Notes from the underground

When you write about porn, you focus on the little-known Cleveland porn mogul Reuben Sturman, who dominated the industry for decades. Now that pornography is more mainstream, what does his story say about the black market?

In pornography you have an incredibly black-market commodity that becomes a mainstream corporate commodity.

It's not fully legal ... but for some reason when hundreds of millions of dollars are being earned by AOL Time Warner, Hilton, Marriott and Sheraton from pornography I think you're less likely to see pornography prosecutions than when the money was being earned by these fringe characters, organized crime figures, the Reuben Sturmans.

He is the transitional figure from the "stag films" being shown at Kiwanis Clubs and fraternities to Hilton and Sheraton and AOL Time Warner just beaming it right to your TV.

What's remarkable again is that Lenny Bruce was imprisoned for saying "fuck," for saying a swear word in his nightclub act, and that's nothing compared to what you can get most nights on HBO.

With so many states facing fiscal disaster right now, do you think that state governments will legalize more of the current black markets because they want the tax revenue? For instance, when you write about pot, you say that Americans currently spend more money on illegal drugs than they do on cigarettes. And that's all tax-free.

It's definitely in the states' interest to do so. I think that the ways in which states have been legalizing gambling is absolutely a first step. But I think that the states are not going to be able to do much on marijuana. That's going to have to come at the federal level.

Our current administration is amazingly in favor of states' rights. That's one reason why some Republicans want to make the federal minimum wage voluntary, so that the states can do whatever they want.

But on the issue of drug policy and counting federal election ballots, for some reason states' rights does not apply, and the power of the federal government is supreme.

But I'm oddly optimistic about it. I don't think that you're going to see packs of marijuana on sale next to Marlboros anytime soon. But if you look at our policies on marijuana, they're just so out of step with the rest of the civilized world.

Canada is right now planning to decriminalize marijuana, and Canada is supplying pot through the national health service to people who are sick, so it's kind of hard for the U.S. government to say there is no safe level of use of marijuana and it has absolutely no medical use when our neighbor to the north is providing it under the national health service. That's going to be the case throughout Europe as well.

When you cover black market labor, you write about the dismal living conditions in migrant-worker shantytowns: 22 people living in a two-bedroom apartment. But you also say that the American people have greeted recent revelations about the plight of migrants with indifference. Why do you think that is?

The average migrant nationwide earns about $7,500 a year. In Florida, it's about $6,500 a year. In the book, I talk about how in California, adjusted for inflation, migrant worker wages have dropped 50 percent. In Florida, adjusted for inflation, a lot of migrant worker wages have dropped 75 percent, since around 1980. So, you're having the poorest of the poor in America having their wages cut in half or cut by three-quarters.

Why don't people care? I think on the one hand, despite the bubble economy of the last 15 years, a lot of ordinary people have been working hard just to get by on their own, and spouses both have to work in order to maintain a stable income. So, it's been harder to be compassionate about people that you never come in contact with.

And I also think that the connection between having this second-class status worker and ordinary people's lives hasn't been clear ... I'm trying to show how this is a very corrosive phenomenon.

It starts in one place, and then it extends to other places, and you could pretty soon have autoworkers who are illegal immigrants. There's no reason that the kinds of shantytowns that are in San Diego County couldn't be all over the United States, like the slums outside of São Paulo.

What would help?

The states can do more in terms of minimum wages and enforcing labor laws. But there are a lot of mainstream Republicans who want to eliminate the federal minimum wage or make it voluntary, because a minimum wage law represents tampering with the market.

We have this government right now that is so committed to deregulation, to getting environmental laws and worker-safety laws and overtime laws off of business' back in the interest of the free markets, and yet the most important commodity that's traded in the world by far is oil, whose price and production levels are set by a cartel that meets every few months to literally decide: What do we want the price to be? And how much should we pump?

And I'm kind of surprised that the Bush administration has never made a peep about how OPEC violates the free market. They want trade sanctions against the E.U. because the E.U. will not accept genetically engineered foods, in violation of the free market, and not a peep is made about OPEC.

The free market is an absolute myth. Governments are intervening all the time, whether it's to buy new tanks or to build new roads, and I'm all in favor of that. But if the government is going to intervene maybe it should intervene on behalf of the poorest people every now and then, and maybe it shouldn't intervene on what grown-ups do in the privacy of their bedrooms that has nothing to do with anyone else.

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