GHB Toy Beads, the Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic

[McCamy Taylor]

Back in late 2001, a Republican Congressman was being interviewed on CNN. The Enron bankruptcy was big news, but he was being questioned about a different scandal, one involving Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton and charges it had lied to the federal government on invoices. The GOP Senator responded to the inquiries with outrage. “Halliburton is still solvent!” As if having money in the bank absolved Halliburton of any crime it may have committed.

Today, we learned that Aqua Dots, toy beads made in China have pulled from shelves in the U.S., because if children put them into their mouths, they turn into the date rate drug, GHB and put the kids into a coma. This is just the latest round of recalls of toxic childrens' products that American toy dealers, eager for more profits, have commissioned from China, a land where labor is cheap and where the protestant work ethic does not exist.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7083158.stm

The protestant work ethic does not exist in the United States, anymore, either, not in its original form. Now, we have a perverted version in which the morality and religion have been stripped from it and only the greed remain.

A century ago, Max Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Briefly, he speculated that several strains of Protestants, notably the Calvinists, the Baptists, the Puritans, and to a lesser extent the Methodists rejected the idea of withdrawal from the material world. At the same time they embraced the idea of predestination. You were either damned or saved. The only good works on which God looked favorably were labor in the material world, a “calling” and the best way to demonstrate one's own state of salvation while working for the glory of God was to do well in one’s God giving calling---i.e to turn a profit.

For if that God, whose hand the Puritan sees in all the occurrences of life, shows one of His elect a chance to profit, he must do it with a purpose.

Unlike in Catholic countries, where holy men often took a vow of poverty so that others could give them alms and achieve give works(the same practice occurred among Buddhists and Hindus), those who were a drain on society because they labored in some unproductive calling were morally as well as socially bad according to these Protestant groups:

To wish to be poor was, it was often argued, the same as wishing to be unhealthy; it is objectionable as a glorification of works and derogatory to the glory of God. Especially begging, on the part of one able to work, is not only the sin of slothfulness, but a violation of the duty of brotherly love.

Income disparity was no longer a problem under this system which preached predestination, since

Unequal distribution of goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret ends unknown to man.

Exploiting low income workers was actually a good thing, for “Calvin himself had made the much quoted statement that only when the people i.e. the mass of labourers and craftsmen, were poor did they remain obedient to God.”

I wish I could say that the Gap was trying to save the souls of the children of India when it commissioned clothes to be made by them in sweat shops. However, I think Weber was right when he wrote

In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth , stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

Sport on the part of the capitalists. Life or death for the rest of us. One hundred years later, business demands that the American people continue to treat Business, Profit and the Economy as the same sanctified endeavors that our Puritan forebears did—even though today’s business leaders do not follow the rules. Yes, they had rules, once upon a time, in the days of Ben Franklin. Things like selling an honest service or a decent product. However, once the "ethic" became a "sport", the "all's fair" rules came into play.

One of the rules is keeping all the old protestant ethic rules that benefit the capitalist. Therefore, everything is justified if it keeps the company profitable. Mass layoffs, dissolving a pension, cutting health care benefits, outsourcing jobs, hiring undocumented workers. Workers are expected to make sacrifices to ensure their company’s profitability. But as with the employees of American Airlines, when the sacrifices help a company turn a profit, it is the owners and bosses who are rewarded. Why? Because our Puritan forebears said that the workers souls benefited from poverty, while the owners should amass capital so that they could continue their good works---works that include keeping more workers poor.

This perverted philosophy permeates the United States. Note the fervor with which many blame undocumented aliens for accepting the low wage jobs which U.S. businesses offer them. No one holds a gun to the heads of the business owners and forces them to hire aliens. If they were patriotic, law abiding companies, they would hire only citizens, correct? Why aren’t there groups of right wing Minutemen camped out around factories and the factory owners’ homes, picketing them twenty four seven? The answer is that the religious right, with its strong Puritan streak, secretly believes that the wealthy business owners are God’s anointed. If offered a chance to save money and increase profit by hiring a worker at a lower wage, they must seize it. It is their duty as good Americans and Christians. Instead, they blame the immigrant workers for providing temptation. They blame China instead of American toy companies for lead coated toys and GHB beads. They blame countries like India with lower wages for stealing American jobs. When Ford goes bankrupt, once again, it will get a bailout, because it is sacred, but when working people go bankrupt because of medical debt, they can not file bankruptcy to get out from under their loans. God wants them to work forever to pay off their $100,000. It is good for their soul. The rich do not go to jail, because they are predestined to go to go to heaven. They could not have amassed all that money otherwise.

This crazy perversion of Christianity explains, in part, why the Republican base votes the way it does. It is very useful for the business class and elite in this country. Since poverty is a sign of moral turpitude, then right wing voters will never approve universal health care or SCHIP (the sins of the father are visited unto the child) or improved education benefits. They will never, ever agree to taxing the rich, since God wants them to have all that money. They will not doubt the word of Bush or Cheney or any of their rich white male advisers, who are obviously the apostles of the modern age.

And it explains why businesses keep getting away with murder---literally. Poison people with E.coli contaminated meat? Oh, it is so sad that an old meat company had to go bankrupt, just because some people died. Blame it on the lawyers and our “broken” court system. Illegally wiretap every single American citizen in exchange for administration favors? No problem. The Democratic Congress would never allow Ma Belle East and Ma Belle South---two heads of the three headed Phone Company---to suffer financial harm. It would be a sin. Let’s give AT&T and Verizon immunity that we would not give a Black man for writing a bad check.

Under the Bush administration, the agencies which are supposed to check the worst impulses of business, like the FDA and the FCC and the EPA, have turned into their enablers instead. However, these agencies could not get away with covering up contaminated food and toxic waste spills if a large section of the American public was not willing to cut business in the country a mile wide swath of slack. Unfortunately, this impulse in so deeply ingrained in our culture that it sneaks into our public school system and our literature and television. That means that everyone in the U.S. has a little bit of this thinking buried within them somewhere. It is the impulse which tells us "Time wasted in spiritual, intellectual or charitable pursuits is worthless (since we can not alter our status as saved or damned---Calvinist predestination is just a hop, skip and a jump from atheist existentialism). The only way we can make our mark known on this earth is by making money, so that we can leave a monument that reads 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'"

In China, they would execute the owners of toy companies that imported toy beads that poisoned children with GHB. Here, in the U.S., this will be the subject of lots of tasteless jokes and some mild outrage. There will be lawsuit. Money--the holy dollar---will pass from hand to hand, and people will say that justice was done.