No Logo

I didn't read No Logo when it first came out because I was already a no logo kind of girl. It was worth reading though because she fleshed out the whole sweatshop situation for me. After spending the first few chapters describing how companies have gone from making products to advertising them to branding and now focus only on creating an image, she describes how the whole sweatshop issue is a result of companies getting rid of their own factories and searching for the cheapest labor to assemble their products.

Contractors compete with each other to get those everyday low prices for them. This created what were basically indoor work camps, all over Asia, enclosed in walled compounds that were protected from local taxes in an effort to lure the big name "investors". These "export processing zones" or "free trade zones" are impenetrable to outsiders and short on inspectors. The labor, usually teenage girls and young women, are kept intimidated to discourage labor unions from forming. So what we're talking about here is a structural component of globalization. Countries compete with each other for the big brand name investors so they grant the foreign investor immunity from their own laws regarding minimum wage and conditions, while inspectors turned a blind eye to violations of safety and overtime claiming those to be a management problem. Brand name companies don't have to face the conditions they have created until activists force them to.

Klein asked the same question posed by Travels Of A T-shirt in which the author claims that such factory work is preferable to working on the farm. This was also a statement made by one of the factory owners. The girls are outraged by this assumption and point out that it is just a justification given by those who employ them. One said she missed her family and wished she was at home with them because at least when she was sick there would be someone to take care of her. And they only make enough money to cover expenses so they have little opportunity to either help their family or improve their own lives. Klein gained access to the factories by sneaking into one of the compounds. The author of the t-shirt book was invited into a factory by the owner, so there are factories and there are factories. As I learned from the Green Festival, activists have now established fair trade guidelines and factories that comply to their guidelines can register as a fair trade factory.

Klein also gave me insight into what happened to activism when it got mired in identity politics. She herself was in college fighting for women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, etc. as was I. The problem was that the politics became all about equal representation in the media and equal opportunity for jobs. The equal representation part was co-opted by advertisers looking for niche markets while the equal opportunity for jobs became all about access for middle class women and minorities. Everyone forgot all about the poor and the class system that made sure the poor would remain poor. My complaint was that gay rights had become all about rights for gay people who could present as nearly identical to straight white married upper middle-class people. And women's rights had become all about getting women into the CEO's office while neglecting them at the welfare mom level.

She points out how activists narrowed down their focus, but that there's been a come back as students came to understand that the shirt on their backs was made by their peers in sweatshop conditions and began to protest globalization. Her book predates the WTO protest in Seattle, so she was on the pulse. In the end she acknowledges that there is a limit to activism focused on brand names, while the bigger damage is being done by companies that extract resources and aren't household names.

The Secret History of the American Empire

The fun of reading John Perkins is that his books are more like spy novels than heavy reading about globalization and empire building. So interspersed between exotic descriptions of Asian hotties entertaining corporate hit men, are nice summations of how the IMF, World Bank and economic hit men collude to bring countries into the corporate empire. Basically the same ground as covered in Shock Doctrine, but with more stories of illicit CIA activity.

Often his sources are cloak and dagger in their anonymity. This seems to render him suspect in the eyes of many skeptical readers, but the stories are still compelling and likely true. I mean why wouldn't they be? We now know from recently declassified reports that there was indeed a CIA backed coup to overthrow Allende and then he was assassinated. He describes how a democratically elected leader might be elected based on his promises to help the poor, distribute land and otherwise take resources away from corporations by nationalizing mines, oil reserves, etc,. This is when corporate economic hit men first try to bring around the elected leader with bribes, then when that doesn't work, the CIA jackals threaten him and if that doesn't take, the CIA stage a coup and finally an assassination if he can't be budged.

He also tells the story of a young couple who wanted to find out what life was really like as a sweatshop worker living on $2.41 a day in Indonesia. Conditions described were bordering on destitute so now I'm really mad at the economics professor who wrote Travels of a T-shirt and concluded that these jobs were giving women economic freedom. Besides with the Gap being exposed as an employer of child slave labour, I'm even more inclined to assume that bad conditions and human rights violations are more the rule than the scandalous exception.

There was also another interesting tidbit about OPEC and the gas shortage of the '70s. According to his sources, Nixon was playing a brilliant game of chess by backing Israel in the Six day war which he knew would piss off the Arabs who then raised oil prices. This is interesting in that I've not read anywhere else that pissing off the Arabs was intentional. It was after that that economic hitmen were sent into Saudi Arabia to make a deal for corporations to handle all their infrastructure. US also persuaded them to invest their oil money in American treasury bonds and agree to only sell oil for dollars. Since Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard this gave the dollar an "oil" standard which we are busy trying to protect by going to war in any oil producing country that makes deals to sell oil in Euros. Speculators seem to betting that the Euro will win, given the 40% devaluation of the dollar in recent years.

His stories about Africa tell how NGOs and the Peace Corp are inadvertantly helping corporate takeover, by instilling first world living standards. For the amount of money spent to send over Western "teachers", they could be developing teachers who are already there who know the land already and how to farm it. Instead the Peace Corps teachers are bringing in GMO seeds and pesticides and fertilizers to "help" farmers get into debt and kill off their land.

And finally he talks about how to make change, telling stories of how Rainforest Action Network got their point across through public humiliation of corporations like Home Depot. He emphasizes that even though companies seem so big, so was the English crown to the colonialists. Though it's not my preferred metaphor, he does persuade me to believe that ordinary people can put pressure on corporations.