From The Washington Square News
Published as: The Journey of Wall Street’s Wealth
A.J. Leonard
Published: Tuesday, October 28, 2008
“Financial Tsunami.” “Economic Meltdown.” “Main Street vs. Wall Street.” We’ve seen the fiery headlines. The economy is in a tailspin and everyone is ill at ease. We ask: When WILL things settle down? How did we get to this point? However, these aren’t the right questions to be asking. We need to ask where this wealth comes from in the first place and look at the chain of human activity that produces it.
Somewhere in southeastern China;s Zhejiang Province a young woman waits for a boat. It arrives, carrying a shipping container full of old computer monitors. After the boat is unloaded and the monitors are stacked up, the woman and a score of other former peasants break open the glass and plastic. With each hammer blow a new cloud of toxic dust springs into the air. She does this to extract bits of copper and aluminum. To get the other precious metals she must cook the logic boards, freeing the gold and silver melded to them along with vaporized poison. On a good day she can make $4.
Back in the 19th century, when capitalism was relatively new, Karl Marx wrote about the “fetishism of commodities,” how “social relations between men” are seen as an almost mystical “relation between things.” Some people see scrap metal, some see Chinese workers with hammers and no ventilation masks.
Where does the scrap go? It is reprocessed and then courses through industrial China. Some of it ends up in the Hon Hai Precision Industry factory where iPods are manufactured. The factory is a behemoth, with 200,000 people working there. The same company, also known as Foxconn, is building what will be the largest assembly plant in Mexico.
Meanwhile, at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City, business is bustling. A young actor, who works as a waiter, buys an iPod Nano and takes it home. At the restaurant where he works, the talk among brokers is of the latest bank failure and the tight credit market. They know quite a bit about capital flows and balance sheets and little of the lives of the laborers that create this wealth.
The waiter goes into the kitchen to collect the food. His coworkers, Mexican immigrants, wash dishes and bus tables. They make half of what he makes — and he doesn’t make much — and half of that gets sent back to their families in Mexico. Soon the brokers will be out of work and will stop coming for lunch. The restaurant will fail, and the actor and Mexican immigrants will lose their jobs. No more iPods, no more checks sent home; shifts will be cut at Foxconn and the shipping containers full of discarded computer parts will stop coming.
In our modern world there aren’t even six degrees of separation. It’s likely that the work you do is as connected to someone standing right next to you as to someone thousands of miles away. When things are thriving, a multitude of human muscles are flexing. When things hit a wall, everyone hurts.
The turmoil in the credit markets and the fluctuating stock market seem difficult to understand because we are not shown people whose lives are being wrenched and racked, but rather a barrage of statistics and indicators. We live in a time when we can churn out miracles of technology, yet everything can turn on itself and close down in the blink of an eye.
The world continues to draw more and more tightly together, yet we are saddled with a ruling framework driven by an anarchistic drive for the accumulation of things, most of all profit. We desperately need a different model. One that has humanity working together to fill its ever-urgent needs.
A.J. Leonard is a contributing columnist. E-mail responses to opinion@nyunews.com.