In 2000, a band of semi-trained young men in a rubber dinghy blew a hole in the U.S.S. Cole,
a multi-billion dollar ship of war, shocking the world, killing over a
dozen sailors, and making global headlines. Measured in terms of the
cost of the attack versus the damage inflicted, the return on investment
proved to be astronomical. A terrorism budget of less than $100,000 did
millions of dollars in damage and purchased the equivalent of a massive
international advertising campaign that bolstered the notoriety of Al
Qaeda, the group responsible, to historic heights.
John Robb, an entrepreneur and former air force captain expounded on this military and economic discrepancy in his 2007 book Brave New War:
networked combatants whose inexpensive attacks cause outsized damage
and disruption to a vulnerable, rich society dependent on extensive
trade networks and worldwide political arrangements. Robb writes:
The
nation-state is now bound up in a straitjacket of constraints. The core
of its strength, its ability to marshal resources and take actions that
exceed the power of any smaller organization, has been made
increasingly impotent.
...
[The] cozy
and highly regulated market of warfare characterized by wars between
state oligopolies is eroding because of these constraints... [The]
result is a new, competitive market for warfare more akin to the years
before the Thirty Years’ War
than to our recent past. The participants in this new market are small
adroit nonstate competitors and occasional allies — guerilla/terrorist
groups, paramilitaries, and private military companies — and they are in
the process of rewriting the rules of warfare.”
The
brazenness of the attack on the Cole, and the fact that non-state
actors achieved it, signified an historic change. The American military
turned to the private sector for assistance in fighting this new asymmetric war against mostly non-state foes. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, soon after won the company’s first Federal contract to provide security training for sailors.
Turning
to a private military company for support may have been a consequence
of the general policy trend at the time — the notion that government
services could be privatized while still being funded by tax revenues
had become popular with both parties, albeit with some controversy —
but it would eventually snowball into a far larger industry in the wake
of the attacks of 9/11/2001. During the Afghan and second Iraqi wars,
modern mercenaries would make their mark.
By ideology,
convention, and international law, modern governments have generally
eschewed the use of mercenary companies in favor of national
militaries.
The era of monarchies made greater general
use of mercenaries than later popular governments, for various reasons.
The ideology of popular government rests on the notion of the shared
rights and responsibilities of citizens, whereas an aristocratic society
may have neither the financial resources nor manpower to either
maintain a standing army nor raise one on short notice without paying
for it. The Knights Templar were a sort of a medieval Academi
(the new brand name of Blackwater Worldwide), originally charged by the
Vatican with providing security to Christian pilgrims following the
First Crusade.
The militia tradition of the United States and especially the levée en masse
established during the French Republic broke with common military
practices, and the two World Wars further established the norm of using
mass conscription instead of professional military units to fight wars.
Modern
mercenary companies avoid the use of the word ‘mercenary,’ and
newspaper writers avoid using the word when referring to members of
“security services providers.” This is a useful legalistic evasion of
the terms of the United Nations Mercenary Convention.
While the United States has never signed the convention — and plenty of
the signatories, like Liberia, are incapable of enforcing it even on
their own territory — a number of developed countries are signatories
and domestic political debate in the United States recognizes the norm
behind the convention by refusing to call mercenary companies what they
are in plain language.
The Geneva Conventions also have a section
stating that none of the protections otherwise afforded to prisoners of
war apply to mercenaries. The law considers mercenaries to be ‘unlawful combatants,’
and as such, American companies are careful to operate within the
arcane confines of international law, generally providing logistics
support to client militaries, along with securing facilities &
high-value individuals.
All of this makes it extremely
challenging to start and run a mercenary company in the modern world,
even though it’s technically the ‘second oldest profession’ in history.
It’s illegal, or at least frowned upon, to practice the trade openly.
There are limitations on the procurement of tools for employees,
conducting training is politically difficult, and the press usually
considers the trade to be morally abhorrent. Despite this, the economic
factors in play have begun to overpower the legal and cultural
resistance to the re-emergence of private soldiering.
The conflict that reintroduced the mercenary to public awareness in America was the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom
— the largest American military occupation since the Vietnam War. The
all-volunteer American military, lacking in manpower or the ability to
increase staffing on short notice, turned to private companies to
provide logistics and support. The economic consequences of the
abolition of the draft in 1973 became apparent as the occupation began
to drag on far longer than American war planners had initially
predicted. Politicians could no longer increase the number of boots on
the ground at the stroke of a pen — it was now necessary to bring out
the public checkbook.
The American private military
industry resurged during the Iraq and Afghan wars, as substantial
portions of the increase in the defense budget following the attacks on
9/11/2001 wound up in the coffers of defense firms. According to a 2011 paper by the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
by 2010, almost 40% of all defense budget spending was on defense
contractors, largely in military services. By 2006, a census recorded
over 100,000 military contractors
living and working in Iraq for the occupying authority. In the words of
representative Henry Waxman of California during a 2007 congressional hearing on Blackwater:
“We
know that sergeants in the military generally cost the Government
between $50,000 to $70,000 per year. We also know that a comparable
position at Blackwater costs the Federal Government over $400,000, six
times as much.”
Private military firms in
the U.S. recruit much of their staff directly from the Department of
Defense: the publicly-financed military effectively subsidizes the
training that provides these companies with their talent. The firms that
are working for the U.S. government are usually heavily regulated, with
their weapons carefully tracked, and in most situations are under the
direct command of military authorities.
“[The
U.S. government hires Private Military Contractors] because they truly
don't have the manpower or the logistics capability to fulfill those
missions. So really the company becomes like a very robust temp agency
operating very much under the command and control of the government.”
This
political aspect of the private military industry is changing. As the
American commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq wind down, private military
companies are finding new roles in the international ‘bazaar of
violence.’ The increase in piracy in the Gulf of Aden and in the Indian
Ocean, along with the relative difficulty that national navies have had
in providing effective security in the region, have reintroduced the old
historical and economic role for both mercenaries and merchant marines.
When pirate attacks threatened to drive up insurance costs for shipping
in the area, major shipping insurance companies banded together to both
lobby to loosen international regulations on arming ship crews and to fund a private naval force to defend against pirate attacks.
British PMCs in particular have begun to establish themselves in the trade, as have firms from India and Sri Lanka. Some American companies like AdvanFort even publish press releases
of their military exploits, complete with posed photos of mercenaries
in action, ideal for sharing on Facebook. Simon Murray, the chairman of
the massive international conglomerate GlenCore,
has also started a firm called Typhon to patrol the area. Unlike the
Private Military Contractors (PMCs) that made headlines during the Iraqi
and Afghan wars, these firms are less public-private in essence and are
more private companies serving other private companies for private
purposes.
In interviews regarding Typhon’s plans, representatives have described the role of their private navy as acting more like ‘burglar alarms’
to alert nearby ships of possible threats. Rather than traveling
alongside the navies of nation-states, the private fleets operate on the
schedules and routes of the private cargo vessels targeted by the
pirates. The company has described itself as the ‘first naval-grade
private convoy protection in 220 years.’
On the ground, mercenary armies like the Puntland Maritime Police Force have run into difficulties with funding and politics,
as occurred with the Puntland company when its backers in the United
Arab Emirates and the United States withdrew funding, leaving behind
thousands of unpaid mercenaries in Somalia. When an internet startup
goes bankrupt, all that’s left are a bunch of Aeron chairs and some
computer equipment. When a mercenary company goes bankrupt, the hired
guns start to look for new employment and entertainment.
There’s even a trade group representing maritime security providers — the Security Association for the Maritime Industry — which has been endorsed by Lloyd’s of London,
one of the most prestigious and successful insurance firms in the
world. SAMI lists dozens upon dozens of PMCs from countries ranging from
Estonia to Germany, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. While
these companies may prefer the PMC acronym to describe themselves, in
historical terms, they’re essentially privateers.
Many of the companies listed claim to have been founded quite recently —
many between 2000-2010. Some prefer more reserved,
professional-sounding branding, others, like the Marine Pirate Busters, prefer a little more bombast.
Since the growth of PMCs in the area, the United Nations reported this year that there have been no Somali hijackings in the region
since 2012. Unlike the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which had
challenging, idealistic strategic incentives and non-economic
motivation, the conflict in Somalia has clearly defined costs in the
form of insurance payouts to hijackers, which makes it easier for
private companies to calibrate what resources to expend on resolving the
threat.
In an interview with the blog PiracyDaily, Terrence McKnight, the former commander of Task Force 151,
the international naval force set up in 2009 to deter pirate attacks
off the coast of Somalia, spoke of the difficulties that private
security companies face in one of the next potential security vacuums on
the seas off of West Africa, North Africa, and in the Middle East:
“This
is something that the world communities have got to get a handle on. We
know we want to stop piracy. We know we don't have enough naval ships
out there to protect all the fleets—so we have these armed security
teams. So, how do we now implement them? If we have all these
restrictions, then they can’t do it. We've seen the success story that,
since 2009 and the arrival of these security teams, there has not been a
ship hijacked yet that has had an armed security team. So it is a
success story. So (we need to) take that success and figure out how do
we organize these teams so that the host country has some say in it and
also, that we protect the crew that man the ships.”
Facing
resource constraints, the U.S. and other allied governments are
becoming less capable of providing security on sea lanes. Further,
foreign governments are perhaps understandably jumpy at the prospect of
permitting heavily-armed privateers to use their waters. Diplomats know
how to speak to other diplomats, but conducting diplomacy with dozens of
private security corporations is not the same. Similarly,
nationally-managed navies are not necessarily structured in such a way
that they're capable of fighting non-state foes (like poor pirates armed
with cheap rocket launchers piloting zodiacs) in an economically
efficient way.
When John Robb wrote Brave New War in 2007, he predicted that by 2016:
“...The
first casualty [of a black swan event] in the United States will be the
ultra-bureaucratic U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which, despite
its new extralegal surveillance powers, will prove unable to defuse the
threats against us... Furthermore, the extra police powers that it will
be granted in the wake of these attacks will be counterproductive
because these powers will only serve to divide the United States and
generate a significant base of domestic dissent and vociferous debate.
[...]
Security
will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as
health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational
corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system,
opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater
and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and to
establish a protective perimeter around daily life.
[...]
Members
of the middle class will soon follow, taking matters into their own
hands by forming suburban collectives to share the costs of security.”
With the public debate surrounding the revelations of Edward Snowden
— himself, essentially, a former cyber-mercenary working on contract
for the National Security Agency — in early 2013, fulfilling at least
some of Robb’s predictions for the future of security, it may be
sensible to take notice of them now. Lest he be dismissed as a crank
author, no less a representative of mainstream thinking than David Brooks saw fit to blurb the book jacket, and James Fallows, writer for The Atlantic and winner of the National Book Award, wrote the foreword.
In another continuation of this trend towards private provision of security in the U.S., The San Francisco Gate reported in September that the private law enforcement industry has been earning hundreds of new subscribers
in Oakland, supplementing the over-extended public police force. Like
mercenaries elsewhere, current laws prevent them from taking over the
functions of their publicly-financed authorities — but perhaps as has
happened elsewhere in the world, the sheer demand for safety will cause
laws to shift. The price cited for protection is $20 per month.
Lindsay Makowski and her bulldog in her living room in Silver Spring, Md. Ms. Makowski owns numerous handguns which she got after getting into a bad situation with a former boyfriend.
(L) Ben Baker stands on the railway tracks that run by his home in in
Ashburn, Ga. He is posing with his beloved 20 gauge pump action shotgun.
(L) Writer Dan Baum at his home in Boulder, Colo. Mr. Baum with his
cherished 7.63mm C96 Mauser which was manufactured in 1896.
“There were times when I thought it would never happen,”
Coleen Rowley, a former FBI agent, said about her recent trip to Moscow.
“I’m still amazed.”
I too was amazed when I received an encrypted email at
2am one recent October morning, with a photo of her and three other
whistleblowers standing shoulder to shoulder with one of the most wanted
men on the planet.
When Edward Snowden abandoned his Hawaii home, a long-term
relationship, and a six-figure salary as a government contractor in
order to lift the veil on the US's transnational surveillance system, he
also left behind any sense of safety or security. The US Justice
Department has charged the 30-year-old former "infrastructure analyst"
with theft of government property, and two serious charges under the
Espionage Act. The former director of the NSA, Michael Hayden, even
recently "joked" during a cybersecurity panel that Snowden should be put on America’s kill list. (Rep. Mike Rogers R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, responded, "I can help you with that.")
For four high-profile former spooks, each with their own
histories of whistleblowing and government persecution, arranging a
secret meeting with the world’s most wanted whistleblower was no simple
thing. In early October, they embarked on their mission to inaugurate
Snowden into the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, a
group of ex-intelligence officials who demonstrate “courage,
persistence, and devotion to truth — no matter the consequences.” They
had chosen Snowden as the awardee of their 2013 Sam Adams Integrity
Award, and felt it would only be right to deliver the award—a
candlestick holder made on a 3D printer—in person. They would be the
first Americans known to meet with him since he arrived in Moscow on
June 23.
Holding a 3D-printed candle to power: From left, Coleen
Rowley (retired FBI agent), Thomas Drake (former NSA senior executive),
Jesselyn Radack (former Dept. of Justice advisor), Snowden, Sarah
Harrison (WikiLeaks journalist), and Ray McGovern (retired CIA
analyst).
“Arrangements were made,” said Thomas Drake, a former
senior executive at the NSA who was on the trip and who spoke carefully
about its details. Drake, who warned about abuses at the agency after
9/11 and was indicted under the Espionage Act before most of the charges
were dropped, has been cited by Snowden as an inspiration. After
Snowden's disclosures, Drake warned him publicly to “always check
six"—make sure you know what's behind you. "Obviously, with Snowden, no
communications can be electronic.”
The term "logistical nightmare" springs to mind, but that
would be an understatement. The challenges of what they called the
"mission to Moscow," of communicating with and meeting with Snowden
without revealing his location to people armed with the arsenal of
technology Snowden has revealed, appeared insurmountable when the group began planning their trip in earnest in early August, at a hacker conference outside Amsterdam.
“We cannot be entirely sure, but it would appear that we
did successfully meet Snowden without being tailed or giving his
location away,” said Drake, who spearheaded the planning of the trip.
“We arrived in Russia not knowing where we would meet him—and of course,
we did not meet him at his place of residence. This level of security
was at his request, and agreed upon to protect his safety.” They met in
an undisclosed place that Rowley said was "probably a third location" in
a series of possible rendezvous points, in order to throw off anyone
who might be following them, and perhaps to keep the visitors in the
dark too.
Given the risks and difficulties of transportation,
accommodation, and communication between Snowden and his visitors, it's
not improbable, as some observers have speculated,
that Russia's state security services are responsible for their eminent
asylee. Some reports that emerged after the whistleblowers’ visit
referred to metal detectors at their meeting place, and the presence of
Russian officials. The visitors said that Snowden's attorney, Anatoly
Kucherena, and a translator were also in attendance, along with the
British journalist Sarah Harrison, of Wikileaks—"his shepherd, friend,
protector and constant companion since Hong Kong," according to
Radack. Ed's father, Lon, would visit the following day. But they would
not discuss other people who may have been at the ceremony. “Russia has a
duty to protect Ed as an asylee,” Drake explained. “That should tell
you everything you need to know.”
However hard they are, the challenges of
reaching Snowden might be somewhat diminished if you're already familiar
with the ins and outs of government power, as the Sam Adams Associates
certainly are. The award they were bringing was named for a CIA analyst
who, in 1967, discovered that there were more than half a million
Vietnamese Communists under arms, which was about twice the number that
the US command in Saigon would admit to, lest the narrative of the war's
"progress" prove to be false. Adams protested within the system, and
after retiring from CIA in 1973, wrote an article about about what he
called a CIA conspiracy for Harper's, testified before
Congress, and helped CBS News make a documentary. But up until he died
from a heart attack in 1988, he was nagged by the thought that he could
have said and done more. The new whistleblowers are determined to avoid
that regret.
“The US has unchained itself from the constitution,” said
Drake, who has spent the past few years railing against the government's
massive collection of Americans' data, which violates the Fourth
Amendment's principle that "searches and seizures" require warrants.
Snowden is a constitutionalist too, and when asked in an online Q & A what
he would say to other potential intelligence agency whistleblowers, he
expressed his nationalism in the plainest terms: “This country is worth
dying for."
Snowden's decision to expose the NSA, made in service, he's
said, to the American public and the Constitution, comes at a serious
personal cost. His year-long asylum protects him in Russia, but beyond
those borders, he risks prosecution, or worse. It's easy to imagine life
that has been hollowed, exiled in a freezing, alien terrain by his
crisis of consciousness; his daily existence shaken by the constant
anxiety of his inevitable persecution.
To the contrary, though, Snowden is doing “remarkably
well,” said Drake, who noted his "wicked sense of humor." Rowley rather
casually told me he “seemed fine.” There, they described a man living in
asylum, not as a fugitive—and not, as Snowden made sure to explain, as a
pawn of the Russian government. (His passport was revoked by the
U.S. while in transit to Ecuador, he points out, and his every move is
watched by Wikileaks' Harrison.) His biggest concerns, his visitors
said, tended to go well beyond his own safety.
“He has a poker face,” said Rowley. “He talked a lot about
the need for reform in the US—personal issues didn’t come up much.” What
about former director Hayden’s thinly veiled assassination comments?
“We asked him about that. It didn’t shake him at all. He shrugged it
off.”
Rowley, herself a remarkably resolute character who was
recognized as a Time Person of The Year in 2002 for her whistleblowing
at the FBI, describes Snowden as “one of the strongest and most stable
characters I have ever encountered.” He is practical and focused, she
added, an Epictetian stoic who carried on with life as best as possible,
sometimes getting out and about in Moscow (according to his attorney),
and apparently, working too. Rowley said Snowden's new gig is “working
on internet services of some sort.” No surprise there, but Snowden’s job, like his location, is likely to remain a closely guarded secret, for now at least.
Snowden's remarks at the Sam Adams Associates dinner, via Courtesy Wikileaks/The Daily Conversation
Being a Sam Adams Associate may not endow you with any
added sense of security, but it aims to provide a comforting sense of
solidarity. After the two-hour award ceremony, which included individual
speeches, an exchange of human rights texts and Russian literature, and
accounts of radical moments in American history, the attorney and
translator left, and the whistleblowers chatted until the early hours.
Another of his visitors, Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department
ethics attorney and whistleblower who has represented Thomas Drake and others, chose to read from Albert Camus.
“We have nothing to lose except everything," she recited.
"So let’s go ahead. This is the wager of our generation.” She drew
parallels between Camus’ wager and what Snowden called "the Work of a
Generation" in a statement he recently sent to the European Parliament's
Civil Liberties Committee. Radack reminded Snowden too that Camus
rejected what he termed “the paltry privileges granted to those who
adapt themselves to this world," adding, “those individuals who refuse
to give in will stand apart, and they must accept this.” Stoicism, not
anger, it seems, is a consistent motif among the US's intelligence
whistleblowers.
Ray McGovern, the 73-year-old founder of the Sam Adams
Associates, isn't among Snowden's generation, but he supports his
"wager." A former high-ranking CIA analyst who served under seven
presidents, McGovern argues that young people today who have grown up
with the internet possess technical abilities and a corresponding
conscience that motivates them to keep it free.
"One of the things that impressed me most," McGovern wrote,
"was Ed’s emphasis on the 'younger generation' he represents—typically
those who have grown up with the Internet—who have
(scarcely-fathomable-to-my-generation) technical expertise and equally
remarkable dedication to keeping it free—AND have a conscience."
"It is the sort of idealism,"
said Jesselyn Radack, "that allows someone to undertake such a
magnificent act of civil disobedience. It’s an idealism that believes
the democracy he once knew can be reined in from the surveillance state
it has become, if only the public knew what was going on.”
Drake, who has been thinking a lot lately about civil
liberties in the digital age, believes that an internet-connected
generation that remembers the pre-9/11 world may “carry new principles
to do with the democratization of information and the protection of
civil liberties that help us resist this dystopic nightmare.” Perhaps
serving as some measure, the number of people using the anonymous web
browsing program Tor has rocketed since the Snowden revelations.
Will this generation manage to curtail the kind of dragnet
surveillance that Snowden helped disclose, whether through political
change or technological evasion? Do Americans want to resist the
spied-upon world that Snowden said he didn’t want to live in? In the
Nation, Radack described Snowden as “idealistic—in the best sense of the
word. It is the sort of idealism that allows someone to undertake such a
magnificent act of civil disobedience. It’s an idealism that believes
the democracy he once knew can be reined in from the surveillance state
it has become, if only the public knew what was going on.”
There was a dose of realism in their meeting too. “He was
always talking about what should we do next, how to achieve reform,”
Rowley said, recounting the whistleblower's three main political aims.
First, he would like to see section 215 of the controversial post-9/11
PATRIOT Act, and particularly section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act,
repealed, ending two elements of legislation that permit the collection
of metadata and warrantless surveillance, with dubious
constitutionality."
Snowden also said he wants to see the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) amended, as this is the legislation that permits the interception and storage of private electronic communications.
Third, he urged that an independent body conduct a thorough inquiry
into the surveillance practices of US intelligence agencies on a broader
scale. Rowley reminded me that the NSA is just one of sixteen US
intelligence agencies—and that there are around 2,000 private security
contractors. “There is even more going on than Snowden knows about,” she
said.
And for us, the public, too. Glenn Greenwald, who took hold
of Snowden's documents (Snowden has said he no longer has them),
estimates that he and other journalists are only about halfway through
the release of Snowden's trove of exported documents. And some of the
most shocking revelations, I am told, are yet to come.
The revelations likely won't end there. The ex-spooks tell
me, with scant detail, that more whistleblowers have begun to come
forward. There's a sense now that dawn is breaking in the Information
Age, revealing a staggering new horizon. If information is power,
Snowden has helped foretell a decade of unprecedented public
empowerment, his supporters say. He may be called an idealist for
wanting to change the world, but in the eyes of those who have dared to
tread a similar path, he already has.
“It is never about the majority,” Drake said of the
people who are instrumental in protecting the freedoms of the public,
“nor has it been throughout our history.”
In this excerpt from the forthcoming Junkyard Planet, author Adam Minter explores China's central role in the world's vast global recycling trade.
By Adam Minter
China’s
reputation as the “world's factory” is well-established. But what
happens to everything the world throws away? Since 2002, the
Shanghai-based journalist Adam Minter has sought to find out. The son
and grandson of scrap metalists, Minter traveled throughout the world to
investigate how what we discard—and reuse—helps drive the global
economy.
Minter, who has written for a variety of publications (including both the print and digital versions of The Atlantic), now writes a weekly column on China for Bloomberg. In this excerpt from his forthcoming book Junkyard Planet, which will be published by Bloomsbury Press on November 12, Minter travels to the epicenter of the global scrape trade: southern China.
I remember the first time I reported in Foshan, China, population 7 million.
I flew into Guangzhou Airport, where I was met by a scrap dealer, his
sleek BMW, and a fresh-from-the-countryside driver. It was 2002, and
Foshan wasn’t much more than a spread-out set of underdeveloped villages
somewhere west of a Chinese wherever. I’d only been in-country a couple
of weeks at that point, and I’d had trouble finding Foshan on a map.
This all seemed like a bad idea.The drive from the airport traversed
newly built highways and not so newly built country roads lined with
high-voltage power lines that sagged to a few feet off the ground.
Overloaded delivery trucks were the dominant means of transportation,
jamming up the roads and—when there were shoulders—the shoulders, too.
Back then it took almost two hours to reach the faux-rococo
Fontainebleau Hotel, a yellowed porcelain doily in the heart of Foshan’s
Nanhai District.
Cigar-chomping scrap dealers from around
the world sat in baroque chairs and discussed where they’d get a decent
hamburger when they made it up to Shanghai on the weekend.
By then, Nanhai was already one of the world’s biggest processors
of scrap metal, and you only needed to walk into the lobby to know it.
Set amid lush, manicured landscapes that would make Louis XIV
blush, cigar-chomping scrap dealers from around the world sat in
baroque chairs and discussed where they’d get a decent hamburger when
they made it up to Shanghai on the weekend. But that wasn’t all: at any
hour of the day, you could walk into the lobby of that hotel and find at
least a couple of Caucasian scrap exporters having tea, coffee, or
whiskey with a couple of Chinese scrap importers while some of Guangdong
Province’s finest prostitutes sashayed by, on the way to visit clients
upstairs. If you needed to know the price of insulated copper wire—well, the global market was being made right there, all day and all night long.
Jet lag defined much of what happened in the Fontainebleau in those
days. I remember seeing scrap guys consuming breakfast at midnight,
steaks at 7:30 a.m., and poorly mixed cocktails any time at all. But that
was just as well, because scrap processing was (and often still is) a 24-
hour-a-day activity in southern China. It had to be: Two decades into
the country’s modern development, everything was starting to
accelerate: airports, highways, apartments, cars. And everything,
needless to say, needs metal.
Take, for example, subways: On the day I moved to Shanghai, it
had precisely three subway lines. Ten years later it’s the world’s
largest system, with 11 lines and 270 miles of tracks. However, China
lacks ready access to sufficient raw materials of its own to build all
those subways, so in very short order it’s become a net importer of
scrap copper, aluminum, steel, and the other metals needed in the
infrastructure of a modernizing society.
Back then, if you were jet-lagged and had an amenable scrap-metal host
(and they were all amenable if it meant access to American scrap metal),
you could head out to the scrapyards in the dead of night. You’d arrive
in the processing zones via expensive cars that zigzagged down a narrow
brick-lined alley, out into a boulevard with murky, poorly lit signs,
back into an alley, finally pulling up at some metal gate
indistinguishable from other metal gates. The driver would honk, the
owner would roll down his window so the guard could see him, and a
worker would push aside the gate. Then you’d drive into a wide lamplit
space, the headlights bouncing off piles of metal fragments, giant bales
of wire, and, off to the side, a shed where two or three men—it was
mostly men—fed scrap cables into machines that ran an incision along the
insulation. Nearby, another team—often female—used that incision to pull away the insulation and expose the copper wire.
What I saw was so alien—except for all of that scrap. I knew
what that was. It looked like what we used to send to China, only now it
was in China. Meanwhile, over in the farthest corner of the yard, the flicker of flames
might send black smoke into the not-quite-as-dark night. The smell
would be noxious (and, depending on the wire, dioxin-laced), but the
goal would be anything but: profit. Wires too small to run through the
stripping machines were a favorite item to burn, but anything would do
if copper demand was strong; in the morning, the copper could be swept
out of the ashes. One night, I recall clearly, I saw a row of a
halfdozen electrical transformers—the big cylinders that hang on
power lines and regulate the power—smoking into the night. When I
realized what they were, I backed off: older transformers contain highly
toxic PCBs. But nobody seemed to mention that to the workers who,
through the evening, poked at the flames. I didn’t like it, but there’s
not much to be said when you’re standing in the middle of a scrapyard in
a village you’ve never heard of in a province you’ve just barely heard
of, as the guest of somebody you’ve just met. I wasn’t sure that I was
in much position to be complaining, anyway: I’m a child of the industry
too.
To be honest, I was shocked by the number of people who worked in these
scrapyards, and by their low pay. But I was not shocked by the menial
jobs, and I was not surprised by the pollution. After all, my
grandmother and her siblings cleaned metal into adulthood, and her
younger brother, Leonard, told me that he knew how to “break” a
motor—that is, take it apart with hammers and pliers, and extract the
copper—as well as anybody in the Twin Cities. That’s what you do when
you’ve got nothing else— and their generation didn’t have much else.
That wasn’t the only thing the Chinese and my family had in common.
For example, I’m not ashamed to admit that my family often
paid contractors to burn our wire in farm fields outside Minneapolis (we
also ran an aluminum smelter with an open smokestack—arguably a
worse off ense). If it couldn’t be burned, it would’ve been landfilled,
and so we were doing what countless other scrapyards were doing in those
days: using the cheapest means available to clean up other people’s
messes.Those days are over (for my family, at least) but I know of
people who still do it in North Dakota— and there isn’t an impoverished Chinese farmer among them.
To be sure, Foshan in the early 2000s was far more polluted than anything I saw in the United States while growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, and surely more polluted than what my great-grandfather knew in his early years. But from my perspective, that difference was a matter of scale, concentration, and history. For better or worse, they weren’t doing anything in 2002 that we didn’t (or wouldn’t) do in 1962. They were just doing much, much more of it. And as dirty as it might have looked at times, I didn’t get the sense that the people around Foshan felt that scrap was “dumped” on them. Instead, they actively imported it, or they migrated from other provinces to work on it.
The pay, after all, couldn’t be beat, especially if you were
uneducated and illiterate. Depending on the scrapyard, salaries might be
anywhere from 10 to 20 percent higher than what the local high-tech
factory might pay. By U.S. standards, though, it wasn’t much: maybe $100
per month plus room and board. Still, if your prospects were limited to
a life of subsistence farming, that was more than enough money to
send home to pay school fees. The next generation would have a better
life, and the negative health consequences of scrapyard conditions could
be worried about later.
***
In 2011 I fly into Guangzhou on one of my twice-yearly trips to its scrapyards,
and lo, there’s a subway that will take me to Foshan in less than an
hour. Nanhai, which had once felt to me like a Wild West
outpost divorced from all non-scrap-metal reality, is now another suburb
of yet another Chinese megalopolis (Guangzhou: population 20 million
plus). As I climb out of the station, I glance around me: I’m at the
intersection of two busy, newly paved roads and four pieces of entirely
empty farmland. Two blocks away, however, is the incoming wave of
wealth: dozens of construction cranes hovering over dozens of
high-rises, some as tall as 30 stories, each taking a bite out of open
space recently home to farms. I roll my suitcase in their direction,
through crabgrass and dirt littered with paper instant noodle bowls, to
the front door of a new five-star Intercontinental Hotel, next to a new
three-block-long shopping mall.
When people ask me why China needs all the scrap metal Americans send
to them, I wish I could show them the view from my hotel room that day.
20 stories below is that shopping mall, as big as anything I grew up
visiting in suburban Minneapolis. It required steel for the structure,
copper and aluminum for the wiring, brass for bathroom fixtures, and
stainless steel for all of the sinks and railings. And that’s just the
start.
Then there’s this: On the other side of the mall, in all directions,
are dozens of new high-rises—all under construction—that weren’t
visible from the subway and my walk. Those new towers reach 20 and 30
stories, and they’re covered in windows that require aluminum
frames, filled with bathrooms accessorized with brass and zinc fixtures,
stocked with stainless steel appliances, and—for the tech- savvy
households—outfitted with iPhones and iPads assembled with aluminum
backs. No surprise, China leads the world in the consumption of
steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium,
zinc, platinum, rare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else
labeled “metal.” But China is desperately short of metal resources of
its own. For example, in 2012 China produced 5.6 million tons of copper,
of which
2.75 million tons was made from scrap. Of that scrap copper, 70
percent was imported, with most coming from the United States. In other
words, just under half of China’s copper supply is imported as scrap
metal. That’s not a trivial matter: Copper, more than any other metal,
is essential to modern life. It is the means by which we transmit power
and information. So what would happen if that supply of copper were cut off ? What if Europe
and the United States decided to embargo all recycling to China, India,
and other developing countries? What if, instead of importing scrap
paper, plastic, and metal, China had to find it somewhere else? Some
Chinese industries would substitute other metals for the ones that it
couldn’t obtain via recycling—that’s technically doable in many
cases—but for some applications (like the copper used in sensitive
electronics) substitutions are not possible. That leaves mining. To make
up the loss of imported scrap metal, there’d need to be a lot of holes
in the ground: even the best copper ore deposits require one hundred
tons of ore to obtain one ton of the red metal. What would the
environmental cost of all that digging be? Would it exceed the
environmental cost of recycling the developed world’s throwaways? What’s
worse?
***
In October 2012 I drive north on Minnesota’s Highway 53 into the so
called Iron Range, which once supplied the American steel industry with
some of the world’s purest ore. As I approach Virginia, Minnesota, I
begin to see the high, looming walls of dirt excavated from pits as
deep as 450 feet, and as wide as 3.5 miles. They look like crater walls
from the highway, left by meteor impacts and defining the landscape for
miles. If you climb one (I did), you’ll look out at a lifeless gray
moonscape. This is what’s left behind when steel is made from iron ore,
and not scrap metal. I continue north for nearly an hour and then take a
right turn just outside the town of Ely, onto Highway 1. It’s beautiful
out here, green, lush, and uninterrupted. I see only two other cars on
the road for the first 10 miles; I stop my car on bridges over the
shimmering blue Kawishiwa River without fear of being hit; I close my
eyes down by the water, the only thing cutting the heavy blanket of
silence the individual
lapping waves.
Foshan, China, is the living, breathing
alternative to the mine that will one day be dug somewhere near Spruce
Road. It’s not the cleanest industrial town I’ve ever seen, but it
doesn’t leave me with a feeling of intense personal loss.
I follow directions given to me earlier that morning and take a
sharp left on to Spruce Road. There, at the intersection, is a
bumper-sticker festooned minivan that belongs to Ian Kimmer, staff
member with Friends of the Boundary Waters, a group that aims to
protect, preserve, and restore the federally designated million-acre
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), one of the largest
unspoiled regions in the United States.
Ian has a big job. From the time the BWCAW was established in 1978 until now, the communities that surround it have expressed considerable hostility to the idea of an unexploitable wilderness in their midst. From their perspective, wilderness inhibits growth and the resource extraction industries that their towns and families were built upon. So far, they haven’t made much progress in turning back or damaging the mostly pristine status of those million acres. But that’s likely to change, and the single factor responsible for the shift is one that scrap-metal men know well: the price of copper.
For decades, geologists, mining companies, and miners have
known that the land around the BWCAW contains deposits of copper ore.
But those ore deposits are of such low quality that nobody could figure
out how to mine them profitably. Then, in the 2000s, China entered
the market for copper. What had once been worth 60 cents per pound
became an occasionally $4-per-pound commodity, and a low-grade,
unprofitable ore deposit became a mother lode that mining executives
speculate might be the largest untapped extractable copper reserve in
the world, worth around $100 billion.
Ian shakes my hand, takes a seat in the front seat of my Saturn,
and sends me down the rutted dirt lane that is Spruce Road. On the left
side, he notes, is the BWCAW. On the right, he says, pointing, is where
the mining companies are doing test drilling.
“It’s that cut-and-dried?” I ask.
“Yep.” He asks me to stop, and we walk up a hill. Near the top, we
reach a crumbling gray and red rock outcropping. It contains copper ore,
he explains, as well as something called sulfides. When rain or snow
comes into contact with sulfide ore like this, Ian explains, it produces
caustic sulfuric acid. “That’s why the rock is so crumbly.”
Ian points at the base of the outcropping, where a
several-foot-long streak of dirt is completely devoid of vegetation.
“That’s where the acid leaches out and down the hill,” he explains,
killing the vegetation. The phenomenon is not unique to northern
Minnesota. Sulfide ores are mined around the world, and the left over
rock—the tailings—have become a long-standing environmental problem,
contaminating rivers and lakes, and killing vegetation and the wildlife
that depends on a clean environment.
According to Twin Metals, the mining company that controls the rights to
the ore on this side of Spruce Road, Ian and I are standing atop 13.7
billion pounds of copper, 4.4 billion pounds of nickel (used to
make stainless steel), and some of the world’s richest untapped precious
metal reserves outside of South Africa. Twin Metals hasn’t received the
permits to mine, yet, but if and when they do, each ton of copper will
require the processing of as much as 100 tons of ore. Multiply 100 tons
of sulfur-bearing ore by the 13.7 billion tons of copper beneath my
feet, and the scale of the problem becomes epic.
What will happen to the 99 tons of sulfite rock once the copper has been
extracted from it? Some will go back into the ground, Twin Metals
claims, but an unknown percentage of those billions of tons will need to
remain on the surface, exposed to rain and snow.
But that’s not the only surface impact of this proposed project.
Twin Metals is promising an underground mine—an “underground city”—using
a method called “block caving.” Superficially, at least, block
caving sounds like a great compromise: the miners get the ore, and the
wilderness remains untouched. But that’s not how things work in reality.
At some point, the surface will subside into all of the space left
behind by the excavated ore, leaving a landscape substantially different
from the one that was there before the mine. Rivers and creeks might be
redirected; new lakes might be created. But that’s the thing: nobody
knows for sure. The one thing everyone knows, though, is that the unique
character of this natural landscape will forever be altered.
Ian and I get back into the car, and he directs me down Spruce Road and
an in-progress logging operation just off the BWCAW boundary. Trucks are
loading freshly cut logs onto flatbeds, leaving behind little more than
scrub. But Ian wants me to look past the logging, to two chest-high
pipes painted red and sticking out of the ground like pins. “That’s a
test drilling site,” he tells me. “There’s hundreds of them all over the
place. They’re looking for the richest places to run the mine.”
No Chinese company is involved in the Twin Metals project (the company
is a joint venture between Canadian and Chilean firms), but Chinese
demand is what makes the mine a virtual certainty. While Twin Metals
investigates northern Minnesota, the Chinese are already digging some of
the biggest and most controversial copper mines in the world today. In
Afghanistan, the Aynak mine threatens ancient Buddhist sculptures. In
Burma, a copper mine run by the Chinese military is destroying ancient
farmland and causing mass protests.
Let me be clear: a doubling of U.S. copper scrap exports to
China wouldn’t halt this destructive trend. But it might just reduce
some of the demand for that virgin copper.
In any event, when it comes out of the ground, all of that Chinese
mined virgin copper will have competition—from imported scrap metal, as
well as from the scrap metal that the Chinese are generating in
greater volumes at home. But cut off access to imported scrap copper,
and the demand for mined copper will only grow— including the demand to
allow mining in more places like Spruce Road.
Foshan, China, is the living, breathing alternative to the mine
that will one day be dug somewhere near Spruce Road. It’s not the
cleanest industrial town I’ve ever seen, but unlike Spruce Road and its
test drilling sites, it doesn’t leave me with a feeling of intense
personal loss. If anything, I always leave Foshan energized.
***
For the last two decades, much of the U.S.-and European-generated scrap
metal exported to China flowed into Foshan, home of the
Fontainebleau Hotel. But these days, if you’re riding on the elevated
highway that cuts through and above most of Foshan, you won’t see any
piles of metal, much less the smoke of burning wire and unvented
furnaces. The people who live in Foshan’s expensive new high-rises won’t
tolerate it. Instead, you’ll just see under-construction buildings and
long strip malls filled with restaurants and small workshops that sell
construction-related supplies.
These days you need to turn off the highway, down the narrow city
streets, and then into the even narrower lanes and alleys of
Nanhai. The buildings are one and two stories high, and every one sits
behind a high brick wall. But if you’re lucky or—even better—invited, a
gate will open here or there, and you’ll see piles of baseball-and golf
ball-sized metal chunks; neat stacks of baled-up wire; machinery that
takes fistsized chunks of shredded automobiles and sorts them by size;
and workers slowly combing through those same chunks, sorting them by
metal type. It’s a cleaner and wealthier Foshan, where worker salaries
have quadrupled in a decade and many of the earliest and biggest
recyclers sit
on fortunes worth hundreds of millions.
I saw workers in little more than
T-shirts, cotton slacks, and sandals working around open furnaces; I saw
other workers using cutting machines and acetylene torches with their
bare hands; and even today I’m not surprised to see scrapyard employees
going about their work in flip-flops.
For all of the cosmetic improvement, one thing in Foshan won’t soon
change: the hand labor of Chinese workers is essential to recycling the
wasted luxuries of American and other developed world consumers. In 2011
I visited a yard where men dismantled old aluminum deck chairs imported
from somewhere warm and vacation-like. Over to one side was a pile of
the blue and white nylon stripping that once hung between the metal
frames (later to be sold to a plastics recycler), and a woman who spent
the evening cutting it away from the
chairs. On the opposite side of the pile were men with chisels and
pliers, busy breaking away the steel screws, fasteners, and hinges
that “contaminated” the more expensive aluminum. Nearby, a similar
process was under way, with aluminum screen doors hung with steel mesh
that needed to be removed. The act might look mindless, relentless, and
even dehumanizing, but from a business standpoint it’s pure profit:
aluminum contaminated with steel is all but worthless, a mixed metal
that can’t be sent to any furnace for remelting. But
separated? Depending on the market, the aluminum might be worth $2
per pound.
Back at the Foshan Intercontinental, Joe Chen, a diminutive and gracious Taiwanese-American scrap man in his early seventies, picks me up in his chauffeured Mercedes. I’ve been invited to join him at a dinner he’s hosting for several Mexican scrap exporters, and we glide through Foshan on the way to meet them. Living standards and wages in Mexico aren’t much better than China’s, but China has an advantage over Mexico: it’s growing. So Mexico, poor as dirt, sends its scrap to the factories of China.
Joe understands the dynamics of this trade as well as anyone in
the world. In 1971 he started traveling the United States, cold calling
for scrap to send to scrapyards owned by relatives in Taiwan. “I flew, I
drove. I went to yards without an appointment, and a lot of times I got
thrown out. Today we are here, and tomorrow we are in the next
state.” He specialized in low-grade scrap: insulated wire that needed to
be stripped or burned, scrap radiators that had to be separated into
aluminum and copper components, and loads of motors, water meters,
and other metal-rich devices that had to be busted apart by hand to free
up the constituent metals for sorting. It was the sort of scrap that
used to be processed in the United States (and on my great-grandparents’
basement stairs) until rising labor prices made the practice unaff
ordable, and
environmental crackdowns shuttered the refineries and smelters
that could do it chemically. By the time Joe started scrapping, much of
that scrap had nowhere to go in the United States—except the landfill.
Joe’s export business was so good that in the early 1980s he had
the means to establish his own scrapyard in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, under
the name Tung Tai. But Taiwan too was evolving, and as incomes rose, the
public and its government became increasingly intolerant of the burning
and dumping associated with the scrap industry. Meanwhile, as Taiwan’s
economy developed in the 1980s, $100-per-month workers
became $500-per-month workers who were ready to join the middle
class. “You couldn’t find the workers anymore,” Joe tells me. “They
didn’t want to do it!”
Joe realized that if he didn’t find new markets, he’d own a
business rich with suppliers of low-grade scrap across the United
States, but—once again—nowhere but an American landfill to ship it. So
he started thinking about China. It wasn’t such a stretch: other
Taiwanese industries that couldn’t afford to operate in a more expensive
Taiwan were starting to move there.
For two years, Joe searched fruitlessly for a Chinese local
government partner or patron. Then in 1987, just as he was close to
giving up, a delegation from Zhuhai, a port city in Guangdong, turned up
in the United States and needed some help getting around. Joe was based
in California, and he was more than happy to help. As it happened, one
of the delegation’s members was the “owner” of a large,
government-owned scrapyard in Zhuhai. He’d heard Joe was in search of a
place to import and process scrap, and after a week of being shown
around the United States by Joe, he made Joe an offer. “You can have—you
can rent my yard. Receive material there.” Joe shrugs as he recounts
the offer to me. “Zhuhai was my first yard.”
It was 1987, and though China allowed private investment in the economy,
outsiders were well advised to find somebody who could help ease the
passage. “You need[ed] a relationship with the government at that time,”
Joe explains. “Without that you could not come.” It wasn’t just
a matter of not being able to set up a yard, either. At the time, China
didn’t have any environmental regulations related to the import of
scrap metal, nor did it have customs officials trained in the art of
assessing a duty on scrap metal. In the absence of regulation, you
needed somebody who could say, I am the regulation, and here’s your approval. “Twenty
years ago, nothing—no regulation, no customs tariff. I bring it in,
they decide how to charge me. It’s metal, copper—they don’t know. They
don’t know how to charge me.” The government was interested
in jobs, presumably; the owner valued “rent”; and Joe wanted
somewhere to process all that U.S. scrap he was collecting. If any one
of the three links in this chain failed, then all that scrap was bound
for a U.S. landfill.
At its peak Tung Tai’s government-leased yard employed a
breathtaking three thousand workers and imported five hundred containers
per month of low-grade copper-bearing scrap like motors and
insulated wire. The motors, Joe tells me, were purchased for two cents
per pound, and contained copper worth thirty times that amount. Labor
was just as cheap—less than a dollar per day. All the while, the market
for scrap—and especially copper scrap—did nothing but grow. Between 1985
and 1990, China doubled its production of copper from scrap metal,
to 215,000 metric tons per year, accounting for 38 percent of all copper
produced in China, according to data compiled by the China
Nonferrous Metals Industry Association. If Joe Chen was really bringing
in 500 containers per month, he might very well have been responsible
for close to 10 percent of that supply in the late 1980s.
Joe was proud of Tung Tai’s Zhuhai yard. As he saw it, the yard solved
two important problems: it provided a place for Americans to recycle
things that couldn’t be recycled in the United States, and it
employed thousands of Chinese. So in 1990 he invited international
media to visit. “It’s thousands of tons of scrap every year in the
United States,” he told Dan Noyes of the progressive Mother Jones magazine. “And the United States has got to find a place to dispose of it.”
Noyes didn’t disagree. His article described “discarded
batteries, electrical motors, copper wire, even used IBM computers”
scattered over Joe’s yard. But unlike Joe, Noyes didn’t see anything
commendable about how Joe was handling the scrap. Rather, he saw wire
fires, burning transformers, and a giant Tung Tai trash trench. Rather
than expressing gratitude and admiration to Joe for taking all of
these troublesome items off the hands of wasteful Americans, Noyes was
indignant at the negative health, safety, and polluting effects of
Chinese recycling methods. “From atop the factory’s administration
building,” he wrote, “the scene was reminiscent of a prison chain gang.”
Joe Chen, too, was bothered by the pollution (and he was quoted as saying so in Mother Jones),
but he resolutely declined to blame himself. Instead, he pointed his
finger at wasteful Americans and—perhaps unwisely—the people who allowed
him to operate in Zhuhai in the first place: “Right now I’ve got the
feeling the government [in China] only cares about the money. I don’t
think they realize the problem yet.”
Predictably, the relevant authorities quickly recognized that their problem was Joe, and shut down Tung Tai’s Zhuhai yard.
It was a rough period for Joe. “I think I talked too much,” he tells
me in the midst of a 2009 visit during which he decides it’s time to
talk about his moment of media notoriety (later, he offers a second
assessment of the period: “Oh my god oh my god oh my god”). But in the
long run it didn’t matter: Joe now has several China-based yards and as
many tons of U.S.-based scrap as he can handle. The “stuff,” as Joe
characterizes it, has to go somewhere, and he believes China is the best
place.
When he invites me to visit his Guangdong scrapyards, Joe makes a point
of showing me things easy to hold against him—like the worker dorms. “If
I show you the best, then I must show you the worst. But if I show you
the worst, then I must show you the best.” So I walked through steamy
dorms where the only personal space allotted to workers is the space
inside their bunks. Those bunks, it must be noted, are in rooms that
lack air-conditioning in the tropical Guangdong summer. Joe
realizes this, but makes no apologies: “The conditions I give them are
ten times better than what they’d have back home. In Hunan [Province]
they’d be sleeping 12 to a room, sometimes to a bed. And they wouldn’t
be having eight-course meals.” Later he makes me an offer: “You don’t
believe me? You can take my car, and I’ll have my driver show you!”
I don’t take him up on the offer, but I know what he means. The
life of a rural Chinese villager is hardly bucolic. Homes are cramped,
lacking in privacy, and often without plumbing. Depending on
circumstances, meals are simple, and surely not as varied as those
served in Tung Tai’s kitchens (and yes, I’ve seen the eight-course
meals). Rather than spending days sorting scrap for wages, villagers
spend days in fields, picking crops for subsistence. Is one better than
the other? I’ve never lived in either circumstance, so I’m not about to
guess. But one thing I know is this: in the 2000s there was no shortage
of laborers available to China’s scrapyards. They lined up in the
mornings, hoping for work, fresh from farming villages in the provinces.
They could have stayed home; they could have gone to work in
traditional factories; instead, they chose to work in scrapyards.
Why? The money. A chance for a future. Most of the money earned by those
laborers was sent home, often to pay school fees for kids left behind.
Is the work safe? Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. Breathing
the smoke that rises off a pile of burning wire is not safe; neither,
for that matter, is it safe to breathe the leaded fumes that come off a
computer circuit board when it’s exposed to flame. But most of what
happens in a Chinese scrapyard is breaking and sorting. Burning, despite
two decades’ worth of exposés by environmentalists and journalists, is a
very small and declining part of what happens in China (Africa, and to a
far lesser extent, India, still burns).
In the early 2000s, I saw workers in little more than T-shirts,
cotton slacks, and sandals working around open furnaces; I saw other
workers using cutting machines and acetylene torches with their bare
hands; and even today I’m not surprised to see scrapyard employees going
about their work in flip-flops. Hard hats and safety glasses,
respirators and work gloves, are as uncommon in most Chinese scrapyards
as kosher hot dogs. Anecdotally, at least, injuries are common.
Unfortunately, China’s employers aren’t under any requirement to report
workplace accidents, so we really don’t know how common they are.
Will China’s scrap industry become more safe over time? Probably. But
even in the United States, where workplace safety regulations are among
the most advanced and best-enforced in the world, the scrap industry is
still a leading source of workplace accidents. That’s not for lack of
trying: the industry’s leading trade associations expend an
inordinate amount of time, energy, and money on safety-related training.
But one simple fact remains: Cleaning up someone else’s garbage is an
inherently dangerous business. The best solution—really, the only
solution—is to stop throwing away so much stuff. Every old piece of
plumbing, every used computer, is just another opportunity for someone
to be injured.
But for all of the risks, there are still opportunities, and in my
travels I have yet to come across a country, a region, where recycling
is in decline. As resources become more scarce, the demand for people
to extract those resources becomes ever greater. It’s an entrepreneurial
opportunity for the small-time grubber, but in some ways it’s an even
bigger opportunity for the entrepreneur who figures out how to do
business with that grubber. Nowhere on earth has the scale of that
opportunity been appreciated, and seized, more readily than in southern
China.
With a whiff of controversy and not a bikini in sight, a US-educated
business graduate was selected as the first Miss Universe contestant to
represent Myanmar in more than 50 years.
Moe Set Wine will take
her place on stage at the global beauty pageant in Moscow next month,
reflecting dramatic political and social changes in the former
junta-ruled nation, which last fielded a Miss Universe contender in
1961.
"I feel like now I am part of the history and I feel like
a soldier that is doing something for the country and my people," the
25-year-old said after her selection late on Thursday.
Hemlines
are rising in the country formerly known as Burma as it opens up to the
world after decades of iron-fisted junta rule ended in 2011.
But still not everyone approves of scanty dress.
When racy shots of one model wearing a two-piece swimsuit appeared online a few years ago, she received abuse and threats.
So the Miss Universe hopefuls were careful not to bare any midriff in the swimsuit section.
"My personal view is that the competition presents a good image of our
country, but if you look at what they wear, it is not what a lot of
people here like," Deputy Culture Minister Than Swe told AFP.
Myanmar's traditional dress, which is still mandatory in high schools,
universities and most state workplaces, is the demure "longyi" -- a
sheet of cotton or silk cloth wrapped around the waist and stretching to
the feet.
But the younger generation, especially young urban
women, are increasingly shunning the national garb and embracing
unconventional alternatives as they brush aside concerns about morals
and modesty.
"Myanmar people dared not wear clothes like this
in the past. Now things are improving, and people dare to wear things,
so as a designer I can create what I like. So I'm glad things are
changing," said Htay Htay Tin, who designed all the contestants'
outfits.
The CIA no longer has any overseas "black site" prisons where they used
to carry out "enhanced" interrogations far away from the soil (and
civil rights laws) of U.S. prisons. But if Americans are holding an
al-Qaeda leader on a U.S. Navy ship in international waters, what's
legally stopping them from performing similar work there?
That's essentially what the American Civil Liberty Union is asking today. We know longtime suspected al-Qaeda leader Abu Anas al-Libi was captured by American commandos over the weekend and is now being interrogated off the Mediterranean coast on
board U.S.S. San Antonio, without being read his Miranda Rights or in
the presence of a lawyer. He will eventually be tried before a federal
court in New York for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania,
but until then he'll be held under the laws of war. As the Pentagon and legal experts explained over the weekend,
that's the same legal justification used to authorize military force
against al-Qaeda at the beginning of the war on terror. But until
al-Libi makes it to New York, he's free of a lawyer and the protection
usually offered by the civilian court system, adrift in the middle of
the sea.
"It appears to be an attempt to use assertion of law of war powers to
avoid constraint and safeguards in the criminal justice system," Hina
Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national
security wing, told the Associated Press. "I am very troubled if this is the pattern that the administration is setting for itself."
Government officials were keeping mum with regards to the interrogation
techniques being used on the San Antonio right now. "He is in our
custody and he will be treated like anyone else," Rep. Dutch
Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told CNN Monday morning.
He wouldn't say whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" were being
used, cryptically saying that "If he does not want to talk, he will go
through our system," Ruppersberger said.
The model for al-Libi's detention was written in 2011, when the
administration captured Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, a Canadian-Somali
citizen accused of aiding terrorists, and held him aboard a U.S. warship
for about two months before he was delivered to New York to face
terrorism charges. He eventually plead guilty and agreed to tell
authorities everything he knew.
Some legal experts expect al-Libi's situation to play out in the exact
same way. "Don't expect al-Libi to stay in military custody for more
than a few weeks," predicted Robert Chesney, co-founder of the blog Lawfare, over the weekend.
"This situation will unfold just like the capture of Ahmed Warsame a
few years ago, meaning that after a period of no more than, say, 6-8
weeks, al-Libi almost certainly will be flown to the United States to
face a criminal trial." But some legal observers think the
administration should probably hurry unless they want another human
rights headache on their hands. Just Security's Meg Satterthwaite explains:
So long as he is not held outside the regular U.S. legal system, al-Liby is presumably not at risk of refoulement (though a transfer to Guantánamo or Bagram would raise refoulement issues). Al-Liby’s detention on a ship, and his interrogation by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group without
judicial oversight or legal assistance, will quickly run afoul of human
rights law concerning due process, however, and if prolonged and under
incommunicado circumstances, could amount to an enforced disappearance.
The United States should transfer al-Liby to the United States and
bring him under judicial protection without delay.
The administration, for now, is keeping mum about what's happening
aboard that ship. "As a general rule, the government will always seek to
elicit all the actionable intelligence and information we can from
terrorist suspects taken into our custody," National Security Council
spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the AP. [Inset: Reuters]
If Obama Can Do it, So can Putin
Russian
President Vladimir Putin attends the launch ceremony of the Nyagan
power plant in Nyagan.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been nominated for a Nobel Peace
Prize by an advocacy group for his efforts to prevent an attack on
Syria.
Putin was nominated by the International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World.
During a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday, members of the group
said Putin was far more deserving of the peace prize than U.S. President
Barack Obama, who received it in 2009.
The group said while Obama had continued to lead American military
operations abroad, Putin has consistently opposed military intervention
throughout the two-and-a-half year Syrian civil war, which was left more
than 115,000 dead according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Putin, a former KGB agent, is credited with commanding a war against
separatists in Chechnya and approving a full-scale attack on Georgia
over a minor border dispute.
The 2013 Peace Prize recipient will be announced in Oslo on Oct. 11;
nominations for this year’s prize had to be postmarked by Feb. 1.
Jesus Christ's Superstar (The Gospel According to Carl Lentz)
With the Lord as his
swagger coach, the 34-year-old pastor is turning Hillsong Church in New
York City into a Pentecostal powerhouse and a destination for the in
crowd. Drawn by his concertlike sermons and pop-idol looks, Lentz's fast
growing flock of groupies includes Justin Bieber, NBA superstars, and
young Hollywood celebs. But whom, exactly, is this new apostle of cool
seeking to glorify?
By Howie Kahn
Photographs By Robbie Fimmano
Carl Lentz steps into a cloud of
silver-blue
light and hits the stage at the venerable New York City concert venue
Irving Plaza, primed to bring the Word. The 34-year-old pastor of Hillsong Church NYC
is wearing his Sunday best: black YSL wing-tip boots, black Nudie
jeans, and a short-sleeved All Saints denim work shirt. He's backed by
an 11-piece rock band that sounds like a born-again Coldplay and a
neon-lettered projection: ALWAYS. ONLY. JESUS. Sweeping
back his mohawk as shreds of rainbow disco-ball light pass across his
bearded face, Lentz revs into his first 45-minute sermon of the day.
"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian, just like going to Krispy
Kreme doesn't make you a doughnut"; then, "If you think I'm one of
those weird stalker pastors . . . you're right." Lentz scans the
two-tiered auditorium packed with congregants—they're mostly in their
twenties and thirties, with a smattering of recognizable actors and
athletes. But the range of true believers here also encompasses
suburbanites, hurricane-devastated families from the Rockaway section of
Queens, and people praying to beat cancer or to find financial
stability. They hang on Lentz's every word: "We're in the control-freak
capital of the world, where people want everything but want to give up
nothing. When it's always only Jesus, you're not the boss—He is."
As Lentz paces the stage
on this sweltering mid-July afternoon, balancing quick, sharp movements
with sudden moments of reflective stillness, he comes off as less
feverish holy roller than cool Pentecostal populist—his message being
that of love, acceptance, and total surrender. Lentz delivers it in
expressions of faith so pithy and catchy they play back in your head
like a pop song: "You don't have to believe to belong here." "It's not a
feel-better message, it's a be-better one." "We don't want your money, but God wants everything."
They drive his preaching style—what he calls his "homiletical
habitude." Lentz, who was born into a devout Christian family, spent his
early years in a white-collar suburb of Chicago, but when he was 11,
his dad, a television-ad salesman for Pat Robertson's Family Channel,
took a job at the network's headquarters in Virginia Beach—that's where
Lentz picked up his slight southern twang, which intensifies when he
preaches. "I'm going to say things that disrupt you," Lentz says,
wrapping up his sermon. "It's the full Gospel—I have to do it. I owe you
that as the pastor of this church." On cue, the house band strikes up,
and Lentz quickens his cadence to match the building bass line. "We're
going to sing our way out of here," Lentz says. The crowd sways to the
music, raising their hands in surrender. Lentz blesses them all, then
exits stage left.
"He is going to be huge," predicts today's guest speaker,
Priscilla Shirer, a 38-year-old minister. A rising star in her own
right, Shirer was flown in from Dallas to lighten Lentz's load. He
normally preaches at all six Irving Plaza services, beginning at 10 A.M.,
with lines of devotees wrapped around the block for each one. But today
he is leading only the last three services because he's running on
three hours of sleep, having just returned from the annual Hillsong
Conference in Sydney, Australia.
Hillsong NYC exudes a start-up vibe, but the church is actually a
franchise. It's an extension of the Australian Pentecostal megachurch
and multimedia conglomerate Hillsong, which has more than 20,000 members
in the Sydney area, chart-topping musical acts, DVDs, books, and
satellite churches in 11 countries—and took in $58.3 million in 2012
(including $25.9 million from tithes). After initially receiving
financial support from the mother ship, Lentz says, Hillsong NYC, which
passes around black donation buckets at every service, is now
self-sustaining. Lentz was educated in the early 2000s at Hillsong
International Leadership College, where he met his future Hillsong NYC
partners: Laura Lentz, his wife and fellow pastor, and Joel Houston, the
33-year-old son of Hillsong's cofounders, Brian and Bobbie Houston. But
it's Lentz, with his supernatural magnetism, who is the face of
Hillsong's first foray into American Christendom. "People call New York
the church-planting graveyard," Lentz says. And yet, just three years
after its launch, Hillsong NYC draws 6,000 people to its services every
Sunday and has just added two more at a chapel in the Gramercy Park
neighborhood. "I see our church taking ground in a major way," Lentz
says. "In five years, I want a giant version of what it is now."
Lentz has already shared the pulpit with megapastors like Joel Osteen
and T.D. Jakes at Christian conferences. This month, he'll preach to
sellout crowds at Hillsong's debut conferences in America, first at New
York's Radio City Music Hall, then at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, Lentz's digital persona is going viral. He has 65,000 Instagram followers, who "like" it when he mugs beside a tank-topped Justin Bieber
(the two trade Scripture-based texts daily) or poses with the newly
baptized—by Lentz—NBA superstar Kevin Durant and Jay-Z (snapped on the
day Durant, with Lentz's spiritual counsel, signed with Roc Nation
Sports). Lentz conveys a hip, iconoclastic image: religion in a designer
wrapper.
"It's a reaction against the fundamentalist evangelical culture of
the eighties and nineties," says Brett McCracken, the author of Hipster Christianity: When Church & Cool Collide.
"Dynamic speakers have always risen to the top, from Charles Spurgeon
to Billy Graham. The difference now is pastors like Lentz wear skinny
jeans and beards and quote Jay-Z. They gain authenticity from caring
about the same things as you do. Part of the brand is saying you don't
think about the brand."
Lentz is aware that endorsements from Bieber and Durant, especially
when tweeted and Instagrammed, pay dividends. "I'm an advertiser," Lentz
reasons. "You are God's ambassador—as if He is making his appeal
through you. We're essentially His commercial."
• • •
In the Pentecostal worldview Carl Lentz subscribes to, all human
talents are expressions of the Holy Spirit. Lentz believes his swift
ascent is part of God's plan, his past full of portent. His earliest
memories involve working in a soup kitchen and ministering to prisoners
with his father. As a teenager, he says, he gradually turned away from
God—toward basketball, earning a walk-on spot as a shooting guard at
North Carolina State. "I was teammate of the year," Lentz says,
"breaking up fights, signing guys out of jail." But he left the team
during his sophomore season. "Something in my heart shifted," he
continues. "I felt like if I stayed, I couldn't serve God. I felt like I
was going to die."
At age 20, Lentz lit out for California, where he attended King's
Seminary in Van Nuys while working part-time at the Gucci store on Rodeo
Drive. His pastor in Virginia Beach, Wave Church's Steve Kelly,
suggested that Lentz check out Hillsong International Leadership
College. Attending Hillsong after King's, Lentz says, summoning a
basketball analogy, was "like going to UNLV instead of Princeton.
Princeton wins with backdoor cuts, whereas UNLV is running, gunning,
getting dunks, and popping their jerseys on the way back up the floor.
That's the way I wanted to relate to Jesus."
After marrying Laura and graduating in 2003, Lentz moved back to Virginia Beach and jumped into the ministry at Wave Church, where he rapidly built a following with his hip-hop-infused "Soul Central" services. Then, on New Year's Eve 2009, Lentz flew to New York to meet Joel Houston—who was already well known as the frontman of the Christian-rock band Hillsong United—to discuss a scenario that the two had dreamed about in Sydney: a Hillsong church in Manhattan. A couple of months later, when they got the go-ahead from Joel's parents, Lentz jumped at the opportunity, which he views as a manifestation of God's plan. The night Lentz, his wife, and their three young children pulled into Brooklyn, he says, the family car was broken into. "We couldn't find a place to live, because you have to prove you make, like, 900 grand a year," Lentz says. "So by God's grace, some real-estate agent, who just loved us, found us a spot in Williamsburg. It was a brand-new building, and the dude cut us a deal. We have a doorman, which was all my wife wanted to feel safe."
In the beginning, Hillsong NYC was less a church than a series of informal meetings on park benches and in pizza joints. Lentz recalls canvassing the streets with Houston, talking to whomever they could about Christ. The size of their meetings grew, and after one attendee fainted in an overcrowded TriBeCa apartment, Lentz decided it was time to seek a larger venue. A Hillsong contact who works for the concert-promoting group Live Nation helped Lentz secure Irving Plaza, and Hillsong NYC held the first of its weekly services there in February 2011.
As his church grows in numbers and notoriety, Lentz knows he'll be subjected to intense scrutiny—not least because of Hillsong HQ's controversial past. There was the admission from Joel Houston's grandfather Frank Houston, a leader in the Australian Pentecostal movement and Hillsong's patriarch, that he had sexually abused a boy in New Zealand. Hillsong Church is also the target of widespread allegations of homophobia. Lentz says gays are welcome at Hillsong NYC, but he declines to address the topic of same-sex marriage with me. It's clearly not worth the risk. Lentz maintains that his job is more about uniting people than dividing them. "It's harder to feel welcome in some local churches than it is to meet Jesus," Lentz says elliptically. "If Jesus walked into New York City, he wouldn't be able to get into some of the places they profess to worship him in."
• • •
What some people call swagger, Carl Lentz calls the grace of God. Justin Bieber's longtime manager, Scooter Braun, says Lentz "has that X-factor, that thing you're born with that makes people gravitate toward you. I'm a proud, practicing Jew, but you don't have to be Christian to be moved by Carl's words and his passion." When Braun and Bieber met Lentz for the first time—introduced by a mutual friend, the Seattle pastor Judah Smith, backstage at a Bieber concert in New Jersey—Braun was wary. "I'd had bad experiences with people claiming they were all about God," Braun says. "My reaction was just to get him out." But when they met again at a pickup basketball game at Shaquille O'Neal's house in L.A., the two men bonded. "Carl has never asked for anything other than friendship," Braun says, "and has given nothing but friendship in return."
Lentz has earned the trust of many young famous Christians. At that same 5 P.M. service in mid-July, the 24-year-old actress Vanessa Hudgens and her 21-year-old boyfriend, Austin Butler, were seated in the front row, with Butler's costar in The Carrie Diaries, AnnaSophia Robb, 19, a row back. As Lentz began to preach the Word, Robb tapped out notes on her iPhone. When the pastor left the stage, Robb, who recently moved into the same apartment building as the Lentzes, turned to me and said, "You can feel the favor of God in this church." After his sermon, upstairs in Irving Plaza's greenroom, Lentz meets with a grieving couple who just lost their 4-year-old son in a car accident. Lentz prays with them, huddling in a tight circle, finishing just in time to change back into his stage clothes and deliver again at the seven o'clock service. When Lentz hauls himself back to the greenroom 45 minutes later, he's gutted. He shuts the door and sits gingerly on a couch, alone, brushing his hair back. He leans forward, elbows on knees, hands joined, eyes closed. He's sweating and sniffling; a tear runs down his cheek. One more service to go.
Lentz quickly collects himself and opens the door to find Roc-A-Fella Records cofounder Damon Dash waiting, unannounced, with an entourage of two.
"That was like a rock concert with a message," Dash says, introducing Lentz to someone he refers to as "the biggest DJ in China."
"You mind if I get your details?" Lentz asks. "Give you a holler? Grab a coffee?" The two exchange numbers, and Lentz heads back downstairs to preach his final sermon of the night.
"Jesus," Lentz says, bathed again in silver-blue light, "I pray tonight you have your way. There will not be one of us who leaves here as we walked in."
• • •
Four days later, Lentz hits the road: There's Hillsong's European conference at London's O2 Arena; an event in Joplin, Missouri, called Project Restoration, to which Lentz was personally invited by a woman who'd driven to New York just to ask him to heal her tornado-ravaged town; and a trip to preach in New Zealand. On the day Lentz returns to New York, nearly three weeks later, he heads to Harlem to coach his church's basketball team in a game at storied Rucker Park. He rolls uptown in a caravan of Chevy Tahoes filled with former and current NBA talent, including the Golden State Warriors' All-Star forward David Lee. Justin Bieber's onetime "swagger coach" Ryan Aldred, a.k.a. Ryan Good, sits in the back of one SUV. "All the other teams are sponsored by rap labels and drug dealers," Lentz says. "We're the only church team in the history of the league."
During the game, Lentz, in a loose-fitting Ksubi Baddies tank top and a camouflage baseball cap, sits anxiously on the bench, eyes narrowed, turning his cap forward then backward. He appears even more intense than he does in church. By the fourth quarter, Lentz's squad of ringers, the Hillsong NYC Hustlers, have a 15-point lead. When Lee seals the deal with his third dunk in a row, Lentz shoots up off the bench and exchanges a flying body bump with his Warrior. His commitment to winning is total.
That was made clear four Sundays earlier, during his final sermon of
the night. Wiping sweat from his brow under the disco ball, Lentz cited
John 6:53 and spoke of a total commitment to Christ: "Unless you eat the
flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in
you." He then explained the meaning of Jesus' words: "When you take a
bite of me, when you really follow me, everything in me goes in you—you can't pick and choose." Lentz leaned out over the edge of the stage, his voice rising. "You have to be consumed with this. I'm talking about flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, everything in me, in you, and if you're not about that, you need to go follow somebody else."
Lentz was ostensibly talking about his savior, but it almost sounded
like he meant himself. "Because this is not a game. I am not a circus. I
am not just traveling around doing cool things. I am after followers."
THE CIRCLE OF LOVE
Carl Lentz has a knack for making famous friends, from true believers to adoring admirers. 1. AnnaSophia Robb
The Colorado-raised Carrie Diaries star uses Hillsong NYC as a cure for homesickness and now lives in the same apartment building as Lentz. 2. Kevin Durant
Lentz baptized the NBA superstar and serves as his spiritual counselor;
the two hit the gym together whenever they're in the same city. 3. Scooter Braun
Braun's first reaction to Lentz? "That guy is definitely not a pastor!" Now Lentz has the full trust of Bieber's Svengali. 4. Damon Dash
The Roc-a-Fella Records cofounder recently visited Hillsong NYC, telling Lentz: "That was like a rock concert with a message." 5. Jeremy Lin
When he's back in New York, the former Knicks and current Houston Rockets point guard often attends Lentz's services. 6. Vanessa Hudgens
The Spring Breakers co-star and her actor boyfriend, Austin Butler, are Hillsong NYC regulars and friends with Lentz's whole family. 7. Justin Bieber
Last year, Lentz and the King of Teen Pop bonded over pickup b-ball; now they exchange texts about Scripture every day. 8. Tyson Chandler
With his wife, Kimberly, the Knicks' star center traveled with the
Lentzes to this year's Hillsong Conference in Sydney, Australia.