Pubdate: Sat, 28 Jun 2003
Source: Listener, The (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2003 The Listener
Contact:  http://www.listener.co.nz/FrontPage.asp
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/241
Author: Russell Brown
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Eric+Schlosser
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)

HOW TO CREATE A PEASANT CLASS

REEFER MADNESS AND OTHER TALES FROM THE UNDERGROUND, by Eric Schlosser
(Penguin, $37.95).

In the state of California, as nowhere else, visitors are liable to feel a 
sense that America's social mobility has broken down: that there is one 
class enjoying a thrilling, lively prosperity, and another destined only to 
carry the bags and till the fields.

In Reefer Madness and Other Tales from the American Underground, Eric 
Schlosser offers substantial empirical evidence to support the feeling. In 
Los Angeles County, an estimated 28 percent of workers are paid in cash. A 
burgeoning underground economy accounts for something between nine and 29 
percent of the city's economic activity.

But it is in agriculture that the underground has most firmly taken hold. 
Between 30 and 60 percent of the migrant workers in California's fields - 
more than a million of them - are illegal immigrants; non-citizens, 
untouched by civil society, lacking health care and, in some cases, even 
homes to live in.

The underground is the setting of Schlosser's book, although the three 
essays that comprise it don't quite achieve the consistency of theme that 
he aspires to in his introduction. "Reefer Madness" (which first emerged as 
a long magazine article about the war on drugs) and his story of the 
American porn industry, "An Empire of the Obscene", are at heart about the 
perverse outcomes of attempts to regulate private behaviour, but "In the 
Strawberry Fields" is more in the territory of Schlosser's first book, Fast 
Food Nation, in its examination of the unsavoury - and frequently illicit - 
underpinnings of the American consumer food chain.

Like Fast Food Nation, this book is not a rant, and will come as a balm to 
anyone feeling uneasy with the liberties taken by liberal superguy Michael 
Moore in the name of, well, liberty. Schlosser's technique is calmly to 
assemble the facts and leave the reader to conclude that something is 
seriously wrong here.

He's hardly an ideologue, either. The book opens with a consideration of 
The Wealth of Nations, and, just as Schlosser saw the early fast-food 
entrepreneurs as in many ways admirable, so he seems to detect essentially 
American virtues in the nimble and defiant career of millionaire porn king 
Reuben Sturman.

Schlosser pursues his outwardly academic theme - "the proper limits of the 
state and the proper limits on the free market" - as a journalist, using 
real stories to track the boom in minimum sentences and other forms of 
gimmick law associated with marijuana. The result: woeful inconsistency, 
ludicrous punishments, poor outcomes and the alarming transfer of judicial 
discretion to prosectors. And also - in a link with his essay on immigrant 
labour - a substantial transfer of risk to those at the bottom of the 
industry ladder.

He concludes (almost to his own surprise, you feel) that America's most 
sound illicit-drug policy existed under the Nixon administration, and that 
the Reaganite war on drugs reversed a declining trend in illegal drug use. 
Why, Schlosser asks, has such weight of law been piled onto protecting 
Americans from their private behaviour, when the most important safeguards 
of life and liberty go unheeded on California's strawberry fields?

"This unwillingness to control corporate behaviour on moral grounds has 
been accompanied . by a government crusade to judge, condemn and punish 
individuals for their alleged moral failings. Certain things cannot be sold 
because they are immoral, while other things - such as the exploitation of 
illegal immigrants, their poverty and poor health - hardly raise a moral 
qualm."

Meanwhile, the old porn king's elaborate systems for keeping the government 
away from his business and his money seem "quaint and old-fashioned" 
compared to the more recent practices of Enron Corporation, which was 
washing money through nearly 900 foreign subsidiaries (two thirds of them 
registered in the Cayman Islands) by the time it collapsed.

"In addition to influencing the accounting practices of corporate America," 
says Schlosser, "the underground has subsumed a wide range of economic 
activities that used to occur in the mainstream. The sort of black-market 
labour once narrowly confined to California agriculture is now widespread 
in meatpacking, construction and garment manufacture."

Schlosser's ominous prediction that before long the US will have no need to 
import a peasant class - it will have created its own - will have to be 
tested by history. The September 11 attacks and subsequent 
life-during-wartime in the US seem to have been shoehorned into the end of 
the book, as if he couldn't bring himself not to mention them. But overall, 
the meticulous and original Reefer Madness and Other Tales from the 
American Underground elegantly draws the reader towards his personal 
philosophy: "My own views tend toward a suspicion of all absolute theories 
and a strong belief in thought that knows its own limits. I like the idea 
of fewer laws, strictly enforced." 
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