I drink your milkshake! a metaphor for capitalism
- Thread starter rickyb
- Start date
Everyone?every1
u
Even me...
Everyone?
everyone
Everyone?
Yes and u fled America
Everyone?
america unionizing again. this is actual good news; not fake orange hair guys becoming president or minorites becoming president...
More Perfect Union
@MorePerfectUS
·
42m
BREAKING: Starbucks workers at the University of Oregon Erb Memorial Student Union have voted to unionize 19-0.
That makes 40 unionized Starbucks stores nationwide.
@Sbworkersunited
won 5 of 6 union elections today.
More Perfect Union
@MorePerfectUS
·
42m
BREAKING: Starbucks workers at the University of Oregon Erb Memorial Student Union have voted to unionize 19-0.
That makes 40 unionized Starbucks stores nationwide.
@Sbworkersunited
won 5 of 6 union elections today.
Thebrownblob
Well-Known Member
That’s great for them I hope they get a good contract, although I still won’t be drinking coffee there it was overpriced before LOL.
i dont drink coffee
capitalism out of control
capitalist power too:
Primo Radical
@PrimoRadical
·
Apr 29
The people in power don’t care what political label you espouse. Call yourself liberal, conservative, communist — heck, call yourself an anarchist. All they really care about is whether or not you bow down before their privilege and accept your role in the subservient caste.
Primo Radical
@PrimoRadical
·
Apr 29
The people in power don’t care what political label you espouse. Call yourself liberal, conservative, communist — heck, call yourself an anarchist. All they really care about is whether or not you bow down before their privilege and accept your role in the subservient caste.
ralph nader: ...And so here's how important the textile clothing industry is. I'm taking this from Dana Thomas's
book. “It's a three trillion dollar a year industry around the world. It produces about 100 billion
items of clothing annually. We buy 80 billion of them. The remaining 20 billion are destroyed,
usually burned or shredded. The average garment is worn seven times before being thrown away,
according to UK study. Roughly one out of every six people in the world works in this industry.
Shoppers today buy five times more clothing than they did in 1980. In 2018, that average 68
garments a year. How did shopping for clothing become such an addiction? Why do we buy so
many clothes?”...
Dana Thomas: Well, there's several different reasons. The first is because through marketing
by fashion brands, fashion has become — shopping has become a pastime. Like we used to go to
the movies, we go play golf, we went to play tennis, now we go shopping. So, more people go
shopping all the time. At the same time, clothes have never been cheaper than they are today.
Now you say, “What do you mean?” When I kept hearing this while I was working on the book,
I didn't understand what people were saying. And then I read a piece from The New Yorker in
1940 or so. It was a big profile on Hattie Carnegie, the retailer. And she was talking about her
clients during the Depression. And she said, you know, “I was importing these clothes from
Paris, the Paris original luxury clothes from Chanel and Dior, and I was selling them for $1500,
$2000 apiece.”
And I said to myself, wait a minute, that's the price that we pay for a Chanel dress today. And
that was during the Depression, a 100 years ago when the price of eggs was in the cents, not the
dollars, right? I started calculating like how much a pound of beef costs then versus today, and
then how much a Chanel dress cost then and today. And the Chanel dress was the same price as
it was during the Depression. But everything else was a fraction of the price. So clearly, prices of
clothes had not gone up in that end on the luxury end with inflation.
But then she wrote that Raymond Chandler called it “the secretary special.” It was a line for
young women who didn’t make a lot of money and it was a proper suit and a pretty little day
dress that you can wear to the office if you were a secretary. She was selling those between
$19.99 and $25 during the Depression. And that's the same price you would pay for clothes at
Zara or H&M or Uniqlo today.
Ralph Nader: That's why I want to tell our listeners that you've traveled to all these places, the
factories in Bangladesh to sweatshops in Los Angeles, Vietnam, elsewhere, so these lower prices
made possible by NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]; and the outsourcing–
Dana Thomas: Going offshore.
Ralph Nader: Yeah, effect of these trade agreements. The price is on the workers. Tell us about
the conditions in these factories overseas that are producing clothes that used to be produced by
factories in New England, factories in North and South Carolina, which are now empty.
Dana Thomas: Which are now empty. Well, they're slowly filling up. But, yes, what happened
was with the trade agreements during the Reagan era - NAFTA, which came a bit later, but there
were others as well, CAFTA [Central American Free Trade Agreement], which is the Caribbean
version of NAFTA - with these trade agreements, all our manufacturing moved offshore. And
they didn't just move offshore because they're looking for better prices. They moved offshore
because they were looking for the cheapest price possible. So, if they were paying a worker $20
in North Carolina, they were paying a worker 20 cents in Guatemala, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or
Bangladesh. Before they used to have corporate - what we call corporate paternalism - where
they would do things like give money to the local Little Keague teams. They put up field lights at
the local stadium. They gave donations to the local library. Plus, they paid maternity leave,
vacation leave, 40-hour work weeks, benefits, all of that. When they went offshore, they didn't
have to pay any of it. No Little League, no benefits, no maternity leaves, nothing.
So the cost of clothes bottomed out. Nothing. It costs nothing. The factories are a shambles. I
visited them in Vietnam, I visited them in Bangladesh, I visited them in China. Yes, some of
them were perfectly fine, and clean and as they should be. But for the most part, most of the
time, they were shambles, I mean, 120 degrees. Big fans blowing dust around. Guys in the jeans
factory walking around in waders in six inches of dye water on the floor because the drains are
chocked. It's just a horror show. And they work nonstop. There were lots of people who argue
and say well, “We're creating jobs for people in these places who wouldn't have jobs. They are
terrible jobs. They have what we call “forced overtime,” which basically means you're told to
stay longer and work weekends and work nights, and you're not getting paid for it. They just
won't let you leave because you're locked in the factory. You're searched when you come in;
you're searched when you leave, because they're afraid you're going to steal from them.
When I went to Bangladesh, they were paying the workers $68 a month – a month! And that was
less than half of living wage, which is what economists calculate is what people in Bangladesh
need to house, clothes, and feed their families. So basically you need to work two full time jobs
just to meet the basic needs. It's basically corporate colonialism where we're going into these
countries, we're just taking all their resources, we're making their workers work just one step up
from slavery because we pay them a little bit, but they're working in terrible conditions and
they're working nonstop to the bone. And if, you know, you're pregnant, you're fired. If you get
married, you're fired. There's no insurance of any sorts or stability in your job. And why? So we
can have cheap clothes that we can burn through and wear three or four or five times and then
throw away.
Ralph Nader: And they get sick. Their toxic substances particularly in the workplace
[overlapping 08:49]
Dana Thomas: Toxic substances, the waters, they dump dyes in the rivers. The rivers die.
They're so opaque from dyes that nothing can live in them because the sun can't even go through
the water. The destruction to the environment is epic. Epic, epic. I saw a dead river next to an old
jeans factory outside of Ho Chi Minh. And it just made me want to vomit. It was so nasty. It was
so, so nasty. And I thought this is just one little factory in one little village outside of Ho Chi
Minh. There are thousands of these all over the world. We can't solve the climate issue until we
solve poverty. We can't solve the poverty issue until we deal with the labor issue. Every story
today is a climate story; every climate story is a labor story.
Ralph Nader: Listeners, before you hear a series of stories that you cannot fail but remember
and relate to your friends and fellow workers, name the brands that are profiting from these
dungeon-like factories in Asia and elsewhere, Ethiopia as well, name the brands and the big
stores in the U.S. where people go in and buy.
Dana Thomas: Well, many of them are publicly traded companies, so you can even see it in
their annual reports. But H&M is one of the largest producers in Bangladesh and in Myanmar,
former Burma. They're still producing there even though there's been a junta, there's martial law.
They're still producing clothes there. They managed to be working with the bad guys throughout
the democratic government. Gap famously has been caught many times producing in pretty
sketchy situations like they were producing in sweatshops in Saipan, which is an American
protectorate in the Pacific, and putting “Made in the USA” labels in it, and made everybody
think that they were made in the USA like in San Francisco, when it was in Saipan where they
were treating them like — where they were just sweatshops behind chain link fences with razor
tops, and they were paying people pennies, and it was a horror show so.
Ralph Nader: And Walmart and Target --
Dana Thomas: Walmart, Walmart. Don’t even get me started on Walmart. And Disney,
Disney. When the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Bangladesh, I believe Walmart was one of the
brands that was found to be producing there and all the brands that were found producing there
said, “Not our fault. Our agents on the ground subcontracted that factory, we had no idea.”
book. “It's a three trillion dollar a year industry around the world. It produces about 100 billion
items of clothing annually. We buy 80 billion of them. The remaining 20 billion are destroyed,
usually burned or shredded. The average garment is worn seven times before being thrown away,
according to UK study. Roughly one out of every six people in the world works in this industry.
Shoppers today buy five times more clothing than they did in 1980. In 2018, that average 68
garments a year. How did shopping for clothing become such an addiction? Why do we buy so
many clothes?”...
Dana Thomas: Well, there's several different reasons. The first is because through marketing
by fashion brands, fashion has become — shopping has become a pastime. Like we used to go to
the movies, we go play golf, we went to play tennis, now we go shopping. So, more people go
shopping all the time. At the same time, clothes have never been cheaper than they are today.
Now you say, “What do you mean?” When I kept hearing this while I was working on the book,
I didn't understand what people were saying. And then I read a piece from The New Yorker in
1940 or so. It was a big profile on Hattie Carnegie, the retailer. And she was talking about her
clients during the Depression. And she said, you know, “I was importing these clothes from
Paris, the Paris original luxury clothes from Chanel and Dior, and I was selling them for $1500,
$2000 apiece.”
And I said to myself, wait a minute, that's the price that we pay for a Chanel dress today. And
that was during the Depression, a 100 years ago when the price of eggs was in the cents, not the
dollars, right? I started calculating like how much a pound of beef costs then versus today, and
then how much a Chanel dress cost then and today. And the Chanel dress was the same price as
it was during the Depression. But everything else was a fraction of the price. So clearly, prices of
clothes had not gone up in that end on the luxury end with inflation.
But then she wrote that Raymond Chandler called it “the secretary special.” It was a line for
young women who didn’t make a lot of money and it was a proper suit and a pretty little day
dress that you can wear to the office if you were a secretary. She was selling those between
$19.99 and $25 during the Depression. And that's the same price you would pay for clothes at
Zara or H&M or Uniqlo today.
Ralph Nader: That's why I want to tell our listeners that you've traveled to all these places, the
factories in Bangladesh to sweatshops in Los Angeles, Vietnam, elsewhere, so these lower prices
made possible by NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement]; and the outsourcing–
Dana Thomas: Going offshore.
Ralph Nader: Yeah, effect of these trade agreements. The price is on the workers. Tell us about
the conditions in these factories overseas that are producing clothes that used to be produced by
factories in New England, factories in North and South Carolina, which are now empty.
Dana Thomas: Which are now empty. Well, they're slowly filling up. But, yes, what happened
was with the trade agreements during the Reagan era - NAFTA, which came a bit later, but there
were others as well, CAFTA [Central American Free Trade Agreement], which is the Caribbean
version of NAFTA - with these trade agreements, all our manufacturing moved offshore. And
they didn't just move offshore because they're looking for better prices. They moved offshore
because they were looking for the cheapest price possible. So, if they were paying a worker $20
in North Carolina, they were paying a worker 20 cents in Guatemala, or Thailand, or Vietnam, or
Bangladesh. Before they used to have corporate - what we call corporate paternalism - where
they would do things like give money to the local Little Keague teams. They put up field lights at
the local stadium. They gave donations to the local library. Plus, they paid maternity leave,
vacation leave, 40-hour work weeks, benefits, all of that. When they went offshore, they didn't
have to pay any of it. No Little League, no benefits, no maternity leaves, nothing.
So the cost of clothes bottomed out. Nothing. It costs nothing. The factories are a shambles. I
visited them in Vietnam, I visited them in Bangladesh, I visited them in China. Yes, some of
them were perfectly fine, and clean and as they should be. But for the most part, most of the
time, they were shambles, I mean, 120 degrees. Big fans blowing dust around. Guys in the jeans
factory walking around in waders in six inches of dye water on the floor because the drains are
chocked. It's just a horror show. And they work nonstop. There were lots of people who argue
and say well, “We're creating jobs for people in these places who wouldn't have jobs. They are
terrible jobs. They have what we call “forced overtime,” which basically means you're told to
stay longer and work weekends and work nights, and you're not getting paid for it. They just
won't let you leave because you're locked in the factory. You're searched when you come in;
you're searched when you leave, because they're afraid you're going to steal from them.
When I went to Bangladesh, they were paying the workers $68 a month – a month! And that was
less than half of living wage, which is what economists calculate is what people in Bangladesh
need to house, clothes, and feed their families. So basically you need to work two full time jobs
just to meet the basic needs. It's basically corporate colonialism where we're going into these
countries, we're just taking all their resources, we're making their workers work just one step up
from slavery because we pay them a little bit, but they're working in terrible conditions and
they're working nonstop to the bone. And if, you know, you're pregnant, you're fired. If you get
married, you're fired. There's no insurance of any sorts or stability in your job. And why? So we
can have cheap clothes that we can burn through and wear three or four or five times and then
throw away.
Ralph Nader: And they get sick. Their toxic substances particularly in the workplace
[overlapping 08:49]
Dana Thomas: Toxic substances, the waters, they dump dyes in the rivers. The rivers die.
They're so opaque from dyes that nothing can live in them because the sun can't even go through
the water. The destruction to the environment is epic. Epic, epic. I saw a dead river next to an old
jeans factory outside of Ho Chi Minh. And it just made me want to vomit. It was so nasty. It was
so, so nasty. And I thought this is just one little factory in one little village outside of Ho Chi
Minh. There are thousands of these all over the world. We can't solve the climate issue until we
solve poverty. We can't solve the poverty issue until we deal with the labor issue. Every story
today is a climate story; every climate story is a labor story.
Ralph Nader: Listeners, before you hear a series of stories that you cannot fail but remember
and relate to your friends and fellow workers, name the brands that are profiting from these
dungeon-like factories in Asia and elsewhere, Ethiopia as well, name the brands and the big
stores in the U.S. where people go in and buy.
Dana Thomas: Well, many of them are publicly traded companies, so you can even see it in
their annual reports. But H&M is one of the largest producers in Bangladesh and in Myanmar,
former Burma. They're still producing there even though there's been a junta, there's martial law.
They're still producing clothes there. They managed to be working with the bad guys throughout
the democratic government. Gap famously has been caught many times producing in pretty
sketchy situations like they were producing in sweatshops in Saipan, which is an American
protectorate in the Pacific, and putting “Made in the USA” labels in it, and made everybody
think that they were made in the USA like in San Francisco, when it was in Saipan where they
were treating them like — where they were just sweatshops behind chain link fences with razor
tops, and they were paying people pennies, and it was a horror show so.
Ralph Nader: And Walmart and Target --
Dana Thomas: Walmart, Walmart. Don’t even get me started on Walmart. And Disney,
Disney. When the Rana Plaza factory collapsed in Bangladesh, I believe Walmart was one of the
brands that was found to be producing there and all the brands that were found producing there
said, “Not our fault. Our agents on the ground subcontracted that factory, we had no idea.”
Thebrownblob
Well-Known Member
Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
There is an endlessly repeated witticism by the poet Anatole France that ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ What France certainly did not foresee is that an entire country – and an...
www.spectator.co.uk
Canada is your paradise
canada least evil of north american countries, and doesnt compare to EUWhy is Canada euthanising the poor?
There is an endlessly repeated witticism by the poet Anatole France that ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ What France certainly did not foresee is that an entire country – and an...
Canada is your paradise
Thebrownblob
Well-Known Member
Least evil? But still evil…. Enjoy your dystopian milkshake
im trying to escape but the world is not free and we are locked into our countries with rigid visa system
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