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Extraordinary column from Nicholas Kristof. A defense of sweatshops.
Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.
This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.
The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.
Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough. …
… Look, I know that Americans have a hard time accepting that sweatshops can help people. But take it from 13-year-old Neuo Chanthou, who earns a bit less than $1 a day scavenging in the dump. She’s wearing a “Playboy” shirt and hat that she found amid the filth, and she worries about her sister, who lost part of her hand when a garbage truck ran over her.
“It’s dirty, hot and smelly here,” she said wistfully. “A factory is better.”
A Chinatown sweatshop in lower Manhattan served as one of the first location shoots of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose series on PBS in 1980. The link will take you to IdeaChannel.tv for two versions of Free to Choose. First the 5 episode 1990 edition with an introduction by a version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he went over to the dark side. Next are the original 10 episodes from 1980. You can watch the streaming video of both editions. The sweatshop scene appears 9 minutes 40 seconds into Vol. One of the 1990 edition, and 4 minutes 10 seconds into Vol. One from 1980. Pickerhead can’t think of a better way to spend time in front of a computer.
We continue with our series from Bush fans in the foreign press. Last week we ended with Canada and the U. K.. Now the Australian foreign affairs editor.
THE final word on George W. Bush’s foreign policy belongs, perhaps, to his successor, Barack Obama, who will be inaugurated as president of the US next week. In his most wide-ranging television interview on foreign policy, Obama was asked last week whether he stood by a remark he made in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which has been constantly shelled by Hamas rockets from the Gaza Strip. Obama said that if his town, where his daughters slept each night, was constantly being attacked by rockets he would want to do something about it.
In the light of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the TV interviewer asked if Obama still felt that way?
He replied: “That’s a basic principle of any country: that they’ve got to protect their citizens.”
Obama was further asked to differentiate himself as strongly as possible from the Bush administration’s policy of supporting Israel. Would he instead be ushering in a bold new policy?
Obama replied: “If you look not just at the Bush administration but what happened under the Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outlines of an approach.”
Good grief! These words should shock every true Bush hater in the world. But wait, there’s more.
Obama’s nominee for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that the Obama administration would put more emphasis on diplomacy and try to engage Syria and Iran in dialogue. (Just, indeed, as the Bush administration has tried to do.)
But, just like Bush, she and the new administration would not take the military option off the table in dealing with Iran.
On Hamas, she said: “You cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognises Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements. That is an absolute. That is my position and the president-elect’s position.” It is also one of the most contentious positions of President Bush, Democrat Obama’s Republican predecessor. …
David Warren noticed the temperature outside.
… Both Barack Obama in the U.S., and Stephen Harper up here, are on the cusp of announcing ambitious new “climate” plans founded upon last decade’s laughably “settled climate science.” They may be chastened by the economic downturn, and even by the progressive disintegration of the global warming lobby, but the bureaucratic machinery to fight “global warming” is a very great ship, and it is too late to steer her off the shoals. The only new thing will be the excuses.
The current excuse is that governments are on the verge of legislating millions of new “green jobs.” This imposture will work only as long as people refuse to devote the necessary four minutes to thinking the matter through.
The only way to reduce energy consumption is by penalizing it in some way; generally by driving up prices, but occasionally by ham-fisted legal action. Driving up prices does not save jobs, at least, not in that part of the economy responsive to market forces (which generates the taxes to support the rest). It can only cost jobs — as energy itself, and energy-intensive products, are priced out of reach to those whose wealth is diminished. That wealth is diminished, like a candle burning at both ends, by inevitably higher taxes at one end, and inevitably higher prices at the other. …
David Harsanyi says the debate is over, it’s freezing.
The carbon footprint of Barack Obama’s inauguration could exceed 575 million pounds of CO2. According to the Institute for Liberty, it would take the average U.S. household nearly 60,000 years of naughty ecological behavior to produce a carbon footprint equal to the largest self-congratulatory event in the history of humankind.
The same congressfolk who are now handing out thousands of tickets to this ecological disaster only last year mandated the phased elimination of the incandescent light bulb — a mere carbon tiptoe, if you will. The whole thing seems a bit unfair.
And, on the day millions of Americans were freezing their collective backsides off, new Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman announced that Congress would fast-track climate change legislation. Waxman claimed “inaction on the climate issue is causing uncertainties that make it more difficult to emerge from the recession,” according to The Associated Press.
Waxman’s methane emission would merely reek if it weren’t so catastrophically sad. I learned long ago that any dissent on climate alarmism will be met with unflinching fury, but is there anyone who can genuinely argue that inaction on “climate issues” (formerly known as global warming) has had a fundamental impact on the economic downturn? …
Ann Coulter provides more chilling facts as she deconstructs the NY Times’ latest slander of our troops.
In a front-page article on Jan. 2 of this year, The New York Times took a brief respite from its ongoing canonization of Barack Obama and returned to its series on violent crimes committed by returning GIs, or as I call it: “U.S. Military, Psycho Killers.”
The Treason Times’ banner series about Iraq and Afghanistan veterans accused of murder began in January last year but was quickly discontinued as readers noticed that the Times doggedly refused to provide any statistics comparing veteran murders with murders in any other group.
So they waited a year, hoping readers wouldn’t notice they were still including no relevant comparisons.
What, for example, is the percentage of murderers among veterans compared to the percentage of murderers in the population at large — or, more germane, in the general population of young males, inasmuch as violent crime is committed almost exclusively by young men? …
Jimmy Carter’s Zimbabwe issues $100 Trillion dollar bill.
American Thinker from June 2007 blogs on Carter’s work in Zimbabwe.
Michael Barone notices a change might be taking place in migration patterns.
Evidence keeps accumulating that the tide of immigration is ebbing. Tough enforcement laws passed by states like Arizona and Oklahoma and localities like Prince William County, Va., have reportedly spurred Latino immigrants to move elsewhere. Tougher enforcement of federal immigration laws may be having the same effect.
Classrooms in Orange County, Calif., are suddenly half-empty. Latino day laborers seem to be less thick on the ground at their morning gathering places. Remittances to Mexico and other Latin countries are down, and men are returning to some villages from the United States.
Latinos appear to account for a disproportionate share of mortgage foreclosures. The Census Bureau estimates that net immigration in 2007-08 was 14 percent lower than the average for 2000-07, and those estimates don’t cover the period after June 30, when the recession really started hitting.
Demographic forecasters tend to assume that the long-term future will look a lot like the short-term past. That’s why the Census Bureau estimates that there will be more than 100 million people classifying themselves as Hispanics in 2050, compared to 45 million today. But history tells us that trend lines don’t go on forever. Sometimes they turn around and go downward. …
Swedish paper says drinking coffee lessens likelihood of Alzheimer’s.
Our humor section starts with Joe Biden talking about himself. Power Line with the details.
Joe Biden has been talking about his favorite topic — Joe Biden. In particular, he’s been attempting to talk his way past the widespread view that he, Joe Biden, marks a return to the days of the irrelevant vice president. Talkin’ Joe himself has contributed to that perception by insisting that he will not be like Dick Cheney. …
… Joe Biden has found his role in the Obama administration. It will be the self-referential one of defending his importance. Biden is the best suited vice president to play this role since anybody.
Rick Brookhiser comments on Biden.