What Does The Term "Third World" Mean Today?

My suggestion is that we just stop using the term "Third World" and "Lesser Developed Country" altogether.

There are certainly places with incredible poverty.   Like, say, the poverty I knew about in the Ozarks as a kid.  Not that I suffered it, or even that many people I know suffered it.  But it was in our rear view mirror, through our parents and grandparents, who lived in the Ozarks during the Depression and before electricity, running water, and hospitals were commonplace.

I've posted a few times about my mom's father, Clarence E. Fisher, pictured above. This was a photo I took as a teenager.  He had a tractor, but had gone back to his mule ("Jenny") for old times sake and found that he really liked ploughing that way.  He was a subsistence farmer and an excellent carpenter and painter.   And someone who convinced me it was going to be really important to me the rest of my life to know how everything worked, and how to fix stuff.

Say It Out Loud. I Fix and I'm Proud

"We demands a chance to do things for ourself/we're tired of beating our head against the wall/and workin' for someone else" - James Brown (I'm Black and I'm Proud, 1968)

1968, I was 6 years old, and I remember this song.  I remember my parents, whites from the Ozarks, reacting to it... good people, but completely unable to appreciate James Brown's signing, or the lyrics to his song.  (skip to bottom to play Brown's music video)

And now we demands a chance To do things for ourselves we tired of beating our heads against the wall And working for someone else 

How can people be anything but proud to do business with these technicians of color in Ghana?  How low can we possibly stoop to defend the prison sentence of Joseph Benson for selling gently used electronics goods to these smart people in these markets?

The hardest working man in show business had a lot in common with the hardest working people in the electronics reuse and repair business.  I speak to people who are afraid to sell to these techs of color.   They would be ashamed, they say, if the clients knew they were trading to Africa.

Color and shame?

Say it loud.

The trip to Africa is not like my trips to China in 2002 and 2005.  This time, I already have the photos, I already have the records.   This time I'm not going to "investigate", to be the great white savior.  Been there, ashamed of that.   This time I'm going to meet friends of my friends.



Uh, with your bad self 
Say it louder (I got a mouth) 
Say it louder (I got a mouth) 


Look a'here, some people say we got a lot of malice 
Some say it's a lotta nerve 
I say we won't quit moving 
Til we get what we deserve 
We've been buked and we've been scourned 
We've been treated bad, talked about 
As just as sure as you're born 
But just as sure as it take 
Two eyes to make a pair, huh 
Brother, we can't quit until we get our share 

Term "Third World" is Anti-Second-Hand Propaganda

How "e-Waste Tragedy" propaganda is imprisoning African Geeks, Nerds, and Technicians.

1. 

1. The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO (with the United States, Western European nations and their allies representing the First World), or the Communist Bloc (with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and their allies representing the Second World).

2. Third World - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
   

   Wikipedia
3. 
   

Ok.  So, the number of people who are not aligned with either the Soviets or NATO is... irrelevant.







Now, we all have friends who are overly anxious to impart their trust quickly on the statistic which affirms their bias.   The "bias confirmation" here could be something Eric and I suffer from.

We see that people are being arrested for importing stuff which mostly works.  To us, banning the trade between rich and poor makes as much sense as outlawing the used car market.

Bullyboys 8: Bright African Lights, Big African City

"They shouldn't have to make that choice."  This was the NGO leader's answer to CBS Reporter (now anchor) Scott Pelley in 2008, when Pelley asked whether the scrap pickers in Guiyu had another job to go to.

Johnny Be Goode Enough.

Perhaps they did have another choice.  Picking cabbage. Agriculture is an honorable job.  A dangerous job, a job with insecticides, moving blades, and risk of death.  But many of the Africans in TV repair could, if they wanted, have stayed in the rural sahel, Savannah or forests.

Just don't kid yourself, it's not "back to Eden."
MRO - Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul - if taken off the table - leaves worse choices.

This is the eighth blog about the decision to scrimmage environmental enforcement agents to arrest "e-waste #wastecrime criminals".   I've focused on Joe Benson, because his was the case Jim Puckett put on display at a conference last November, showing off news coverage by UK Independent reporter Cahil Milmo.

Maybellene, why can't you be true?

Last November, at that "E-waste Summit" in Las Vegas, I had a face to face with Jim Puckett and Mike Enberg of BAN and E-Stewards, which I wrote about in the "Environmental Malpractice" series.  That series of blogs centered around the Interpol crackdown (which we were documenting before Interpol's press release).   Jim and Mike are really nice people with good hearts, and I wanted to try to just ask them why they wouldn't be concerned about a man like Joe Benson, who Jim had just run down in his Powerpoint (without recognize the man's name... You've been reporting his arrest for years, trumpeting it in your 2009 Annual Report, pairing the news with Pieter Hugo photos... and don't know his name...)

He never ever learned to read and write so well, but he could [fix a TV] just like ringing a bell.

"Collateral Damage?"  Did Jim actually say those words?  I swear he did.  He said he felt bad for any individual caught violating international law, as a person.   But the law must be enforced.  If we can arrest a TV repairman, who can't we arrest for #wastecrime?  Metal sorters? Cabbage fertilizers?  Fair Trade Cotton farmers?  Cabbage dealers?  For most of the people in the developing and emerging markets, the bottom line is that Europe is a lot like Africa.   Badges and handcuffs and financial fines are the tools of bullyboys.  No habeus corpus, no Basel law broken, just a presumption of "primitive", based on what?

Ask Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird while Chuck Berry was in prison, convicted under the Mann Act, a border-crossing crime, like Joe Jackson (the boxer).  It has been a few years, Benson seems ripe for a cross-border crime.

In Europe: On the Trail of the Great Grey Whale

The Great White Whale, from Moby Dick, is a story which combines the medieval tales of obsession (Gawain and the Green Knight, or the Jaborwocky) with the exoticism of travel and foreign adventure.

This isn't one of those literary blogs, but I was in Lyon France yesterday (home of Interpol offices), and next week I'll be driving through Geneva, Basel, and home of the European Union (Strassberg).  I flew in with my family to Denmark (spending 3 nights with old Scandinavian chums), and we drove south, stopping in twice in Germany and Luxembourg, then Lyons, and now find ourselves in Perpignan.

Next week I leave them here and drive back solo, hoping for a series of gams on WasteCrime policy, WEEE rules, with the final stop in London.  It's not just a chance to charge part of the trip to business (though it's legitimately that as well), but also hopefully a chance to meet Joseph Benson, face to face, outside Heathrow.

Most of the Europeans I've spoken to an this trip know as much as the average American about used appliances.  Our Scandinavian friends told about how their package delivery man (an African immigrant) asked them to buy an old freezer one day, which he saw outside the house.   They said it was for the dump and he could have it. and he explained that on his trips back to Africa, he always sends a sea container of repairable WEEE for friends and family to fix.

Euroeans gam on stoneage Europeans - whoa

The friends are both archaeologists or anthropologists at a Norwegian university, and are able to talk about cultural tools and relics from stoneage times (we visited a Stoneage Village outside Vinderup, Denmark, see photo).  We drank, and talked about what would be left of our time for future archeologists and anthropologists to comb through?

Then talked about fake antiques, like the fake-vintage-toys I saw for sale at a French highway rest stop (possibly refurbished, but no way were these "as is" condition, and I suspect they were just "made in China" like every other toy at the rest stop).   The way age and value intersect can make the marketplace, and is easy to study in economics.  But when the trade is layered by race and nationality and geography, it becomes too complex a legal maze, and the burden of proof shifts against the Africans I recklessly presumed to be innocent.

• Fake antiques.
• Actors playing in stone-age villages.
• Used electronics, sold for reuse

The Economist: Follow the Fixers

From this week's The Economist:  Follow the Fixers

Who to partner with in Africa, if you are trying your hand at business development?

"AS GLOBAL investors salivate over Africa's economic growth, Ashish Thakkar, founder of the Mara Group, explains why success still hinges on local knowledge"

I repost this because it's very close to my takeaway, when I left Africa, thinking "I shall return".   The people who fix things, who tinker, who repair.  They tend not to be liars.  It's not the way a Fixer's brain is wired.

This interview by the Economist with African development expert Ashish Thakkar says much the same thing.

"What do you think is the single most important thing..." to help Africa?

Answer:  People who make improvements.   Follow people who fix things.

EWaste Hero: Silicon Sam

How do you know if it's exported for repair or for scrap?

Circuit board repairs, capacitor replacements, chip replacement, solder bypass -- these are all electronics repair techniques WR3A has filmed in Egypt, Peru, Senegal, Indonesia, Malaysia and China.  But people often ask me how we can really know whether a piece of electronics is really repairable before it is exported? 


Here's to Samuel M. Goldwasser, 
a.k.a. "Silicon Sam".  

Troubleshooting and Repair of Consumer Electronic Equipment 

Including: Test Equipment, Supplies, Parts, Incredibly Handy Widgets(tm),

Sources of Information, and Where to Find Broken Stuff
Version 2.45 (08-Mar-09)

Copyright © 1994-2009
Samuel M. Goldwasser

Sam "wrote the book" on electronics repair between 1994 and "as we speak".  Or rather, the website.  His FAQ on repair of electronics became a bible for my early research on requests from overseas buyers.

• Want to fix a VCR?
• Want to fix a turntable?
• Want to fix a monochrome computer monitor?
• Want to fix a color TV?

The Silicon Sam website is simply and efficiently written.  Moreover, the "usenet" group and google groups pages offer real-time advice, feedback, and guidance on repair jobs in action.  In the original FAQ, Goldwasser-man used web pages to "nest" answers for follow up (so if you needed more information on the flyback you and click-to-follow, or digress).  In the 1990s, USA electronics repairmen looking to check their work or troubleshoot a component began driving up the page rankings for Silicon Sam's FAQ, which was uploaded onto a server at Drexel University.  The site is regularly accessed  by repairpeople worldwide - In India, Thailand, South Africa, and Brazil, repairpeople are logging onto RepairFAQ every hour.

When it comes to exports, the Silicon Sam site is one side of the "rosetta stone" of ethical exports.   The other side is to look at the scrap value of the item (metal and plastic).  You ask for the price offered by the buyer, and then look up the troubleshooting guidelines via Silicon Sam.

A repairable unit should be worth MORE than scrap.  And a non-repairable unit should not be accepted at the same price (if at all) as the repairable unit.

The problem is that American exporters are shipping without even screening the material on "silicon sam's" website.   "As Is" sales do definitely include a lot of repairable equipment, but they might also include "toxics along for the ride".  A really good buyer will tell you to screen for the exact same problems as you find on the Silicon Sam RepairFAQ... if the tube is imploded (the phosphors disturbed on the inside of the CRT), it's not repairable, and you should not insist the buyer take it.

Why not just destroy all of it, just to make sure none is exported as E-waste?  I think that a med school student's key to online success at the University of Cairo is worth paying people to screen the equipment by Silicon Sam guidelines.  If a buyer will PAY $5 for one 1999 Samtron 17" monitor, but refuses (or charges a recycling fee) for the exact same Samtron 17" monitor because of a "troubleshooting" inspection, that's a repairman who knows his stuff.  If they reject the imploded tube, then the screened one was not sold for the raw materials, was it?

And it was NOT a waste.