Spoofed WTO website endorses Re-Legalization of Slavery. (1 Viewer)

RebSaint

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Not a shock post. Read the article. Still want to give corporations unfettered power?

http://www.gatt.org/wharton.html

Compliments of the polysci prof at LSU-A who told me about it. I told him he probably misread the article.

He proved me wrong.
 
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At first look, yes, it sounds awful. However, what he says makes sense:

A system in which corporations own workers is the only free-market solution to African poverty, Schmidt said. "Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits—out the door. Get sick, get fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care. With each life valuable from start to finish, the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."

I'm not saying this is an ideal solution merely that I can understand the direction he is coming from -- a purely economic one. Of course, there are other factors to bring to bear on this problem aside from raw economics but that's not this guy's field.

I'm not an expert on the laws and labor relations of Africa nations but I daresay a decent amount of them don't have the same protections for workers that most western nations have. Somalia was operating under a state of anarcho-capitalism for a while (and still might be for all I know) where private industry and not organized government was supplying protection, utilities, etc. People might not want to admit it but letting corporations literally run what would otherwise be chaotic war torn areas might be the best of only a handful of tenable solutions.
 
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Why would a company care for a worker just b/c they own them? Birth rates are pretty high... just breed 'em and dump them when they become too expensive to keep healthy.
 
At first look, yes, it sounds awful. However, what he says makes sense:



I'm not saying this is an ideal solution merely that I can understand the direction he is coming from -- a purely economic one.

And from a purely economical standpoint if one owns a human being, it might be more profitable to sell his organs and body parts when he becomes too weak or unproductive.

We've been down this road before. Don't be duped by the obtuse, jargony language. "full private stewardry of labor" is just another three dollar word for Chattel slavery.

Obviously these people are ignorant of the history of new world chattel slavery.
 
I am without speech.

Reb, are you sure this isn't The Onion I'm reading?

Dude, I told the polysci prof. the same thing. "Are you sure you didn't misread the article?" So he sent it to a collegues office and several of us read it and discussed it together.

Unreal, I know.

And this version is from their website.
 
It seems official, but it is an Oniony satire:

http://ethnomus.ucr.edu/remix_culture/GATT.htm

Perhaps my favorite online performance intervention was the counterfeiting of WTo_Org. A semi-anonymous group of online activists copied the official website of the World Trade Organization at http://www.wto.org and hosted it under the name of the WTO's predecessor organization, GATT [the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade], at http://www.gatt.org, the intention being of course that unknowing web surfers looking for information on the WTO might reach the faked site by accident.

Cleverly, the unknown authors of the GATT site have created a near-exact duplicate of the WTO's real site on their server, complete with graphics and links which lead one to the real site. The only thing they have changed is the "WTO News" section in the center...
 
Don't be duped by the obtuse, jargony language. "full private stewardry of labor" is just another three dollar word for Chattel slavery.

Oh I know, and I chuckled when I read that euphemism. And Jim is also right that it might be profitable to sell off people for spare parts in the eyes of some companies. However, as this guy prefaces, he is saying it's the only solution for a totally free-market system, i.e., one where there is absolutely no government regulating anything (which is arguably the case in a few African nations).

The alternatives, I imagine, is 'nation-building' which the U.N. is currently engaged in and has been engaged in for what seems to be decades. Ideally it would be great if every African nation were a mirror image of a U.S. style republican government complete with a bill of rights, and an alphabet soup of government agencies protection the welfare of the citizenry. This guy isn't taking anything like that into account.

Edit: Oh well, apparently a fake. The arguments are still pretty much the same. As I said, it's just pure economics in isolation from everything else including morality.
 
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A system in which corporations own workers is the only free-market solution to African poverty, Schmidt said. "Today, in African factories, the only concern a company has for the worker is for his or her productive hours, and within his or her productive years," he said. "As soon as AIDS or pregnancy hits—out the door. Get sick, get fired. If you extend the employer's obligation to a 24/7, lifelong concern, you have an entirely different situation: get sick, get care. With each life valuable from start to finish, the AIDS scourge will be quickly contained via accords with drug manufacturers as a profitable investment in human stewardees. And educating a child for later might make more sense than working it to the bone right now."

Sound's good. Until you consider we are talking about PEOPLE. This sounds more like communism than free market idealism, IMHO.

Ahh. Parody. Tricked me.
 
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It wouldn't surprise me if it's a hoax. But I'd like to see a press statement from Wharton and the WTO.

Y'know, the fact that the WTO has to put out a statement to disprove such allegations is evidence enough in support of your initial point. Truly unregulated capitalism can lead down a dangerous, dehumanizing road...
 

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