized society should not abide by. It should be a straightforward proposition: “We do not enslave people or in any way support those who do.” How hard is that?
And if we can’t get that one straight, how do we solve a complex problem like global warming?
© Mark Floegel, 2008