How Liberia subsidises the Super Bowl

President Obama's quixotic crusade against the ugly face of capitalism has more loopholes than restrictions and will prove a mere nuisance to America's army of greedmongers. Thanks to the unprecedented generosity of government, in which they don't believe but which they are thrilled to loot, these guys have continued to make themselves rich far beyond the dreams of avarice.
It's reassuring to have been reminded over the past decade that not terrorism, not war, not natural disaster, not economic meltdown, nothing, it appears, is allowed to interfere with the natural right of America's filthy rich to further self-enrichment.

The myth of corporate social responsibility is exposed for the PR exercise it's mostly been. Even those companies that might actually pay some attention to the environment or provide childcare can be counted on to be part of mega-lobbies demanding lower corporate taxes, opposing higher minimum wages, and undermining the right to unionise.

Take, for example, the giant Bridgestone corporation, maker of Firestone tyres and the largest tyre and rubber company in the world. According to its website, the company’s vision includes being a ‘leading corporate citizen in all of our communities’, and among its values is ‘treat[ing] all people with dignity and respect’. Well, not quite all communities and people.

One of Bridgestone's big PR coups was a recent deal with the National Football League to be ‘the first official tire of the NFL’. On Sunday 1 February, Bridgestone sponsored the half-time show at the Super Bowl, a coup within a coup. That presumably included Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen’s fab 12-minute set. This surprised some fans of Springsteen, already feeling let down when he made a deal with Wal-Mart to be the exclusive peddler of his new greatest hits CD. Wal-Mart doesn't exactly have such a great reputation for treating its workers the way The Boss wants workers treated. So how come he didn't care about how Bridgestone makes a good chunk of its very considerable profits?

Which brings us to the tiny west African nation of Liberia, number 175 of 179 on the UN's development index, where Bridgestone is the largest employer. I have long argued that Africa's people have been cursed by the twin scourges of rapacious leaders and the destructive policies and activities of rich countries. This is true of Rwanda, Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa – to name just those making bad news at the moment. Liberia is another perfect example of this calamitous double jeopardy.

Firestone's concession in Liberia is the world's second-largest rubber plantation. Its rubber-tappers collect sap from rubber trees, which is shipped to a Bridgestone/Firestone plant in Nashville, Tennessee, where it's used to make tyres. Way back in 1926, in return for generous considerations, the tiny African elite that ran the country bestowed on Firestone a 99-year lease. For the next 80 years, through corrupt authoritarian rule, military dictatorships, vicious civil war and ethnic cleansing, Firestone made its vast plantation a Hobbesian universe. Think of any wretched African scene you've seen on TV – appalling living and working conditions, miserable crowded shacks with no running water, electricity or sanitation, and with rubber-tappers working like dogs in fields covered with hazardous chemicals and pesticides in return for a barely liveable wage – and you'll get the picture.

According to Dan Adomitis, president of the Firestone Natural Rubber Company, each tapper spends a couple of minutes at each tree and taps some 650 trees a day. The math’s not very complicated. It means a 21-hour day. If you don't make your quota, your daily pay of US$3.19 is cut in half. To make their number, tappers recruit their wives and kids, who of course are not paid.

For most of the 20th century, Liberia was an American neocolony. Firestone's arrangement was duly protected by the US navy. The US trained the Liberian army, which fought 23 brutal wars against local uprisings in those years, with the US intervening directly on the army's behalf in nine of them. In the last 25 years, the US backed the brutal Sergeant Sam Doe and the coolly psychopathic Charles Taylor. A quarter of a million people were killed and a million displaced.

Three years go, the indomitable Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf won a genuinely fair presidential election and took over her profoundly failed state. Many things changed. Six months ago, the 4,700 Bridgestone/Firestone workers held the first free union election, dumped their company union, elected independent union leaders, and signed a new contract. While seriously flawed, it called for a reduced, less inhumane quota level as well as health and safety improvements. Firestone, which has fought the union every step of the way, often brutally, has failed to implement many of these rudimentary changes. The Stop Firestone Coalition is trying to draw attention to the ongoing struggle for fairness.

David Zirin, one of the world's few sportswriters who digs deeply into the political economy of sports, asked this question in the Los Angeles Times before the January, 2008, Super Bowl: ‘Should the NFL be offering an international platform to a company accused of using child labour and refusing to bargain with a union whose leadership was democratically elected?’ I guess the answer was ‘Yes’, since the league is still doing it. Should The Boss be party to this arrangement? Should the 151 million viewers of Super Bowl XLIII care? Will you ever buy a tyre from Bridgestone/Firestone again?

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* Gerald Caplan’s latest work is Globe and Mail.
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