Implausible Deniability
I think it would be good if certain things were said.
- Frantz Fanon
Today’s mainstream media provides ample low-hanging fruit for moral posturing. With their increasing reliance on access to powerful individuals, and the death by strangulation of responsible long-format journalism, the media have made it their mission to fail spectacularly at their proper task, which is to guarantee the open exchange of information on which a free society rests.
Friday’s (8 February) international New York Times presents the current condition of the Fourth Estate.
The front page features an opinion column by tech reporter Farhad Manjoo titled “It’s high time we abolish billionaires.” Manjoo riffs on extreme wealth (nobody really needs a billion dollars) and ways in which such wealth might usefully be eradicated. Manjoo quotes Princeton moral philosopher Peter Singer saying that “in general, he did not think it was possible to live morally as a billionaire,” and bemoaning the fact that, of the approximately 2,200 billionaires in the world, “fewer than 200 have signed the giving pledge” promulgated by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
I recognize that Mr. Manjoo has to sell newspapers — his inflammatory headline reminds me of a man who used to panhandle on Broadway back in the years when nonviolent mental patients were released to the SRO hotels of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He would sit on the sidewalk with a handwritten sign bearing the word “SEX” in huge letters. Underneath was written, “now that I have your attention, how about helping out a homeless person with a dollar?” The question is, what do you do now that you have my dollar in your hand?
A headline in the business section of the same edition of the NYT, “15 cents an hour to meet fashion’s needs,” introduces an article about research from the University of California, Berkley, that studied conditions under which piece workers in India produce finished high-fashion goods for major Western brands. The research team, led by “an expert on contemporary slavery,” interviewed 1,452 home workers. These are overwhelmingly female. Many are young by Western industrialized standards — the youngest worker interviewed was 10 years old. The majority are from “historically oppressed ethnic communities” or are Muslims, and all struggle to balance the economic desperation of piece work with the duties of girls and women in a society that requires them to take care of all a family’s household needs.
It is easy to blame billionaires for our own unhappiness, and bashing the rich provides a balm of self-justification for the instant hatred we so readily condemn in others. If the billionaires are at fault, then we are off the hook. Mr. Manjoo mentions policy discussions around drastically stepped-up tax rates on the wealthy and states that “Billionaires should not exist,” as though it were an obvious point. As a technology reporter, Manjoo’s focus is on policy initiatives to make the digital economy more equitable. He quotes Representative Ocasio-Cortez as saying “a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people… don’t have access to public health is wrong.”
Missing from Mr. Manjoo’s piece, and from the Times’ analysis, is the link between extreme wealth and the exploitation of vulnerable populations — low caste, women and young children in poverty, religious minorities, undocumented immigrants. Even in the few instances where this imbalance is mentioned in public discourse, no one takes it to the crucial next step: if global industry relies on what is essentially slave labor, undoing that relationship will upset far more than a handful of billionaires.
I don’t hold myself out as an expert on the exploitation of the powerless, but I participated with a group that visited Immokalee, Florida in 2012. We spent the week meeting with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a remarkable grass-roots organization representing thousands of undocumented, largely Hispanic workers who labor in the central Florida tomato growing industry. In connection with my trip, I made it my business to inform myself about topics ranging from human trafficking, to US farm legislation, to the economics of tomato farming. (And no, undocumented workers are not stealing jobs from Americans. Don’t take my word for it. Do the actual research. Carve-outs in worker protection laws are specifically designed to permit the exploitation of agricultural workers — otherwise you would be paying something like $40 a pound for your flavorless winter Florida tomatoes.)
The hated billionaires — all 2,200 of them — are the tip of the iceberg on which we all live. It’s easy to hate Jeff Bezos: he’s rich, he underpays his workers and doesn’t give them enough time for bathroom breaks. One thing all those who criticize Bezos and his ilk have in common is that they all wear clothing. Indeed, there are only two classes of people I know who care where their garments come from. One group is religiously observant Jews who are careful not to violate the Biblical injunction against wearing garments made of a blend of wool and linen; the other are morality-based vegetarians and vegans who eschew wearing leather. The focus on Bezos’ operations in rural America, while ignoring the plight of dark-skinned children in India, reminds me of a quote I heard attributed to Franz Fanon to the effect that Europe reacted with horror after the Holocaust, not at the enormity of the slaughter, not at the diabolical way in which whole populations were wiped out, but that for the first time in modern memory, it was white Europeans doing this to other white Europeans — inhumanity had reached new depths.
The most telling passage comes from the Times’ piece on the fashion industry: “The report also stated that few of the brands or companies who employ these workers in their supply chain were aware that this work was being outsourced to home workers, or of the conditions many of the home workers faced.” It is scandalous for the Times to run a front-page headline calling for the outlawing of wealth, while allowing this statement to go unchallenged. Armed with nothing more than an Amazon account and the internet, I was able to obtain precise figures — from NGOs, from the UN, and from the US State Department — regarding domestic slavery in the US, and the exploitation of vulnerable populations abroad. It is bizarre to suggest that the world’s largest fashion brands and retailers don’t have access to — or interest in — the same data.
Manjoo mentions Anand Giridharadas, who made the observation — not mentioned in Manjoo’s piece — that much of the most effective work on the front lines of poverty and inequality is done by dedicated individuals working on a small scale. Some are locals working to better the lives of their communities, others are people from industrialized nations who have taken on the task of undoing some of the harm and abuse from which their own economies continue to benefit. These people form small groups that have real impact in their communities, going door to door, town to town, factory to factory not as rabble rousers or revolutionaries, but working patiently to help people improve their lives through education and quiet, patient advocacy.
As they succeed, these groups see their work expanding, and expansion requires assets. As their profile rises, they come to the attention of foundations underwritten by the very billionaires among whom Manjoo moves. Giridharadas says that those who have been successful on the ground are routinely offered grants to underwrite their programs; at the same time, they are told they must alter their “messaging.” Giridharadas says it is common for groups working with the poorest populations to receive new funding — often a relative drop in the bucket of well under ten million dollars — under the condition that they no longer use words like “inequality,” or “exploitation” in their discourse.
In this light, it would be instructive to know who funded the UC, Berkeley study. It would be instructive to ask the Times why they published such a mollifying statement and having printed it, why they allowed it to go unremarked. As a private citizen, I was able to read a handful of books and articles, attend a few seminars, and visit with both farmworkers and tomato farmers in situ. The assertion by the study’s author that the major brands and retailers don’t know what is going on farther down the supply chain is staggering; the Times’ decision to repeat it without comment is disturbing.
Mr. Manjoo’s ire is justified — and off target. He might start by wondering why his own Newspaper Of Record ran a yellow journalistic headline over a simplistic bit of opinion fluff, while in the same issue running a story that blithely bypasses the true heart of problem. The tragedy is not that there are billionaires in this world — as Jesus should have also said, The rich you have with you always — it’s that we have known for centuries about the enslavement and exploitation of the weak, and we do nothing about it. We wear clothing sewn by children in their tubercular cellars, we eat tomatoes picked by pregnant women crawling through the dirt and being sexually abused by the field bosses, we shit in hotel toilets scrubbed by women fearing deportation and afraid to demand their wages — all without challenging the social structure from which we in the middle class benefit. Jeff Bezos didn’t steal his billions; we gave them to him. Now we want to outlaw him. Because the alternative is admitting that it is we who are the true exploiters of the defenseless.
To paraphrase the NRW bumper sticker: If we make being a billionaire a crime, then only criminals will become billionaires.
But what about the crime of living in this world, and remaining silent?
Yours for a better world –
