4 ms·

I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means

by jayferd 14y ago

I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back. -- Leo Tolstoy Any solution to the suffering in Honduras will have to involve stopping the injustice there - which means Dole and Chiquita will have to give up the notion of "basically-free labor". You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
So here is the question, do dole and chiquita get away with this because there is nothing else for these people to do? Or do they get away with it because they have created a system which effectively creates indentured servants? I am not familiar enough with Honduras to comment on that. I noted in the article that the proposed city would have room for the entire population + 2 million. So if this city provides opportunities for the people who now labor in the fields, and they all migrate there, Dole and Chiquita would be out of workers would they not? If this is how the Hondurans envision it working it seems that they are trying to 'get off the backs' of the labor pool.
- sp332 14y ago
  Ever wonder where the term "Banana Republic" came from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Honduras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Honduras Cuyamel Banana Company literally staged a coup to install a more friendly government in Honduras. edited because I had the wrong banana company. Lest you think Chiquita is innocent, look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre and a more thorough description of Honduras in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras#International_influence_in_the_20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras#International_influen...
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    Familiar with the term, but what I don't know is if a similar move on their part today would work, do you have any insights into that? Argentina recently nationalized a lot of their energy infrastructure and its pissed off some big oil folks but while in the past they might start up a guerilla army to cause trouble I haven't seen that so far. And of course in terms of economies Argentina is way above Honduras so I get that it isn't a fair comparison. But without first hand knowledge our sources I struggle to reason about the success chances for Honduras' efforts beyond some basic human action / reaction models.
Daniel_Newby 14y ago
> ... which means Dole and Chiquita will have to give up the notion of "basically-free labor". If we can build a self-driving car good enough to carry the rich and famous, a self-picking banana cart is a no brainer. Then nobody will be on the poors' backs. They had better have a service economy ready when it happens.
- ktizo 14y ago
  Robotic harvesting without damaging the plant is a hell of a lot more difficult than robot cars for highways. For these kind of problems you need walkers and climbers that can deal with a very wide variety of terrain. Will happen eventually, but if you automate all labour I don't see why you should expect the poor to work any more than the rich. Already many of the jobs available in the richer countries are only there to make up the numbers and provide the illusion of employment.
  - nickpinkston 14y ago
    Though - the banana-bots would get rid of the biggest problem in the equation: highway laws. Not sure that it'd be that hard technically, but almost certainly more expensive. Even at $50K a bot (that's probably way low) it'd need to be 20x more efficient to even breakeven with cheap labor...
    - ktizo 14y ago
      Could try a completely different tack. Given that all bananas are sterile clones and banana trees can walk, perhaps they would be suitable for risk free genetic engineering so they got themselves to market without any machinery at all.
- planetguy 14y ago
  It's not like bananas are even one of those crops which requires cheap labour in order to be economical. The Australian banana industry gets by somehow, paying sky-high Australian wages, and you can still buy Australian bananas for no more than you'd pay for an Ecuadorian banana. (At least, in those years when the Australian banana crop hasn't been wiped out by a cyclone.)
bluekeybox 14y ago
> You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs. That's a very naive and over-simplified point of view. During the 1980s' Perestroika, everyone in my country of origin (which was one of Moscow's Cold War satellites) assumed basically the same thing you're assuming: that as soon as those "russkies" got off their backs, they would become rich and prosperous. Well, 22 years had passed since the russkies left, and hopes for prosperity are few and between (some progress has been made but nowhere to the extent that was hoped). BTW, I'm in no way nostalgic for the USSR era; I just don't like when naive opinions like this that have nothing to do with reality propagate because they sound "just". I now believe that the whole contemporary educational system which teaches students that colonialism was uniformly bad needs to be revised. I have yet to see something good come out of nationalism (with Israel a possible exception).
- jayferd 14y ago
  I might have rephrased, "It's very difficult to help the poor unless you also get off their backs". Perhaps it's not helpful to think "everything will be better if those people get off our backs", as you mention. But I'm a U.S. citizen, and I've only recently given up bananas for good. When we're the ones doing the oppressing, it's also not helpful for us to pretend it doesn't exist.
  - bluekeybox 14y ago
    "Oppression" is dangerous terminology to use when no actual physical intimidation is taking place. When peacetime gets labeled "oppressive", people begin to see wartime with a different set of eyes, and the country gets thrown into a cycle of violence from which it is difficult to get out of.
    - jayferd 14y ago
      That's a good point, which I'll have to think about. Clearly not all violence is physical violence. But it's also very easy to use that as a carte blanche for revenge - as in "you're oppressing me this much, so I can do this much violence to you in return".

by jayferd 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago

So here is the question, do dole and chiquita get away with this because there is nothing else for these people to do? Or do they get away with it because they have created a system which effectively creates indentured servants? I am not familiar enough with Honduras to comment on that. I noted in the article that the proposed city would have room for the entire population + 2 million. So if this city provides opportunities for the people who now labor in the fields, and they all migrate there, Dole and Chiquita would be out of workers would they not? If this is how the Hondurans envision it working it seems that they are trying to 'get off the backs' of the labor pool.

sp332 14y ago
Ever wonder where the term "Banana Republic" came from? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Honduras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic#Honduras Cuyamel Banana Company literally staged a coup to install a more friendly government in Honduras. edited because I had the wrong banana company. Lest you think Chiquita is innocent, look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre and a more thorough description of Honduras in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras#International_influence_in_the_20th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras#International_influen...
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Familiar with the term, but what I don't know is if a similar move on their part today would work, do you have any insights into that? Argentina recently nationalized a lot of their energy infrastructure and its pissed off some big oil folks but while in the past they might start up a guerilla army to cause trouble I haven't seen that so far. And of course in terms of economies Argentina is way above Honduras so I get that it isn't a fair comparison. But without first hand knowledge our sources I struggle to reason about the success chances for Honduras' efforts beyond some basic human action / reaction models.

Daniel_Newby 14y ago

> ... which means Dole and Chiquita will have to give up the notion of "basically-free labor". If we can build a self-driving car good enough to carry the rich and famous, a self-picking banana cart is a no brainer. Then nobody will be on the poors' backs. They had better have a service economy ready when it happens.

ktizo 14y ago
Robotic harvesting without damaging the plant is a hell of a lot more difficult than robot cars for highways. For these kind of problems you need walkers and climbers that can deal with a very wide variety of terrain. Will happen eventually, but if you automate all labour I don't see why you should expect the poor to work any more than the rich. Already many of the jobs available in the richer countries are only there to make up the numbers and provide the illusion of employment.
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  Though - the banana-bots would get rid of the biggest problem in the equation: highway laws. Not sure that it'd be that hard technically, but almost certainly more expensive. Even at $50K a bot (that's probably way low) it'd need to be 20x more efficient to even breakeven with cheap labor...
  - ktizo 14y ago
    Could try a completely different tack. Given that all bananas are sterile clones and banana trees can walk, perhaps they would be suitable for risk free genetic engineering so they got themselves to market without any machinery at all.
planetguy 14y ago
It's not like bananas are even one of those crops which requires cheap labour in order to be economical. The Australian banana industry gets by somehow, paying sky-high Australian wages, and you can still buy Australian bananas for no more than you'd pay for an Ecuadorian banana. (At least, in those years when the Australian banana crop hasn't been wiped out by a cyclone.)

bluekeybox 14y ago

> You don't need to help the poor - just get off their backs. That's a very naive and over-simplified point of view. During the 1980s' Perestroika, everyone in my country of origin (which was one of Moscow's Cold War satellites) assumed basically the same thing you're assuming: that as soon as those "russkies" got off their backs, they would become rich and prosperous. Well, 22 years had passed since the russkies left, and hopes for prosperity are few and between (some progress has been made but nowhere to the extent that was hoped). BTW, I'm in no way nostalgic for the USSR era; I just don't like when naive opinions like this that have nothing to do with reality propagate because they sound "just". I now believe that the whole contemporary educational system which teaches students that colonialism was uniformly bad needs to be revised. I have yet to see something good come out of nationalism (with Israel a possible exception).

jayferd 14y ago
I might have rephrased, "It's very difficult to help the poor unless you also get off their backs". Perhaps it's not helpful to think "everything will be better if those people get off our backs", as you mention. But I'm a U.S. citizen, and I've only recently given up bananas for good. When we're the ones doing the oppressing, it's also not helpful for us to pretend it doesn't exist.
- bluekeybox 14y ago
  "Oppression" is dangerous terminology to use when no actual physical intimidation is taking place. When peacetime gets labeled "oppressive", people begin to see wartime with a different set of eyes, and the country gets thrown into a cycle of violence from which it is difficult to get out of.
  - jayferd 14y ago
    That's a good point, which I'll have to think about. Clearly not all violence is physical violence. But it's also very easy to use that as a carte blanche for revenge - as in "you're oppressing me this much, so I can do this much violence to you in return".