Few institutional markers better reflect the U.S.A.'s self-inflicted isolation than Labor Day, celebrated on the first Monday of September rather than May 1, or May Day. A holiday hiding its American origin, ignoring continued U.S. dependence on foreign oil, labor and materials, perpetuating global inequities and encouraging a crazed march to empire, brutally reminds those of us living elsewhere, "Americans are crazy".
Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore, | My flashlight's from Taiwan, | My tablecloth's from Malaysia, | My belt buckle's from the Amazon. | You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines | And the car I drive is a Chevrolet, | It was put together down in Argentina | By a guy makin' thirty cents a day. | Well, it's sundown on the union | And what's made in the U.S.A. | Sure was a good idea | 'Til greed got in the way.
Bob Dylan | Union Sundown
To most, Labor Day is a holiday without historical significance. Only by tracing its origins to a political sop do we uncover American workers' contribution to humanizing the global workplace. Through an 1884 resolution by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Union calling for an eight-hour workday from May 1, 1886, Americans gave the world a commercial conscience and International Workers Day or, as it is better known by those not bludgeoned by Cold War rhetoric, May Day.
Baptized in the blood of those killed early May 1886 by big business and the police at Chicago's McCormick Reaper Works Factory and Haymarket Square, May Day's history continues to defy attempts by government, business, the media, and organizations such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO) to airbrush militant shop-floor and social dissent.
In 1947, as a cynical, backhand tribute to the American worker's potential to shape the world, the diehard right recast May Day in its image, renaming it Loyalty Day. In consigning to the dustbin a history that shaped global perceptions of labor's social and economic relevance, post-WWII reactionaries defined the pursuit of the dollar as capitalism's most noble pursuit. Unhappily, by ruling labor's role to be no more than incidental to capitalism's self-justifying ends, they tarnished capitalism's image for good.
Half a century later, we are reaping the fruits of their blind obeisance to the greenback rather than the people responsible for its existence. Addressing U.S. domestic labor practices perfected by organizations drunk on Republican power, Human Rights Watch offers a 217-page report, Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards.
The report's Key Findings list workplace injustices similar to those prevailing in countries the United States self-righteously calls to order. Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth is blunt: "The cards are stacked against workers in the United States. The U.S. government cannot effectively press another country to improve labor standards while violating them itself. It should lead by example."
As Bob says, "It sure sounds like a good idea."
Well, this silk dress is from Hong Kong | And the pearls are from Japan. | Well, the dog collar's from India | And the flower pot's from Pakistan. | All the furniture, it says "Made in Brazil" | Where a woman, she slaved for sure | Bringin' home thirty cents a day to a family of twelve, | You know, that's a lot of money to her. | Well, it's sundown on the union | And what's made in the U.S.A. | Sure was a good idea | 'Til greed got in the way.
American labor functions in a cocooned world shaped by illegitimate political leaders, crooked business practices and pliant media interests. With workers increasingly dedicated to serving paper and high-tech industries built on raw materials gouged from foreign soils, the harsh world of the foreign worker toiling for nominal wages from African-based U.S. multinationals means as little to the average American as the blood-and-guts origins of Labor Day.
Further, with qualified immigrants falling outside the Caucasian fold habitually given menial or 'invisible' jobs servicing infrastructure, many Americans are unaware of Africa's continuing centuries-old contribution to the U.S. economy. Call it African aid, if you will. Alternatively, choke on this. Africa was subsidizing the American Way long before the War of Independence. Our economic ties are stronger than U.S. politicians would have us remember.
Plying the African coast, Sixteenth Century Spanish and Portuguese slave traders worked the continent's shores for human ore, initiating a trading history favoring colonial interests. By 1800, joined by the English and astute businessmen and sailors from the New England and mid-Atlantic colonies, slavers delivered a labor pool of 1,000,000 Africans to North America's shores.
Despite the influx, the U.S.A. saw no future in Africa. At the 1884-1885 Berlin conference sanctioning the occupation of sub-Saharan Africa by Europe, American territorial and commercial ambitions in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and Asia caused the U.S.A. to limit its sphere of commercial influence to Liberia, the war-torn West African country created in 1847 to accommodate freed slaves no longer wanted in North America.
Today, however, as the G.O.P. aggressively seeks to ensconce itself in oil-rich Francophone Africa, the spectral reality of a close, pre-existing relationship points to a tough future resisting a new American colonialism.
African aid to the United States continues to take the form of human and mineral resources. This largesse would be endearing were it not coerced, corrupt or downright suicidal. A continent ravaged by emigration, corruption, AIDS, war and famine cannot afford to subsidize Northern lifestyles.
Yet, skills acquired in the U.S.A. during the 1960s by Africans enjoying the first flush of freedom from colonial rule continue to benefit the American economy. During the 70s and 80s, Africa's marginalization and deplorable living conditions led to a mass exodus of local and foreign-trained graduates, most returning with their families to the relative comfort and security afforded them by their reborn benefactors. Despite cultural differences and racism leading to Africans being absorbed primarily by the recession-prone secondary or support sector of the job market, they were happy to take on jobs most Americans chose wisely to avoid.
In 1993, the UNDP Human Development Report stated that, despite a devastating shortage of doctors in Nigeria, more than 21,000 Nigerian doctors practiced in the United States. The same report tells us that sixty percent of Ghanaian doctors trained by that country during the 1980s had emigrated.
In 2000, as in 1800, as many as 1,000,000 Africans lived and worked in the United States, forming a vast 'cheap but qualified' labor pool. On the face of it, Africa and the U.S.A.'s trading partnership had changed little in the two hundred years spanning the Nineteenth and Twenty First Centuries.
Well, you know, lots of people complainin' that there is no work. | I say, "Why you say that for | When nothin' you got is U.S.-made?" | They don't make nothin' here no more, | You know, capitalism is above the law. | It say, "It don't count 'less it sells." | When it costs too much to build it at home | You just build it cheaper someplace else. | Well, it's sundown on the union | And what's made in the U.S.A. | Sure was a good idea | 'Til greed got in the way.
For centuries, the African worker supporting the American lifestyle has suffered the thin end of the wedge. A globalization skewed in favor of the North and dangerous protectionism perpetuate global inequity. With African trade barred entry to North America by N.A.F.T.A. and subject to draconian programs devised by the W.T.O., the I.M.F. and the World Bank, the U.S. has left it to other G8 countries to finance necessary, viable African initiatives such as N.E.P.A.D. and the African Union (AU). With a tunnel-vision G.O.P. intent on securing global mineral interests through select implementations of its Global Transaction Strategy, hopes for U.S. fiscal aid now border on the delusional.
Outside of the U.S.A., Compassionate Conservatism is seen for what it is, a cruel and ugly oxymoron. Most would prefer the benign neglect of previous Republican administrations any day.
While its multinationals continue to harvest 'blood' diamonds in Angola, mine coltan for the cell phone industry in Democratic Republic of Congo (D.R.C.), pump oil from Equatorial Guinea's blood-drenched earth, and dump genetically modified crops on starving populations, the U.S. government is increasing military exports to Africa while withholding much-needed humanitarian and medical aid. On the agricultural front, legislation such as the United States Farm Act of 2002 has increased already massive subsidies for American farmers to generate a glut of cotton, sugar and grain; all prime African export crops.
Africans make do with one-sided impositions such as the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (A.G.O.A.), a hopelessly inadequate 'economic growth package' designed to ensure beneficiaries' full compliance with U.S. foreign policy. This is a bargain-basement deal considering the minimal aid likely to accrue to any country buying into the P.N.A.C., National Intelligence Council (N.I.C.), and G.O.P. global agenda.
All in all, U.S. aid to the vast, AIDS-ravaged, drought-stricken region comprising sub-Saharan Africa amounted to $1,4 billion in 2002, a sum equal to that given Israel and Egypt, or enough money to keep 137,000 US troops in Iraq for two weeks.
In the face of a dire need for sustainable development, African exports made under A.G.O.A. to the U.S.A. fell by 15,7 percent in 2002. Contrary to the agreement's stated aim of increasing Africa's export of textiles, 75 percent of African exports for the period comprised petroleum and oil exports, emphasizing the U.S.A.'s readiness to favor raw-material extraction over internal capital or skills development.
What is the result of this imbalance of human and mineral trade?
Agreements reached between unscrupulous multinationals and corrupt leaders perpetuate a paradox of poverty. Despite vast oil revenues accruing to Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Angola, and other countries, their people are poorer than ever. With U.S. dependence on African oil set to rise to 25 percent by 2015, the track records of African leaders, the U.S. government and its oil companies promise only greater suffering.
The simple truth is that, as U.S. aid to Africa dries up, Africa's accelerating brain drain constitutes dramatically increased African aid to the United States.
Well, the job that you used to have, | They gave it to somebody down in El Salvador. | The unions are big business, friend, | And they're goin' out like a dinosaur. | They used to grow food in Kansas | Now they want to grow it on the moon and eat it raw. | I can see the day coming when even your home garden | Is gonna be against the law. | Well, it's sundown on the union | And what's made in the U.S.A. | Sure was a good idea | 'Til greed got in the way.
Continued African-American interdependence is important to both parties. Africa needs humanitarian aid, technology transfers, and structural stability. The U.S.A. needs our mineral wealth. That said, the acrimony born of a master-slave relationship, where military, technological and financial clout are used to bludgeon Africa to subservient acquiescence, or murderous leaders such as Equatorial Guinea's Teodore Obiang control offshore accounts of $500 million and buy their multi-million dollar U.S.-based homes for cash while their people starve, just won't work.
Adversarial relationships suit the neo-conservatives driving the Bush agenda. They nurture the Obiangs of this world for their own ends. U.S. foreign policy tells us Africa falls into a neo-conservative 'Gap' of dysfunctional countries separated from a functioning 'Core'. The neo-cons aim to 'shrink' this 'Gap'. As Naval War College strategist Thomas P.M. Barnett puts it, "Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities."
The 'export of security' is the export of war.
The U.S.A. has to entrench itself in Francophone Africa if it is to gain effective control of Africa and its immense mineral and oil wealth (a lighter, sweeter crude than that found in the Middle East). Its campaign against the French already well under way, American talk of military bases stretching across the continent is not new. Lending urgency to military planners calling for sea bases, the Department of Defense is beefing up its presence in the north, east and west, and conservatives tout South Africa as a 'seam' state, a country with which the United States can do business.
Once the brouhaha surrounding the 2004 elections dies down, Americans will hear far more of the World Bank's ecologically unsound Chad-Cameroon pipeline, support for dysfunctional states such as Nigeria, Gabon and others, and a permanent military presence on S�o Tom�-Principe, an island state sitting on 4.5 billion barrels of crude 40 minutes flying time from Malabo, capital of Equatorial Guinea, and midway between the oil-rich Niger Delta and Angola's Cabinda province.
The nut of it is that, be we African, American, Asian or European, we are in this together. So, as you settle down to a relaxed and enjoyable Labor Day, spare a thought for the abused American office worker, the African laborer coerced into working for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Petronas, Vanco, Elf, Phillips, Trophy, Shell or any other multinational oil company, and all who presently (perhaps unwittingly) serve narrow Washington-based vested interests.
(If you're unable to, remember Mogadishu instead.)
Democracy don't rule the world, | You'd better get that in your head. | This world is ruled by violence | But I guess that's better left unsaid. | From Broadway to the Milky Way, | That's a lot of territory indeed | And a man's gonna do what he has to do | When he's got a hungry mouth to feed. | Well, it's sundown on the union | And what's made in the U.S.A. | Sure was a good idea | 'Til greed got in the way.
Bob Dylan | Union Sundown
[First posted at Open Source Politics]
