One World, Many Peaces

Culinary Protectionism and Anti-Immigration Impulses

Taste buds, it seems, can be allies of cultural integration and economic empowerment as of mutually exclusive, self-limiting policies alike. Pasta is rarely if ever the first thing to come to mind when we think of protectionism and anti-immigration impulses. Yet the city council of the Tuscan town of Lucca in Italy, a picturesque tourist hot spot for international visitors, recently announced a new initiative to crack down on immigrant-run restaurants serving non-Italian food in order to protect its culinary heritage and corner the food consumption market in its centro storico, or historic center.

Imagine the culinary landscape of North America had not a whole lot of entrepreneurial first-generation immigrants the guts, gusto and gastronomical know-how to open diners and restaurants for their communities and the new wider ones in which they came to live. Yes, that includes an implied dearth of hot dogs, pizza and hamburgers as well as sushi, curries, chop sui, tacos and foie gras. Forget tv shows like Top Chef and Hell's Kitchen. And yes, doing so was and is what allowed their children to become other types of professionals from doctors to engineers, boosting quality of life for them and their inherited countries.  Even those who stick to the proverbial meat and potatoes would lose something if all Greek-owned (or once so) diners charicatured in My Big Fat Greek Wedding had been or were to be forced to close.

The great irony in the Italian case is that many of the key ingredients used in their "native" foods were a few short centuries ago originally imports: tomatoes and potatoes from South America, and the iconic pasta from Asia thanks to Marco Polo's pioneering global voyages. The following statement by the right-wing, anti-immigration Italian politician is tantamount to a selective historical revisionism, not to say poor judgment: "This is not a battle against anything or anyone, but a defense of our culture and our agriculture... In Italy we have available 4,500 typical food products. Every one of these represents the culture and history of our country."

The targets of this culinary protectionist initiative fueled by impulses of misguided immigration reform are mostly kebab houses and Chinese restaurants. In attacking the measure, a more moderate but equally misguided official said that the measure would also unintentionally  stop high-end French restaurants from serving oysters and champagne. Thanks for the prioritization,   buddy, I'm sure foreign students touring Europe and tired of eating free leftover pasta at youth hostels will appreciate it as much as your entourage. This line of policymaking is not the same as that which seeks to safeguard traditional regionally-produced foods such as Feta cheese and local wines, but one mistaking cultural exclusion for promotion and economic limitation for preservation.

One of the cherished privileges of having lived in urban centers such as Montreal, Vancouver and Chicago was to be able to eat what was  for me exotic foods from dozens of countries for less than I could have cooked them for myself at home. Many culinary experts also contend that no food traditions are genuinely singular. I would add that to enact policies that affirm this illusion takes away from unequaled role food has, does and will continue to play in bringing members of local communities and worldwide immigrant networks together while empowering their and their children socio-economically, a vital longtime current event which has created the future in which we live.

Arms Dealing and Double Standards

During the peanut salmonella scare, were the vendors or the producers at fault for the resulting deaths?  According to everyone, the producers, and perhaps rightly  so. But then a logical problem arises when, yesterday, the legendary Syrian arms dealer  Monzer al-Kassar was found guilty of selling instruments of death to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), for which he surely should have been. However, without extant conflicts and existing weapons, arms dealers would not have such booming businesses, if any at all. So why are anti-war resources being diverted to treating inevitable symptoms from curing evitable diseases?

When a person sells large quantities of weapons to anyone but their or a friendly state, they are a criminal; when a business produces them for their or a friendly state, they are trusted partners in protection and vital contributors to the economy; and, when anyone but a state or its friends uses them, they are threats to national security or terrorists. Al-Kassar, known as the "Prince" in the Spanish town he calls home, was busted in a sting operation to sell $1 million in arms to FARC, having been a longtime supplier to (among others since the 70s) Palestinian Liberation Front and clients in Nicaragua, Bosnia, Croatia, Iran, Iraq and Somalia.

 

Keep in mind, though, that the five largest arms producing countries in the world are also the five members of the U.N. Security Council, as noted in the compelling film Lord of War depicting an arms dealer played by Nicholas Cage. Lockheed Martin makes about $42 Billion in annual revenues, and uses this strikingly euphemistic (pun intended) language on its website:

CUSTOMER BASE: As a global security and information technology company, the majority of Lockheed Martin's business is with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. federal government agencies. In fact, Lockheed Martin is the largest provider of IT services, systems integration, and training to the U.S. Government. The remaining portion of Lockheed Martin's business is comprised of international government and some commercial sales of our products, services and platforms.

The criminality of individual arms dealers lies in exacerbating and perpetuating conflicts outside of established channels, but they are not always their causes. Then what of that of other arms and conflict industry participants? If anything, dealers like al-Kassar are really small though spiky thorns in the side of the very big boys with much bigger sticks, jealous because as "respected" CEOs, engineers and politicians with a unillustrious lust for military oligopolies they cannot live their clandestine competitors often lavish lifestyles (and not for lack of funds). Being unable to see the forest for the trees, in arms dealing and its double standards or otherwise, remains an unsightly current event creating the future.

The Auto-Invasion of Privacy Epidemic

To the old saying, "walls have ears," must today be added "doors have mouths."  The Big Brother metaphor in George Orwell's 1984 now applies less to an invasive force outside of us as individuals and groups than a hitherto untapped impulse within us which social media has unleashed.  Horror stories from Eastern Europe and Asia in communist times, like recent wiretapping and library borrowing surveillance in the US under the Patriot Act, are starting to pale in comparison to what people are proving so willing to divulge about themselves online. Is a new era of openness and connectivity or an auto-invasion of privacy epidemic upon us?

The two obviously go hand in hand, so the more pressing question becomes how we mitigate the risks while enjoying the benefits of social media and the privacy concerns it raises. Facebook, for example, is currently in a serious row with its users about privacy issues circling around ownership of information posted and advertisers' access to their information, and Google's email system was likewise critiqued to no avail for the automated ads generated by keywords in users' personal emails. Market research seems to be competing with state security as the leading rational to make the private public for pay, and to think that the two may join forces (as if they are not already) is frightening. As an aside: the paragons of safeguarding personal secrecy, Swiss banks, who expertly kept dictators and revolutionaries information inviolable, today announced they will be releasing such information to US authorities.

Probably the scariest technological feature so far for me are the GPS applications on cell phones which allow your real-time whereabouts to be tracked by others. Aside from the fact that being a teenager and committing adultery will never be the same, when you take Google Earth into consideration why hasn't Osama bin Laden been found? In addition to where you are, what you are doing, thinking or feeling at the moment regardless of how mundane is apparently the most important thing to tell everyone you know (and don't) online. And that's ok, to a point. Being taken aback by the self-inflicted stalker-like titles of "Followers" on Twitter is perfectly normal for anyone who hasn't caught the bug. And conflicting personal projected images between, let's say, MySpace and LinkedIn create dilemmas for users and viewers alike, as do inner debates about who to allow access to what, where and why.

Social media is undoubtedly a force majeure and is likely to continue to be so because of the regeneration of old and the creation of new connections between people as friends, collaborators (as with Wikis), colleagues, customers, etc. Lawyers may cease to be the socio-political glue of front-and-back-dealing (corporate or humanitarian) with social media experts taking their place.  It is quite possible that those who do not remain au courant will be left in the dust like late adopters of personal computers and cell phones. I willingly admit that I have, do, and will continue to experiment with social media as this very and to a certain degree all blogs attests. However, doing so blindly without constantly questioning the implications and ulterior applications of social media is a current event putting the future of the personal, public and relationships between the two in peril, or paradise.

Censoring Violence and Selective Morality

If you asked 100 people and ethics experts what is more morally wrong, murder or rape, chances are that they would say it’s a poorly phrased question and their answer would be both equally (or at least we may hope so).  But a clear-cut answer came from Amazon a day before Valentine's Day, when the internet's largest retailer pulled a Japanese video game simulating rape and sexual assaults from its site while keeping thousands of others that simulate other kinds of corporeal violence. So what?

The point is not to open the Pandora's box about violence in media, but to stress the highly problematic selectivity of the moral issues open to debated within it. Games in which murder, theft, assault and even genocide are encouraged or even required to win regularly receive top awards and highest sales, as do movies and television shows that depict them, whether in glorification or damnation. Why? Because apparently for those who play and watch them, recreationally or addictively, they are as entertaining as entertaining can be and a lot of money is made as a result, including by Amazon. The morally offended may find a little comfort in the "rating" system but not satisfaction.

Nor is the point to posit a litmus test for tired arguments pro and con violence in the media; though the debate is decades (if not centuries) old, a stalemate status quo seems to have been reached in the public arena  outside academia with which everyone is ok enough not to do anything too serious about it until a new kid's in town. Among the most popular defensive arguments for these types of pass times is the possible cathartic effect they have on users: "The more I play violence, the less I do it," or so the line goes.  At the risk of being misinterpreted in the hopes of provoking debate:  Should this logic not apply to all kinds of video game violence equally? And if not, why not?

What, then, is the point? Stifling debates through which collective ethical decisions are made is more dangerous than any kind of media violence.  In putting its foot down on one kind of violence and not others, the slippery selectivity of Amazon's moral lip service becomes clear. Censoring one kind of violence and not others conspicuously legitimizes those which remain, weakening the overall societally healthy debates surrounding the entertainment value and/or ethical detriment of media violence altogether. In this case, shutting a door does not open a window, depleting the intellectual oxygen in the room, and the vigor of our moral minds and hearts consequently suffers as a current event creating the future. 

Stimulus or Stimu-less, is Credit a Solution or Problem?

In the past, loan sharks used to break your legs if you failed to pay a loan. Now, lenders have broken their own legs to lend you money, are running to the government for crutches, but both institutions are still expecting you to pay their medical bills...

 

"Rich in debt" sounds like a paradox because it is one, but it accurately describes the basis upon which more and more people, corporations and governments make their daily and momentous decisions, which a passing thought about posterity would prohibit...

 

Consumer credit, originally used to facilitate transactions on a temporary or emergency basis, has in becoming available on standing and widespread basis allowed the poor to drift into an imagined affluence and the affluent to drift into actual poverty...

 

Excerpts from my recently released "Buyers and Buy-Nots: The New Economics of Poverty and Affluence" at Citizen Economists. Are abuses of credit becoming current events reducing the potentials of our future? Decide for yourself, and let policymakers know soon.