I contribute nothing to the conversation.

lobbey, way to undermine whatever correct and reasoned arguments you might have been presenting by being a completely and utterly sexist, racist prick.

Yeah, actually there are several – all proven successes. Subsidies for high-tech & state ownership, in conjunction with quality education & an ambitious R&D policy (see Japan post-1945), micro-banking (see India), worker-owned industry (see South America) … none of which require anyone to be poisoned or worked to death for a princely 48 cents an hour, 12-18 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, while being “housed” in a Free-Enterprise-Zone surrounded by 18-foot fences topped with razorwire … & all simple historical realities that Kristof has to be aware of. Ergo, he’s a bloody shill for multinational money-pigs masquerading as a humanitarian. Not too hard to see that when you look at what sort of stupid shit he writes:

the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough

Gentlemen, we must not allow the Third World to create an Exploitation Gap!
The Maquiladoras must move north to protect our precious bodily fluids!

The peons in the new sweatshops will thank us for their servitude with their dying breaths – as will the workers in the rest of the economy, as they watch their paychecks shrivel away to nothing while more & more of their jobs are “outsourced” … God, how I love the smell of lowered salaries & benefits in the morning … it smells like … VICTORY!

Yes We Can … win the race to the bottom!

Just because everyone thinks he’s a douchebag, doesn’t mean he’s not a douchebag.

http://www.gatt.org/wharton.html

If you’re not familiar with The Yes Men, you should become so.

I don’t really get how pointing out that Kristof presents a false dichotomy is wacky lockstep thinking. I mean, you don’t say that about how we all think Bush is a douchebag.

You use England and the US as examples, to which I strongly disagree. History no more demands that the industrializing world repeat child labor or industrial drudgery than modern typsetters need repeat the habitual exposure to lead and hot presses dogging the sixteenth-century printer. Many of the hard-won lessons of the Industrial Revolution are pretty roundly repeatable without the need to ruin people’s lives – a good example would be Japan, which managed to spend the 50s through 70s emitting poisonous levels of heavy industrial and agricultural pollutants without going through the intermediary stage of proletarian serfdom and robber-baronetcy present in the US or UK during their industrial revolution.

It’s an easy argument to buy into, but as an admittedly amateur student of history I don’t feel it’s a sound one. Economics isn’t a natural process but a human one, and cultural and ideological appropriation can do amazing – and sometimes horrible – things. The long, convoluted history that produced the Holocaust, for instance, was completely absent in the Rwandan genocide – which nonetheless managed to pretty efficiently adopt Himmler’s methods of organized, industrial-scale manslaughter. If first-world results can come without second-world experience in the taking of human life, why should the improvement of it be different?

I can’t believe it took so long in the thread to reach this. “Aye, we were poor then. But we were happy.”

My take-away from the Kristoff piece was the inherent and inevitable race to the bottom of the “free” market, which will affect everyone, everywhere, the more capitalism is globalised. UNLESS other forces intervene, such as unions, environmental laws (and their enforcement), and so on.

The antipathy toward these proven benefits for great masses of mankind is one of the things (but not the only one) that marks the right-wing as, not only stupid (since it will result in the impoverishment of them, too), and hypocritical (to the extent that feel themselves to be “Christians” and therefore benign toward their neighbors), but, in the end, yes, say it with me, now: evil.

Humans had been dirt-eating, dirt farming poor people for thousands of years until the industrial revolution. Every country that has ever dragged itself out of this awfulness, save perhaps some oil-rich Arab kingdoms, have all undergone wrenching social changes that even led to initial declines in living standards and even life expectancy as people moved from the countryside to cities, taking up shitty jobs that bore little if any fruit for the generation that made the change. People in developing countries today have an even harder time of it since they have to compete against already highly advanced economies. You dont have to like it, its just a fact. Pointing it out doesn’t amount to advocacy of poverty for third-worlders.

It would be one thing if the initial sweatshop, low-wage drudgery model of economic development wasn’t bearing fruit. Except, you know, it has. Although absolute poverty is about the same as it was (i.e. the number of poor people), the world just saw an astonishing fall in the proportion of people in poverty over the last 25 years despite massive population growth, mainly in places where that model has been replicated over and over. The children of those who slaved in factories are more likely to be educated and have more productive and higher-paying jobs. And that’s another thing, wages have risen dramatically in these places if you hadn’t noticed.

So yea, acknowledging some of the above would be useful I guess.

In keeping with the spirit of free enterprise and “market solutions,” impoverished children of the world’s shantytowns should be allowed to sell their organs, limbs, etc. on the international market. Certainly, life is less fun with only one kidney rather than a full set of two, but the income from a kidney sale would be enough to feed one ragamuffin and a good many of his or her relations for more than a year. Would we sooner let a little girl die of starvation rather than let her sell a cornea or a patch of skin?

Opponents of organ sale are snatching food from the mouths of hungry children. Won’t somebody other than Mr. Kristof think of the children? Organ markets now! Organ markets forever!

theworkingworld.org

http://www.worldblu.com/ – democratic workplaces
their list for 2008

Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International
http://www.fairtrade.net/

http://www.nosweatapparel.com/ (this is in the US. I can vouch for the Keds.)

how many of the women and girls are pressured to blow the boss for perks.

Would you really say that to a poor woman who can’t blow anyone for enough to buy a handful of rice?