Cheap food

Penny Foolish, by Eric Schlosser

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation's most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Florida's tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by the largest purchaser of Florida tomatoes: American fast food chains that want millions of pounds of cheap tomatoes as a garnish for their hamburgers, tacos and salads.

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald's agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald's.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state's growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as "pretty much near un-American."

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America's most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a farm worker alliance based in Immokalee, Fla. — has done a heroic job improving the lives of migrants in the state, investigating slavery cases and negotiating the penny-per-pound surcharge with fast food chains.

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate "federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering." It has not explained how that extra penny would break those laws; nor has it explained why other surcharges routinely imposed by the growers (for things like higher fuel costs) are perfectly legal.

The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers. "Florida growers have a right to run their businesses how they see fit," a Burger King spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times.

Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.

Three private equity firms — Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners — control most of Burger King's stock. Last year, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, earned the largest annual bonus in Wall Street history, and this year he stands to receive an even larger one. Goldman Sachs has served its investors well lately, avoiding the subprime mortgage meltdown and, according to Business Week, doubling the value of its Burger King investment within three years.

Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn't be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company's good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

Eric Schlosser is the author of "Fast Food Nation."

second grade

teaching second grade today
the tom waits story must wait

science and faith

To the Editor:

Paul Davies asserts that, at present, science's "claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus." But neither the viability nor the dignity of science depends upon any such whole-cloth repudiation of faith. Rather, what science rejects is any kind of faith that demands the sacrifice of intellect, rational judgment or consciousness.

If it turns out to be impossible to find an explanation for physical law from within our universe, which Mr. Davies rightly advocates seeking, if nature in effect declares, this far and no farther, as in particular the multiverse hypothesis implies, this will not have made a "mockery of science": science will simply have reached its rational limit. The correct response to this is awe, not shame.

The very greatest scientists, such as Newton and Einstein, have always been individuals in whom science and faith have coexisted amicably and synergistically, individuals who have valued conscious understanding of creation, and the human drive to pursue it, as bounty and blessing.

Michael L. Brown
Boston, Nov. 25, 2007
The writer is a professor of mathematics at Simmons College.

Asking the Hard Questions on Iraq

Re NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE "Increased Role Sought for G.I.'s in Iraq Training" (front page, Nov. 23):

After four long, costly and deadly years, why do American troops still need to be in Iraq, in harm's way, to train more Iraqi troops? After four long years, why are still more American troops and still more American tax dollars still needed to train more Iraqi troops? Why haven't we, at the very least, trained enough Iraqi troops to train other Iraqi troops?

After four long years, why are American tax dollars still needed to equip and supply Iraqi forces? Why, after four long years, aren't Iraqi oil revenues and Iraqi treasury funds paying for Iraqi equipment and Iraqi supplies?

Why have America's leaders allowed so many American lives, limbs and dollars to be continuously sacrificed for the same endless mission? Why have America's veterans organizations so willingly supported such endless stupidity? What a sham! What a shame!

Thomas Austin

Bratenahl, Ohio, Nov. 23, 2007

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To the Editor:

Does anyone but me find it odd that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 planning an unprovoked war in Iraq; spent the next two years building a fraudulent case for launching that war; spent the next four years prolonging that war by making every mistake it could in Iraq while the war cost escalated, billions disappeared and its private contractor supporters grew filthy rich; and only now, when its five-year privatization of the war is suddenly being reined in, has magically developed its very first actual Iraq strategy, which it will finally reveal to us in March, or just in time to influence the November 2008 election?

Since most G.O.P. presidential candidates endorse all this, one would have to note that today's Republicans lend new meaning to the phrase "war profiteering." Judith Balaban Quine

Beverly Hills, Calif., Nov. 23, 2007

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To the Editor:

The information provided in "Foreign Fighters in Iraq Are Tied to Allies of U.S." (front page, Nov. 22) strengthens and adds credibility to the argument that the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq is a failed one. A significant percentage of the insurgent fighters battling American and Iraqi forces has now been identified as Saudi or Libyan.

For at least three years or since the war bogged down and became a quagmire, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their minions have repeatedly insisted that we are in Iraq to defeat homegrown terrorism. It has now been clearly documented that by invading Iraq and occupying the country, the actions taken by the United States have attracted foreign fighters to join the insurgency in an effort to drive the Americans out of Iraq.

The current stronghold of terrorism in Iraq has developed as a direct result of the Bush administration's actions and decisions, not in spite of them as Mr. Bush would have us believe.

The incredible irony here is that two countries that the president and the vice president have lauded as staunch allies in the global war against terrorism have been significant sources of the people who are killing and wounding American troops on a daily basis.

The only strategic course of action that makes political and military sense is to plan and carry out a phased withdrawal of American forces from a country that has become a cauldron of terrorist and insurgent activity and where there is no victory at the end of the road. Alan Safron

Woodcliff Lake, N.J., Nov. 22, 2007

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To the Editor:

Re "Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves" (front page, Nov. 20):

Now that it appears that progress is being made in Iraq, let's stanch the notion that Democrats and progressives are going to be unhappy and disappointed. Nothing could be further from the truth from what will amount to a cheap shot that will go out through the conservative echo chamber.

Liberals more than anyone have been sickened by the continuing loss of life and disruption in the lives of everyday Iraqis along with our soldiers and their families, not to mention the damage being done to our economy through this costly and endless occupation. If this success has been brought about by the surge, then the question is, Why wasn't it done sooner? Keith Schmitz

Shorewood, Wis., Nov. 20, 2007

if the world could vote

Op-Ed Columnist

Obama in Orbit

By ROGER COHEN

Published: November 15, 2007

NEW YORK

Little that is certain can be said about the U.S. election a year from now, but one certainty is this: about 6.3 billion people will not be voting even if they will be affected by the outcome.

That's the approximate world population outside the United States. If nothing else, President Bush has reminded them that it's hard to get out of the way of U.S. power. The wielding of it, as in Iraq, has whirlwind effects. The withholding of it, as on the environment, has a huge impact.

No wonder the view is increasingly heard that everyone merits a ballot on Nov. 4, 2008.

That won't happen, of course. Even the most open-armed multilateralist is not ready for hanging chads in Chad. But the broader point of the give-us-a-vote itch must be taken: the global community is ever more linked. American exceptionalism, as practiced by Bush, has created a longing for new American engagement.

Renewal is about policy; it's also about symbolism. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic candidate with a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, an Indonesian stepfather, a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and impressionable experience of the Muslim world.

If the globe can't vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world.

Michael Ignatieff, the deputy leader of Canada's opposition Liberal Party, said: "Outsiders know it's your choice. Still, they are following this election with passionate interest. And it's clear Barack Obama would be the first globalized American leader, the first leader in whom internationalism would not be a credo, it would be in his veins."

To the south, in Mexico, resentment of the Bush administration has less to do with American unilateralism and more with stalled immigration policy and the building of a border fence. But the thirst for change is the same.

"Mexicans want evidence that things are shifting, which means the Democrats, and of course a woman like Hillary Clinton, or a black like Obama, would signal a huge cultural change," said Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister.

"My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We've got female leaders now in Latin America — in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary."

Of course, Mexicans aren't electing the president. Nor are Canadians, even if Michael Moore thinks they should. The America of the global imagination is not that of red-state reality, a disconnect that has spawned a million misunderstandings.

Still, the transformational symbolism of an Obama presidency is compelling, especially as the actual content of the foreign policy proposals of leading Democratic candidates looks similar. Among Republicans, only John McCain — admired in Europe — seems to offer real bridge-building capacity.

Clinton, Obama and John Edwards all favor closing Guantánamo Bay. They all want to end the Iraq war, although they differ on how fast and on what residual force to leave in the country or area. They all favor undoing unilateralism. They all back engagement with Iran, although Clinton supported the designation of the Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorists.

Most of this would please an expectant world. But Obama, while saying he might attack "high value terrorist targets" in Pakistan, has been most forthright in sketching a globalized community — "the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people" — and pushing hope over fear.

I see nobody else who would represent such a Kennedy-like restorative charge at a time when America often seems out of sync with the world.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former British ambassador to the United Nations, told me that the United States remained the most important nation, but "the American label feels tied to something anachronistic. America has not been working out where the world is going, nor creating the appropriate relationships for that world."

Obama, in many ways, is where the world is going. He embodies interconnectedness where the Bush administration has projected separateness.

Andrew Sullivan, in a fine piece in The Atlantic, imagines a Pakistani Muslim seeing on television a man "who attended a majority-Muslim school" and is "now the alleged enemy."

He notes: "If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close."

The world isn't voting. America is. But the candidate who most mirrors the 21st-century world seems clear enough.