2008 Woodie Awards
Fair-Trade Coffee needs to be offered at SU
Andrew Curley
Issue date: 10/27/04 Section: Opinion
Peoples in the Untied States have long been disciplined into consuming. In our everyday experiences we learn to seek out advantages in discounted prices with improved quality or increased portions. This is all part of the Capitalist experience. Adam Smith first advocated these effects through the popularized metaphor of an "invisible hand," implying our natural tendencies to seek out our best interests will ultimately discipline "the market." But with such abstract rational comes a loss of tangible senses, a loss of community and concern for the general welfare of our fellow human beings.
The poorest feature of Capitalism is that it promotes stark class-stratification. There are only winners and losers in this system. We, peoples of the United States, are all winners in its process. Our government has secured through violent means resources enough to guarantee most of us much wealth. Obviously we live in far better conditions than peoples in most other nations throughout the world, particularly peoples from nations that form the base on which our pillars of economic exploitation are built.
We have demoralized and economically pillaged nations; creating a cheap and dependent labor from their national workforces-thereby creating for us an abundance of discounted goods we overly consume. Yet we don't bare the costs of these discounts. Peoples abroad, forced into an indentured servitude of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization or any other such free-trade Neo-Liberal economic agreement must forever mend our clothes, assemble our products and toil tirelessly through pesticide-ridden fields to grow "cash" crops for benefit of our consumption. They are the losers.
But they are losers for no rational reason. After all, factory workers in Indonesia, China or Mexico work longer, harder hours than we do in the United States. Farmers in Vietnam, Columbia and Nicaragua are more disciplined and are steadier laborers than we can ever aspire to be. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of domestic exploitation, but it's not done on a scale similar to what peoples in these cited nations must endure. But this has all been said before and no convenient solution seems probable to appeal to the wicked laziness of "Americans."