people w ho have jobs—they’re manufacturing fancy leather clothes
that sell on Madison Avenue and in shops in London and Paris.
It’s a similar story throughout the w orld. But if you w alk through
dow ntow n Boston, you’ll also see appalling poverty. I’ve seen things
in New York that are as horrifying as anything I’ve seen in the T hird
W orld.
Comparable to the favelas [shantytow n slums] in Brazil?
It’s hard to say “comparable.” T he poverty and suffering in Haiti
or R io de Janeiro or Bombay is w ell beyond w hat w e have here—
although w e’re moving in that direction. (As you know, black males
in Harlem have roughly the same mortality rate as men in
Bangladesh.)
But psychological effects are also crucially significant—how bad
conditions seem depends on w hat else is around. If you’re much
poorer than other people in your society, that harms your health in
detectable w ays, even by gross measures like life expectancy.
So I’d say that there are parts of New York or Boston that are
similar to w hat you find in the T hird World. A Stone Age person
could be very happy w ithout a computer or a T V, and no doubt the
people in the favelas live better than Stone Age people by a lot of
measures—although they probably aren’t as w ell-nourished or
healthy.
But going back to your earlier point, seeing things firsthand gives
them a vividness and significance you don’t get by reading, and you
also discover a lot of things that are never w ritten about—like the
w ay popular struggles are dealing w ith problems.
How can w e organize against globalization and the grow ing pow er of
transnational corporations?
It depends w hat time range you’re thinking of. You read
constantly that globalization is somehow inevitable. In the New
York Times, T homas Friedman mocks people w ho say there are
w ays to stop it.
According to him, it’s not haw ks and doves any more—there’s a
new dichotomy in the ideological system, betw een integrationists,