Do working people in the U.S. benefit from the plunder of the worlds poor countries?
“STOP THE war. Don’t drive an SUV.” It’s a sign you can see at almost any antiwar protest. The idea that the war is being fought to provide cheap gas for Americans’ cars gets harder to believe as the price of a gallon of gasoline once again creeps past $3 a gallon. But this antiwar slogan also expresses a more fundamental argument. It is a modern variation on the environmental slogan “Live simply so that others can simply live”–with the underlying assumption that Americans’ relatively high standard of living is responsible for poverty in the rest of the world. The assumption rests on the popular understanding of imperialism in which U.S. companies plunder raw materials and exploit cheap labor in the so-called Third World mostly to satisfy the demands of consumers for more iPods, more Nikes and more designer clothes. But a closer look reveals that this picture gets the dynamics of the system all mixed up. What else to read Geoff Bailey is a regular contributor to the International Soci
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