Port Workers Quotes

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

You’ve been a hard worker—white, black, Asian, and Latino women ship out of the San Francisco port because of you. You have been a shipfitter, a nurse, a real estate broker, and a barber. Many men and—if my memory serves me right—a few women risked their lives to love you. You were a terrible mother of small children, but there has never been anyone greater than you as a mother of a young adult.

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.

In the port city of Liverpool, similar race hatred was gaining ground. Post-war employment was scarce, and over a hundred black factory workers suddenly and swiftly lost their jobs after white workers refused to work with them. On 4 June 1919, a Caribbean man was stabbed in the face by two white men after an argument over a cigarette. Numerous fights followed, with the police ransacking homes where they knew black people lived. The frenzy resulted in one of the most horrific race hate crimes in British history. Twenty-four-year-old black seaman Charles Wootton was accosted by an enraged white crowd and thrown into the King’s Dock. As he swam, desperately trying to lift himself out of the water, he was pelted with bricks until he sank under the surface. Some time later, his lifeless body was dragged out of the dock. It was a public lynching. The days after Charles Wootton’s murder saw white mob rule dominating Liverpool’s streets as they attacked any black person they saw.

I’ve always liked you, Mason,” says the girl, whose name he can’t recall. He’s surprised that she knows his first name, since he never uses it anymore. “Of all the boys in the safe houses, you’re the only one who makes me feel safe.” He doesn’t respond; he just kisses her on the back of her head, to maintain his image as the safest port in her storm. It’s a powerful feeling to know you make others feel safe. “We . . . could, you know . . . ,” she says coyly. He reminds her that the ADR workers were very clear. “No extracurricular activities,” they had said, “or you’ll use up your oxygen and die.

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

Beyond that, all whites depended on laws to defend slavery and segregation so as to elevate us politically, socially and economically. We were dependent on Mexicans to teach us how to extract gold from river-beds and quartz—critical to the growth of the economy in the mid-to-late 1800s—and had we not taken over half their nation in an unprovoked war, the Pacific ports so vital to the modern U.S. economy would have been not ours, but Mexico’s. Then we were dependent on their labor in the mid-twentieth century under the bracero program, through which more than five million Mexicans were brought into the country for agricultural work, and then sent back across the border.140 And we were dependent on Asian labor to build the railroads that made transcontinental commerce possible. Ninety percent of the labor used to build the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860s was Chinese, imported for the purpose, and exploited because the rail bosses felt that group was easier to control than white workers.

Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.

The port city already had “Sunday Schools” for workers, established by Nikoloz “Karlo” Chkheidze (b. 1864), one of the founders of the Third Group, and Isidor Ramishvili (b. 1859), both close comrades of Noe Jordania.

People were pushing and shoving and squeezing and stepping on one's toes; it was a daily stampede. Russians; military, militia, N.K.G.B. - all these people claimed that they did not have to stand in line, only the local people had to. Their ideas of democracy were such, it would have been a good joke, but the joke was played out on me, a local person. I with my knitted sandals, I had bloody toes every day. The worst part of the job proved to be getting a 30 day bread ration card for a worker. I knew that when he was summoned to the central office in Czernovitz and my boss ordered me to get him a 30 day bread ration card, he would be put on a train to Murmansk or Pechora. It would take him 30 days to reach the location - an Arctic port, where American ships arrived and provided the Soviets, at that time allies, with military materiel, clothing and food.

Salvation appeared to be rising from the sea off beaches Omaha and Gold, where a pair of gigantic “synthetic harbors” took shape after two years of planning under excruciating secrecy. In one of the most ambitious construction projects ever essayed in Britain, twenty thousand workers at a cost of $100 million had labored on the components; another ten thousand now bullied the pieces across the Channel and into position with huge tow bridles, hawsers, and 160 tugs. Each artificial harbor, Mulberry A and Mulberry B—American and British, respectively—would have the port capacity of Gibraltar or Dover.

Egbunu, I must say that it wasn’t that he responded this way to every woman’s voice, but her voice sounded strangely familiar to him. Although he did not know it, I knew that it reminded him of his mother. At once he saw a plump, swarthy woman who looked his age. She was sweating in the hot sun, and the sweat shimmered along her legs. She carried a tray filled with groundnuts on her head. She was one of the poor—the class of people who had been created by the new civilization. In the time of the old fathers only the lazy, indolent, infirm, or accursed lacked, but now most people did. Go into the streets, into the heart of any market in Alaigbo, and you’ll find toiling men, men whose hands are as hard as stones and whose clothes are drenched in sweat, living in abject poverty. When the White Man came, he brought good things. When they saw the car, the children of the fathers cried out in amusement. The bridges? “Oh, how wonderful!” they said. “Isn’t this one of the wonders of the world?” they said of the radio. Instead of simply neglecting the civilization of their blessed fathers, they destroyed it. They rushed to the cities—Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano—only to find that the good things were in short supply. “Where are the cars for us?” they asked at the gates of these cities. “Only a few have them!” “What about the good jobs, the ones whose workers sit under air conditioners and wear long ties?” “Ah, they are only for those who have studied for years in a university, and even then, you’d still have to compete with the multitude of others with the same qualifications.” So, dejected, the children of the fathers turned back and returned. But to where? To the ruins of the structure they had destroyed. So they live on the bare minimum, and this is why you see people like this woman who walk the length and breadth of the city hawking groundnuts.

Reacher put his hand on his gun in his pocket and stepped all the way out to the sunlight. The woman was stuffing her purse back in her bag. The taxi was driving away. The woman looked up. She saw Reacher and looked momentarily confused. Reacher was not the guy she was expecting to see. She was in her early twenties, with jet black hair and olive skin. She was very good looking. She could have been Turkish or Italian. She was the messenger. The two guys with her were waiting patiently, stoic and unexcited, like laborers ahead of routine tasks. They were airport workers, Reacher thought. He remembered telling Sinclair that Wiley had chosen Hamburg because it was a port. The second largest in Europe. The gateway to the world. Maybe once. But the plan had changed. Now he guessed they planned to drive the truck into the belly of a cargo plane. Maybe fly it to Aden, which was a port of a different kind. On the coast of Yemen. Where ten tramp steamers would be waiting to complete the deliveries, after weeks at sea. Straight to New York or D.C. or London or LA or San Francisco. All the world’s great cities had ports nearby. He remembered Neagley saying the radius of the lethal blast was a mile, and the radius of the fireball was two. Ten times over. Ten million dead, and then complete collapse. The next hundred years in the dark ages. The

I assured them that our government was not going to be ideological about this: if I was asked whether I was in favour of or against privatization, my answer would be, ‘It depends on the asset in question – a port, a railway, a beach, an electricity company?’ Beaches I would never sell, I told them, just as I would never sell the Parthenon. And the privatization of electricity grids reliably leads to environmentally and socially suboptimal outcomes. But when it came to ports and airports, I would form a view based on four criteria: how much the buyer was committing to invest in the asset; the buyer’s commitment to workers’ rights to union representation and decent wages and conditions; environmental standards; and the extent to which the buyer would be obliged to leave room for and encourage the benefit of small and medium local businesses.

During the thirteenth century Genoese traders in the Black Sea port of Caffa struck a deal to run slaves captured in the Caucasus by the Mongols to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, shipping them to the Nile Delta via the Black Sea and Mediterranean, whereupon the slaves would be forcibly impressed into the Mamluk army. Effectively this meant that the Christian Genoese were directly responsible for supplying workers to a power that was doing its best to crush the western crusader states of Syria and Palestine.

CHRISTMAS FUSS IN BARBADOS IN THE 70’S 1.BUY A BOTTLE OF FALERNUM 2.PUT DOWN CONGOLEUM IN THE SHEDROOF, AFTER SCRUBBING/VARNISHING THE FLOOR 3.WASH DOWN THE HOUSE AND CLEANED THE WINDOWS 4.BAKE GREAT CAKE AND PUDDING 5.GRATE COCONUTS TO MAKE SWEETBREAD 6.HUNG UP CURTAIN RODS/ NEW CURTAINS ON CHRISTMAS EVE 7.TRUST CREAM SACHETS IN FANCY BOTTLES/BIG WHEEL COLOGNE, SKIN SOFTENERS FROM AVON LADY 8.BUY ENGLISH APPLES AND A SHADDOCK FROM THE MARKET 9.WEED AROUND THE HOUSE 10. A CASE OF SOFT DRINKS-JU-C, FRUTEE, BIM, BBC GINGER, COKES 11.GO TO ELLIS QUARRY AND GET SOME MARL 12.PICK GREEN PEAS 13.STEEP SORREL 14.CHANGE THE CUSHION COVERS 15.SANDPAPER THE MAHOGANY CHAIRS 16.CLEAN THE CABINET AND WASHED ALL THE FINE CHINA 17.BUY HAM IN WHITE BURLAP BAG 18.DECANTER OF PORT WINE 19.PICK UP CLOTHES FROM THE NEEDLE WORKER 20.WASH AND PRESS HAIR 21.BUY PIECE OF FRESH PORK 2016

Inter-ethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to over 200 deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of ‘One Belt, One Road’. The road is, oddly enough, a sea route – the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. In late 2015 China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which ‘the belt and the road’ will be connected.

The upsurge of revolutionary egalitarianism that obliterated differences of status and color in the name of human equality restored connections between these two peoples of African descent. The successful establishment of a revolutionary republic under a proclamation that 'all men are created equal,' and the bloody enactment of those principles, provided an ideological umbrella under which slaves, free people of color, Indians, and even disaffected white men and women could band together. The confluence of the plantation revolution of sugar and cotton and the democratic striving of the Age of Revolution made for new, explosive possibilities in the lower Mississippi Valley. Revolutionary republicanism spread rapidly during the last decade of the eighteenth century, and planters soon found themselves surrounded by insurrection and intrigue. Challenging the new harsh regime in the countryside, plantation slaves schemed to break the masters' grasp. Runaways grew in number, and maroon colonies reappeared in the backcountry. Thus, even as slaveholders sealed off their plantations from outside influences and instituted the discipline necessary to create a plantation regime, the plantation regime shook. Revolutionary activities took place at many venues. The primitive, frontier plantations, where newly arrived Africans reformulated their common African heritage, were the sites of many intrigues. Others took shape in the streets and back alleys of the port cities, where disenchanted black and white workers drank and gamed together. Yet other plots were hatched in the barracks, where white and black militiamen - mobilized against the very threat of revolution - had been joined together. Almost all the insurrectionists talked the language of the revolutionary age. But while some linked their cause directly to the revolutions in the United States, France, and Saint Domingue, others drew on their memory of Africa.

During Biden’s long period of flailing, I had feared that he had missed his chance to avert the worst consequence of climate change—and that another opportunity to protect the planet wouldn’t come around for years, after it was far too late. But then in the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a banally named bill that will transform American life. Its investments in alternative energy will ignite the growth of industries that will wean the economy from its dependence on fossil fuels. That achievement was of a piece with the new economics that his presidency had begun to enshrine. Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction. Through a series of bills—not just his investments in alternative energy, but also the CHIPS Act and his infrastructure bill—he erected a state that will function as an investment bank, spending money to catalyze favored industries to realize his vision, where the United States controls the commanding heights of the economy of the future. The critique of gerontocracy is that once politicians become senior citizens, they will only focus on the short term, because they will only inhabit the short term. But Biden, the oldest president in history, pushed for spending money on projects that might not come to fruition in his lifetime. His theory of the case—that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens—compelled him to push for expenditures on unglamorous but essential items such as electric vehicle charging systems, crumbling ports, and semiconductor plants, which will decarbonize the economy, employ the next generation of workers, and prevent national decline.

Whether or not they had traveled down to Southampton on the boat train that arrived early in the morning of April 10, the musicians would have joined the crowd of second-and third-class passengers streaming toward berths 43/44 of the White Star’s dock, where the majestic Titanic lay with its bow pointed at the Solent. They would have boarded by the second-class entrance on C Deck, toward the back of the ship, and taken the elevator or staircase two flights down to E Deck, where there was a designated musicians’ room on the starboard side with three sets of bunk beds, drawers, a wardrobe, a basin, and a separate cabin in which to store their instruments. A second room, again for 5 musicians was on the port side, squeezed between a room for washing potatoes, and accomodation for its workers. It’s likely that the ‘saloon orchestra’ took the better cabin.1

The d’Anconia workers everywhere had been handed their last pay checks, in cash, at nine A.M., and by nine-thirty had been moved off the premises. The ore docks, the smelters, the laboratories, the office buildings were demolished. Nothing was left of the d’Anconia ore ships which had been in port—and only lifeboats carrying the crews were left of those ships which had been at sea. As to the d’Anconia mines, some were buried under tons of blasted rock, while others were found not to be worth the price of blasting. An astounding number of these mines, as reports pouring in seem to indicate, had continued to be run, even though exhausted years ago. “Among the thousands of d’Anconia employees, the police have found no one with any knowledge of how this monstrous plot had been conceived, organized and carried out. But the cream of the d’Anconia staff are not here any longer. The most efficient of the executives, mineralogists, engineers, superintendents have vanished—all the men upon whom the People’s State had been counting to carry on the work and cushion the process of readjustment. The most able—correction: the most selfish—of the men are gone. Reports from the various banks indicate that there are no d’Anconia accounts left anywhere; the money has been spent down to the last penny. “Ladies and gentlemen, the d’Anconia fortune—the greatest fortune on earth, the legendary fortune of the centuries—has ceased to exist. In place of the golden dawn of a new age, the People’s States of Chile and Argentina are left with a pile of rubble and hordes of unemployed on their hands. “No clue has been found to the fate or the whereabouts of Señor Francisco d’Anconia. He has vanished, leaving nothing behind him, not even a message of farewell.

As a self-proclaimed human rights activist, Hochschild can be forgiven for his economic illiteracy. But since it is the keystone that begins his tale, it is another fib worth correcting. The EIC’s large trade surplus (more physical goods going out than coming in) was because virtually none of the revenue from the goods sold in Europe was sent back to pay for labor, which was “paid for” as a fulfillment of the EIC labor obligation. Instead, the revenue paid for European administration, infrastructure, and trade services in the Congo as well as profits that were parked in Belgium (an overall payments deficit). For Hochschild to claim that Africans were getting “little or nothing” for the goods they produced because fewer goods were being sent to Africa displays a stunning economic ignorance. It is like saying that the empty container ships returning to China from today’s port of Long Beach show that China’s workers are being paid “little or nothing.

riots began occurring in the cities of one million or more people. It was started by people, backed by Evans, who claimed the rich and powerful financed Governor Massey’s win, and that the election results were all falsified by a vast right-wing conspiracy of power brokers. Some groups swarmed the various state capitol buildings and began to trash them, breaking statues, destroying offices, and even beating up some of the legislators and their staff. In other locations, cops attempted to stop the rioters, only to be accused of police brutality. Unionized workers brought production to a halt at factories, while others blocked a few ports to keep anything from coming in or going out. Evans was pleased with how everything was turning out so far.

On March 12, 2015, the AIM Development Company, that deals in scrap metal, met to discuss demolishing the now defunct Verso Paper Mill in Bucksport, located at the head of Penobscot Bay. The paper mill was first built by the Maine Seaboard Paper Company in 1930. Demolition of the mill is expected to be completed in 2016. However, company representatives and town officials did not discuss what AIM might do with the 250-acre waterfront site once the demolition work is complete. Originally it was believed that a recycling facility, using the deep-water port access to export salvaged metals, would be the most likely thing to be built on this site; however this plan has now been scrapped. In 1980 this mill employed more than 1,350 workers and was the largest employer in Bucksport, a town of about 5,000 residents. The demolition and removal took much longer than anyone expected and as salvage crews continued working, a fire broke out on March 19, 2017. Apparently the fire erupted at about 8:30 a,m. as workers using cutting torches, cut into the metal exterior wall of the mill. Spreading to the roof of the building, it was debated as to the feasibility of allowing the fire to destroy the remaining structure. Considering the safety involved firefighters from Bucksport and surrounding towns extinguished the fire. It is expected that the remaining remnants will be demolished by the middle of 2017 in fact the company has open rail cars in position, waiting to remove whatever is left of the mill.

If the port made New York, the Irish made the port,” writes James T. Fisher in On the Irish Waterfront.15 Many of the dockworkers were refugees from the Great Hunger that immiserated the island between 1845 and 1849, a famine so cataclysmic that nearly 1.5 million people were willing to risk voyage to America on the too aptly named “coffin ships.”16 Most of the workers were desperately poor and more than willing to take the dangerous, miserably paid, erratic jobs on the piers of Red Hook and near the Navy Yard. Some of the earliest arrivals had dug the Erie Canal; nearly 500 of those following them built the Atlantic Docks, and many more simply did the more forgettable work of unloading cargo, repairing masts, and braiding ropes.17 Like urban migrants everywhere, the

By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings. In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds. Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous. The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower. In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia. Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.

important, it provided the bright prospect of fortunes to be made through exploitation of the land and its people. To that end, the French would transform much of the Vietnamese landscape. In Cochinchina, they carved out a complex network of canals that turned tens of thousands of acres of marshy wilderness into some of the most productive rice-growing country on earth. They developed modern ports at Haiphong and Danang and Saigon, too, so that Vietnamese raw material could more efficiently be shipped abroad and French-manufactured goods could more easily be unloaded. They also built a railroad to move French products north from Saigon all the way to China; one out of three of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese conscripted to lay its tracks is thought to have died along the way. The French hacked down highland forests as well, displacing tribal people who depended on them for their livelihood, and planted millions of rubber trees in their place; the miserably paid contract workers who tapped the trees were ravaged by malaria and “treated like human cattle,” one colonist admitted, and “terrorized by the overseers….On the rubber plantations the people had a habit of saying that children did not have a chance to know their fathers, nor dogs their masters.” In the North, tens of thousands of contract laborers risked their lives beneath the earth, mining coal, tin, tungsten, and zinc for the benefit of investors in France. They worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and those who tried to get away were often beaten before being forced back to work.