Injury Box Blog: Pics Parasites Poverty

Last week I "kinda severely" injured my left hamstring in two winter-home-weatherization related incidents.  What has been frustrating has been to be home-bound but unable to sit still, upright in a chair for long.  Makes for halting, sporadic blogging.

Last weekend's post "Missing Poverty: Poverty Comedy" was messy, but I'm kind of excited by something that turned up from inside it.   The parallels between 1960s Ozarks and 2010s West Africa is not exactly uncanny, we've even been there before.  But the Hans Rosling videos I've been engrossed by this winter helped me generalize my subjective insights.



In 2009, South Korea became the first former recipient of OECD economic assistance to join the assistance giving committee.   South Korea was admitted to the OECD in 1996, 25 years after OECD was defined.  The 1961 original OECD membership list was whites - only (not even Japan was considered "developed").  Kids in college today are getting a message about "developing world" from people who considered South Korea a charity case, and they are getting the message on Samsung handheld devices (which they use to shop for Hyundais and Subarus in another tab).

You can track affluence and progress through lifecycle of appliances.  Koreans bought used products from affluent 1970s Japan.  Selling a first used car to a teenager is not necessarily "exploiting" the teenager.  Selling a starter home to a young family is not making them poor.  The guilt-by-association with poverty dogs the used goods market, and photographic snapshots of poverty should not become a modern soul snatching juju.

It's a fallacy that invokes instincts of nurture and instincts of aversion, and it sways crowds of people who self identify as "Agents of Conscience".   The key is to understand spiritual materialism (the desire to be a good soul) and history of development.  Rosling has shown how the majority of humans, like my Ozark cousins, have emerged from poverty within generational memory.  We need to explain to the Royals that fixing and recycling stuff isn't suffering.

Many places have been wealthy for so many generations that they do not have any institutional recollection of the end of poverty.  But for those of us who can remember, boycotting the poor is not how affluence went down.

Put Yourself In the World's Shoes

I got some positive feedback on the slide I put up two days ago (from my "Fair Trade Recycling" presentation, which has been given at CES and Colleges in 3 countries during the past 6 months).

Here are a couple of other slides from the same presentation.

The first shows the relative size of the market for computer displays.  People earning $3K-12K per year are getting online at 10 times the rate of growth of wealthy nations since 2001.  But the "boycott the poor" advocates shows pictures of primitive dumpsites to describe 6 billion people.

And even the poorest of the poor deserve a bit of a break.  Recycling isn't THAT bad a job for the very poorest people in the world.  If we control the three worst practices - burning wire (little of which comes from computers anyway, that will not be affected by the HR2284 boycott), dumping broken CRTs, and aqua regia acid baths for circuit boards (another rarity), then recycling stacks up pretty well with other choices - like sex worker, miner, Somali pirate, child soldier, etc.

The term "parasites of the poor" and "accidental racist" are a little tough.  But the longer this stupid idea of boycotting poor people and shredding metals into smaller un-fixable pieces goes on (without any intelligent comment or response to people like me), the louder I have to get.

EWaste Whiplash I: Recycling Trade Between Rich and Poor

clap, clap, clap.

WHIPLASH and E-Waste Trade:  Good and Evil do battle in international markets, non-profit NGO rescues virgin natives from sinister computer exporter / exploiter...

Smile and wave, clap and nod... that's the instructions for ewaste recycling companies when we read the headlines of E-Stewards and EPA crackdowns.   We aren't asked to share data on what the markets, like here in Lima, are actually like.   That would be like discussing sex, religion, profits, and politics all in one dinner conversation.  Everything mom told you not to talk about at parties.

From time to time a regulator or researcher confides to me, that they read the blog, that they personally are curious about fair trade recycling, and the Geeks of Color.  But they don't want to be seen talking to me, or Dieu forbid, leaving public comments.  I get enough personal private feedback to keep writing.  But no one wants to turn over the money-changer tables with me.  Reminds me of private discussions about Christianity in Arkansas when I was growing up... fascinating and intellectual, but not too loud, keep this between us.

But so much of the news coverage is stupid.  Dudley-Do-Right-Stupid.

Coverage has been 81.3% black and white, victim and protector, Reefer Madness BS.  There is more-than-a-lot of grey area between "consenting adults", and the word "exploitation" is used to describe the concerns third parties have over the consummation.  We are indeed exporting garbage, but it's in the form of negative propaganda about the repair and recycling trade.  Pictures of children in poor countries!!!  BAN.org and SVTC.org and ETB have become like some kind of Save The Children campaign which eliminates the hassle of sending a dime to the kids in the photos.  They are surrounded by good people, but it has become a charity based on NOT doing something (buying and selling used electronics).  The more money you give them, the more they tell people what not to do?

Just remove parts prior to export

Parasites of the Poor.  And when I say that, I'm considered too far right, too radical, politically incorrect, and crazy ol' uncle Rob.  People suggest I say it differently, i.e. in a manner which doesn't threaten the fundraising.   "We wouldn't be talking about e-waste if it wasn't for these NGOs".

Maybe not.  Maybe we'd have been talking about mining rainforests and coral reefs with conflict mining child warriors sending tantalum and coltan money to Kony.  Maybe we'd see that the biggest lead poisoning cases in Nigeria have nothing to do with recycling, but come from rare metal mining.  Maybe we'd be talking about MEST and the actual choices people recycling scrap metal have in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  Maybe we would actually NOTICE when BAN uses a photo from the outside of this cell phone repair shop to make its case that Geeks of Color are poisoning children, rather than the truth, which is that they refurbish cell phones for farmers in Africa, and reuse chips from phones - reuse even component level parts which took coltan from child warriors to make in the first place.

Why do I get so frustrated at the non-profits?  Why don't I be more diplomatic?  Well, maybe because here I am, once again in the emerging markets (South America), and geek businesspeople are giving up, buying cheap Chinese virgin made products.  The choices given them were to buy from the Americans who are willing to sell "e-waste" to them, which unfortunately includes no one with a conscience.

The people with a conscience are all drinking E-Steward Kool-Aid and boycotting the Techs and Geeks like they are some kind of cyber-leper.  They face shakedowns at customs, as duty officers threaten to seize the whole investment as "e-waste pollution".  They risk too much when they buy affordable used products.  They are told to buy tested working, fully functional equipment from shredding companies which produce "no intact unit" California-fluff.



They are giving up.  And when they give up, they open restaurants.  They need jobs.  Used computers and TV repair was a good job, but that got too political for them.

Here is my family having dinner in a shop which 4 years ago sold used computers and TVs from Middlebury.  These people are still my friends, but they are giving up and trying something else.  Used USA equipment used to be 100% of their family income.  They now buy "brand new cheap-o" Chinese electronics (which is getting better and better), and run restaurants.  Across the street, a former competitor's shop is still selling used TVs and PCs, but my friends threw in the towel.  This will be how Peruvians meet Americans now, as tourists not as traders.

Scrap Boys: Agbogbloshie Ghana Video

A film by Taylor Patrick, Michelle DoCampo, Mary Ellen Skawinski, available on Vimeo.

There are a lot of good film clips in this.  And I'm sure Michelle, Taylor, and Mary Ellen meant well.

But I recommend you watch it first with the sound off.  Now, take a piece of paper.  Make a list of jobs you would NOT want your student from Peace Corps to be doing when you went to visit them in Africa...

1) Child soldier
2) Sex slave
3) Bush meat hunter
4) Robber
5) Cutting down rain forest
6) Conflict metal / tantalum miner
7) Gold, lead, metal mining
8) Oil pipeline tapper
9) Spam writer
10) _________________________________________________________________

Organic cotton farming may or may not be on that list.  Now, take another sheet of paper, and make a list of jobs which you hope your students might have when you go back to visit them.  Doctor, nurse, banker, astronaut, movie star, engineer, software writer....

Now ask how many of the latter jobs your student can achieve without access to a used computer.  The answer is NONE.  Not one of my students could afford a new computer, and none of those jobs are available if you can't get internet in Africa.

After watching the film with the sound off first... play the sound during the interviews of the actual African scrap recyclers.  These are interesting.   Then watch the whole thing.

This is a lot like the Fair Trade Cotton attack (Bloomberg News V. Victoria's Secret) last month.

"It's as if recoiling from images of poverty is becoming equated with compassion." 

After I watched the Scrap Boys video the first time, I watched again, and I followed scene-by-scene by annotating.  You can read what's happening with the sound off, below.  By the way, there's lots of talk about "e-waste", but practically no "e-waste" of any kind visible in the film, or at least not in "imported quantities", and certainly nothing like nice equipment being unloaded from containers in the Greenpeace video.

Dumps at cities in Africa have e-waste, sure.  The same as they have junk cars (prominent in this video).  But there is almost nothing here, no evidence whatsoever, of significant dumping of USA and Europe waste.  They describe how most of the imports are good, but there's no film of that, none of a container being unloaded either.  But there is scrap metal - lots of it.  Car parts, refrigerators, wheels...

Fair Use in responding to claim that Agbogbloshie site is primarily about electronic waste

Scrap Boys from Michelle DoCampo on Vimeo.(For comparison see Fair Trade Recycling To Africa video, made in 2007)