Regulating the Global Brothel
On the night of september 10, 1997, Toronto police officers raided more than a dozen apartments suspected of being houses of ill repute. Twenty-two women, including the alleged madam, Wai Hing “Kitty” Chu, were charged on a total of 750 prostitution and immigration-related charges. All of the women were Asian and spoke no more than…
California
Progressives and the New Immigrant Movement In the new workers’ movement in Los Angeles, immigrants are playing a crucial part: Two years ago, 74,000 home-care workers–many of them immigrants–joined the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the largest union-organizing campaign in the United States since 1918. Last year, a three-week Justice for Janitors strike won…
The Electric Slide
Late this spring, while hardly anyone was paying attention, the epicenter of the California energy crisis moved east. For a year, the focus had been on the state’s misbegotten deregulation scheme and on Democratic Governor Gray Davis’s dithering response to the mess it created. But in the past couple of months, there’s been a seismic…
The Plutocrat as Populist
“We are so far behind,” exclaims Terry McAuliffe, gazing out his window toward the Capitol. “I got a briefing last night that absolutely shocked me. I’m not going to give you the numbers. Let’s just say they”–the Republicans–“have 50 times as many e-mail addresses as we have. It’s unacceptable.” McAuliffe has had to use this…
Failure to Convert
Political parties rarely make deep changes in their societies by winning a single election. Once in power they generally need to reinforce their support, repeat their triumphs at the polls, and so change the terms of politics that even their opponents adjust their positions. That is what Margaret Thatcher did, and Tony Blair may be…
Comment: The Democrats Make Nice
What is Tom Daschle up to? “In this divided government,” he declared upon becoming Senate majority leader, “we are required to find common ground and seek meaningful bipartisanship.” He told the press he would not seek repeal of even the most ill considered portions of President Bush’s tax cut. In an op-ed in The New…
Sneak Preview
Want to know how the Democrats will do in 2002–and whether President Bush will win re-election in 2004? For a reliable prediction, watch Virginia in the fall. The state’s off-year elections have for the last three decades foreshadowed the political trends that shape American politics. This November’s gubernatorial election will be a test of how…
Beyond Jeffords
Two headlines that appeared within 12 days of each other–“Jeffords Quits Republicans, Dems Take Control of Senate” (Associated Press) and “L.A. Turns to the Left as Top Office Goes to a Democrat” (the Los Angeles Times)–have given encouragement to millions of politically active progressives, many of whom have been in a dark funk since the…
L.A. Story
The old order still governs here; the future will not be rushed. Considering all the changes Los Angeles has gone through in just the past decade–white flight and immigrant influx, the displacement of the business elite, the rebirth of the union movement, the rise of a labor-Latino alliance–the idea that a new urban progressive coalition…
Halting the Judgernaut
As Capitol Hill adjusts to Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords’s earthshaking repudiation of the Republican Party, the Senate Judiciary Committee is bracing itself to be the center of the aftershocks. The judicial branch of government, after all, is where a president is likely to have his most far-reaching impact; the judges he appoints will last much…
Localizing Globalization
In 1999, after a study by the university of California at Davis warned that the chemical MTBE may cause cancer in humans, California became the first U.S. state to phase out its use as a gasoline additive. (MTBE from leaking underground storage tanks contaminates soil and groundwater.) But the Canadian corporation Methanex, which produces the…
Government without Democracy
Critics of the global economy often see it as anarchic, a mad market that has burst national bounds and floats free, unrestrained by the laws and rules that made the nation-based social market a decent place to live and do business. It is “wild capitalism,” Benjamin R. Barber wrote last year in The American Prospect…
The Global Alternative
The economic orthodoxy that guides the management of the global economy has failed to deliver. During the past two decades of accelerated privatization, deregulation, and free trade, global growth has actually slowed. The countries (mostly Asian) that grew faster rejected the advice of the bankers, bureaucrats, consultants, and media pundits who constitute the Washington Consensus…
Wary Allies
Corporate codes of conduct offer a “third way” to promote labor rights in the global economy–a civil-society alternative to first-way government regulation or second-way trade-union organizing and collective bargaining. Supporters argue that such codes can harness the market power of informed consumers to halt abuses against workers in developing countries, given that national laws vary…
From Protest to Program
Last year, during a visit to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, I got a firsthand look at the underside of globalization. Located across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, Juárez is home to more than 400 plants known as maquiladoras. Here, workers assemble parts sent by foreign companies–mainly U.S.-based corporations–for subsequent export. Most of the plants…
Globalization and Its Critics
What is Tom Daschle up to? “In this divided government,” he declared upon becoming Senate majority leader, “we are required to find common ground and seek meaningful bipartisanship.” He told the press he would not seek repeal of even the most ill considered portions of President Bush’s tax cut. In an op-ed in The New…
The CIO without the CIA
For four decades, the AFL-CIO’s international presence was notable less for its promotion of labor rights than for its Cold War ferocity. At global conventions, for instance, the labor federation’s protocol required AFL-CIO representatives to stand up and leave the room whenever members of insufficiently anti-Communist unions like Italy’s CGIL entered. The labor federation’s Latin…
A World of Debt
One of Bill Clinton’s final acts as president was to secure Congress’s approval for a $435-million component within the foreign-aid bill last October. This provision fulfills the pledge the United States originally made in 1996 at the Group of Seven (G-7) summit, where the world’s seven richest governments agreed to finance a debt-relief plan for…
Law and Marriage
These days I settle for small and subtle signs of progress. Take the story inthe February 15 Washington Post on the demise of a proposal in the Virginia legislature that would have required public-school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. State Senator Warren E. Barry–the outraged sponsor of the legislation, which was amended by…
The High Cost of Cheap Food
The first thing I did after finishing Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation was to go into the kitchen, slice up some potatoes, and make my own french fries. I sprinkled salt over them, omitted the ketchup, and ate the fries one by one, slowly, savoringly. At the same time, I tried to recall my distant…
When Losers Win
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the american Consensus, Rick Perlstein. Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30.00. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, by Lisa McGirr. Princeton University Press, 395 pages, $31.95. The rise of the right has been a subject of fascination to writers on…
Mrs. Vendler’s Profession
Poor, old Robert Frost–destined to be knocked around as a political tennis ball ever since that day in December 1960 when John F. Kennedy called him at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and asked if he would read a poem at the upcoming inauguration. According to Frost biographer Jay Parini, Kennedy first suggested that Frost…
