War and Peace and the Global South

 This early morning blog is inspired by a couple of Fareed Zakaria analogies posted on X.

Spoiler: It's the Females and Youths, Stupid.

This one with General David Petraeus explains why Israel's Generals are splitting with Netanyahu.  If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. Fareed and Petraeus describe America's success in uniting Sunnis and Shia Muslims in Iraq to counter the tribalist ISIS fear and threat-based war on "western civilization" / imposed democracy.

What America represents, at its best, is an alternative to tribalism. Melting iron and zinc together makes a stronger metal (steel) than either iron or zinc. The America "Melting Pot" analogy of the strength of immigration may well be over-plugged and can certainly be criticized for historical injustices, but it's not "wrong". The resentments of European tribes lasted far longer in Europe than their immigrants to the USA posted "Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply". 

As this 2015 NYT article explains, in a review of classified ads from 1855 (ten years before the US Civil War, and during Bleeding Kansas), the employment discrimination was not just ethnic, but was also religious.  "Catholic" was interchangeable with "Irish" in job discrimination.  

Where the "Global South" has succeeded, an element of voluntary melting pot has been necessary, and where the north has waged economy-ruining wars - like Russia v. Ukraine - involuntary efforts to end tribes has been bad for everybody.

What brings hope is a future generation of 15 to 25 year olds who can envision post-tribal, post-lingual, post-religious, post-melanin (skin pigmentation) melting. And I am optimistic that the number of interracial, interreligious, intersectual, interlinguist, intertribal marriages are increasing the number of future 25 year olds able to see the potential wealth in places like Brazil and Nigeria.

360 Degree Racism: The Privileged Wage Collateral Damage on Emerging "E-Waste" Markets

Do rich people have more leverage and 'unfair' advantage in a marketplace?  Absolutely.  No one denies that in a used car transaction that the wealthy owner of the car doesn't have the same need to make the sale, and the poor person - who needs an affordable car to get to work - has more to lose if the sale doesn't happen.  The wealthy have the power and privilege.

That said, the stupidest and most ignorant conclusion is that poor people should be put in a different marketplace than rich people.  That they shouldn't trade together.  Years ago, an NGO leader told me that poor people should repair poor peoples stuff, and rich people should repair rich peoples stuff... that identity should define the legality of the transactions.

It is a kind of stupid that could only occur in a marketplace contaminated by "identity politics".  Instead of talking about the transaction, and what's in the best interest of the free market participants, we are defining them as representatives of social groups.  In a market where some collective guilt or social liability has been whipped into a froth such that the rich person feels liability or exposure to the idea that they have exploited the poor person in a transaction, and therefore choose to shred the car rather than allow anyone to say they sold it in a transaction, to a poor person, in a marketplace where they held the upper hand.

#360DegreeRacism is the spawn of identity politics.

Used Chevy in Poorest Rural Mexico

Fifth Week of USA College Students Apprentice Program in Africa Tech Sector

Fair Trade Recycling Update:  How Four USA College Students Will Change The Way You See Africa's E-Waste.

Zacharia is amazing

Fair Trade Recycling has a positive message.  Like the message in Hans Rosling's seminal "chimpanzee test" video - that ignited Gapminder in Sweden - our programs teach more about emerging markets.  The 1960s "Third World" images are, themselves, a form of pollution.

This summer we have 4 USA college interns working across 2 continents - Africa and North America - to create a partnership in parts supply.  Two students (U of Florida and Middlebury College) have been working in an apprentice program for flat screen TV repair in Ghana.  They are not just learning about T-con boards and controllers, or how to spot and replace overheated capacitors.  They are seeing Africa's Tech Sector as equals.

"Karim Zacharia is amazing!!!"

I like getting that message.  These two Americans are not "saving Africans".  They are not introducing a new "less primitive" technique. They are being exposed to Africa's best and brightest, to people who may well have been on scholarship to an engineering program if they'd been born in different circumstances.

Oxbow Incident: Lord Chris Smith, Interpol and BAN vs "Waste Tourists"

We have met the enemy, and he is us. Walt Kelley's Pogo comic was set in the deep south.

Here on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Summer protests of Mississippi, a 52 year old from Arkansas is working to free Africans wrongfully accused of being "waste tourists" by a well meaning, but culturally tone-deaf, set of environmentalists.

• David Higgins of Interpol
• Lord Chris Smith of the UK Environmental Agency
• Jim Puckett of Basel Action Network

Higgins had assigned a very young Dutch cop, Emile Lindemulder, to set up a task force to make some arrests of people accused of buying toxic e-waste to be burned by children in African city dumps.  This blog shows some of the history, and chronology, which led to the sentencing of Hurricane Joseph Benson in June 2014, and which fuels the momentum of Project Eden...

Project Eden.  Let's return Africa to its innocence, to a time without e-waste.  Here is the chain of events which led to the seizures and arrests and plant closures, stopping people reprocessing CRTs for Africa (Net Peripheral), repairing computers for African internet cafes (MediCom) or selling televisions which 6.9 million Nigerians were using to watch the World Cup in 2006.

Here's how good white people became involved in a modern Oxbow Incident, accidentally profiling the geeks of color I've been fascinated by since I lived in Cameroon, Africa 1984-1986.  The week I left Ngaondal, the first Cameroon television broadcasts in Adamoua Province showed the miniseries of Alex Haley's "Roots".  My landlord showed it in the adjoining house, his livingroom packed, children leaning against the windows outside his house.  He had purchased the first used CRT television in the town of Ngaoundal, a used RCA.

Sometime between December 1986 and now, I'm sure that TV wore out and created the first "e-waste" in my former village.   Some think that makes the person who sold it to my landlord, Sgt Ndjang, somehow guilty of a wastecrime.  As Graham Pickren pointed out in his doctoral thesis, the guilt of the white person who once owned the RCA seems attached, as if a fetish, to the RCA when it is discarded in Africa 15 years later.  What if we sell something to an African which will eventually become waste, VT ANR staff asked my clients?  By that measure, new product is also banned, and Africa will never gain access to the  tree of knowledge, remaining as "Eden" forever.

Heroicizing and Exoticizing the Trade in Small Household Appliances

I was having a little Facebook chat with an old chum from Peace Corps (Cameroon 1984-86) early this morning, and she shared with me a Washington Post article about John Beale, who reported to Gina McCarthy (now head of EPA, and a former upstairs-dweller at EOEA when I worked at Massachusetts DEP's Recycling program in the 1990s).  I'm told that Beale's original development work was legit, but the slippery slope of junkets turned into a kind of riptide.  (If you don't have time for pontification, enjoy this amusing Vimeo parody "License to Chill")

It's about Fufu

Beale often went to Africa.  At the beginning he claimed it was for an international-EPA-outreach on "stoves" for more efficient cooking of fu-fu.   Within the EPA, the story goes, it became widely accepted that  he was actually working for the CIA, and his EPA post was "cover" for cloak and dagger work.

No.  According to his deposition, he was just playing hooky.   His cover story about "cook stoves" (which were nothing we hadn't seen in the 1980s, not much of a cover story for people who lived in Africa) was all he had come up with, and when the internal EPA gossip gave him "CIA" cover, it just made his travel appear more exotic.  We like to be exotic.

I had shared a link with Judi about a "fu-fu pounding machine" covered by an African blogger this week. It reminded me of how many hours of work teenage African girls and their mothers spend pounding nyams and gari into this delicious cookie-dough-like staple.  Fufu is dipped into all kinds of green, brown and orange colored spice gravies.   I wondered to Judi whether appliances like these might play something of the role washing machines and dishwashers are said to have played in the saga of American women's liberation.

Freedom from labor is freedom to read.  In the Mary Poppins movie, the mother is freed to promote "vote for women suffrage" by the housekeepers and hired help.  Democratic participation has always been for people with time on their hands.   Laundromats (which I've sung the praises of before) freed people - mostly women - to have more time after school to study, and to participate in other earning activity.

When Amartya Sen wrote of "100 Million Missing Women" it turned "environmental justice" on its side.  When women's hours are missing from the economy, land values stagnate, wars ensue, social development is stymied, and cultures tend to be, in a word, "more primitive".  With eventual acceptance of the washing machine, we release women to do more productive things.  Like write books, in the case of Rachel Carlson, author or Silent Spring.  (The tangential irony is that women were freed by technology, the downsides of which she aptly described.  Manufacturing of devices created waste and toxics, which tend to wind up in places where land values are lower... This isn't a rant, as I'm a fan of Carson, it's more of a yin yang thing.)

Here's film of the "fufu pounding machine" with traditional (women labor) pounding to the right.  In Africa, hand laundry is pounded in similar way, and as the video demonstrates, automated fufu pounding is a lot like a washer-dryer.  The first ones were probably made with spare WEEE parts (see bottom).

More professional videos (including consumer on the streets interviews) raise fears of change among African men, fear of the unnatural, association with disease, and other modern "modernization juju").  African Men demand  "certification" and call for the machines being "certified".   An opening for fufu Stewards?  What I can hear in the back of my mind is echos of similar "fear of tech", like the effects of train motion on womens uteruses, the hyperbole over direct current electricity, and "ghoulish" practices of computer monitor refurbishing (as described by Puckett and co.).