KnowMore.org Firefox Extension

If you have not heard of www.knowmore.org then you need to check it out. It is a website that profiles hundreds of corporations and rates them on a variety of issues including workers rights, environmental practices, ethical business practices, political power, etc.

If you use Mozilla Firefox, then definitely install the KnowMore add-on. For more info about the add-on, go here.

Life and Debt

http://www.lifeanddebt.org/

Seriously, check out this amazing documentary about the ills of free trade, international lending, and what is essentially economic slavery that is going on all around the world right now. This documentary focuses on Jamaica.

Trailer:


And here is a pretty good article in the New York Times about the documentary.

Free Trade vs. Fair Trade

This is a pretty good video about free vs. fair trade.

An article in the New Yorker called “Exporting I.P.” illustrates what the American government is doing to the rest of the world in terms of its free trade policy. Here is a quick excerpt:

“Free trade is supposed to be a win-win situation. You sell me your televisions, I sell you my software, and we both prosper. In practice, free-trade agreements are messier than that. Since all industries crave foreign markets to expand into but fear foreign competitors encroaching on their home turf, they lobby their governments to tilt the rules in their favor. Usually, this involves manipulating tariffs and quotas.”

It goes on to explain how America bullies other countries into changing their copyright laws in order to support American pharmaceutical companies.

It is well written article, check it out. I don’t have the link though, sorry.

Mother's Day: Caring and Capitalism

Isn’t it typical that corporations can take something worthwhile, commercialize it, and in the process turn it to shit? Click the title for the link to the CNN article about mother’s day, and how its been bastardized and sold to us. Any way for them to make a buck, and it isn’t just mother’s day. They sell us our entire lives.

They stole mother’s day. They commercialized punk rock. They sold rebellion. They even bottled our water and sold it to us. What is next?

Cannibalism

According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2001, a “living wage,” or the minimum hourly wage to be able to sustain a family of one adult and two children, is $30,000 a year, or $14 an hour. 60% of Americans earn less than $14 an hour, or the living wage. The vast majority of those earn about half that, at $7 an hour for many entry-level positions. This means that the majority of Americans are struggling to pay rent, health insurance, car insurance, credit interest, groceries, etc. With the relatively recent welfare reform bill signed in 1996 by Clinton, thousands of people are suffering, namely single mothers living far beneath the “living wage”. The poverty line, which is at about half that of the “living wage,” is grossly outdated and is not a substantial measure of poverty. Americans feel relatively confident in the fact that the percent of Americans living under the poverty line hovers somewhere around 13% (a number that I find disgustingly high), but do not realize that many Americans live above the poverty line and yet still cannot afford rent. According to a 1997 report of the National Coalition of the Homeless, “nearly one-fifth of all homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full or part-time jobs” (1).

To me, what this all boils down to, is that capitalism works in a way in which many are left out. Capitalism is the problem. According to the principles of capitalism, businesses operate according to the law of supply and demand, and exist only to raise their bottom line. They do not care for their workers, as there is always a fresh supply of those in poverty willing to fill in when a corporation decides to discard a former employee. What does this create? People working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, to feed their children and make rent. What is the point of a life wasted as a wage slave? It seems to me that capitalism has forced us all to sell our lives away for $7 an hour with the pathetic hope of moving up the corporate ladder, as if that will somehow change something and suddenly fill our lives with meaning.

I believe that we can operate our society in a way in which everyone can enjoy life while contributing positively to society. I call this direct action. I call this anarchism.



(1). Direct quote from Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel And Dimed.

Beauty

(click the image to enlarge it)


It's true.


Beauty must be defined as what we are, or else the concept itself is our enemy. Why languish in the shadow of a standard we cannot personify, an ideal we cannot live?

Smash your concept of what you or others should be, and redefine beauty, and understand that we are perfect in our imperfections.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring from Anyone, Under Any Circumstances, Even If They Really Want to Give You One

By Liz Stanton, CPE Staff Economist

1. You've Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond
The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.

2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value
The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.

3. Diamonds Have No Resale or Investment Value
Any diamond that you buy or receive will indeed be yours forever: De Beers' advertising deliberately brain-washed women not to sell; the steady price is a tool to prevent speculation in diamonds; and no dealer will buy a diamond from you. You can only sell it at a diamond purchasing center or a pawn shop where you will receive a tiny fraction of its original "value."

4. Diamond Miners are Disproportionately Exposed to HIV/AIDS
Many diamond mining camps enforce all-male, no-family rules. Men contract HIV/AIDS from camp sex-workers, while women married to miners have no access to employment, no income outside of their husbands and no bargaining power for negotiating safe sex, and thus are at extremely high risk of contracting HIV.

5. Open-Pit Diamond Mines Pose Environmental Threats
Diamond mines are open pits where salts, heavy minerals, organisms, oil, and chemicals from mining equipment freely leach into ground-water, endangering people in nearby mining camps and villages, as well as downstream plants and animals.

6. Diamond Mine-Owners Violate Indigenous People's Rights
Diamond mines in Australia, Canada, India and many countries in Africa are situated on lands traditionally associated with indigenous peoples. Many of these communities have been displaced, while others remain, often at great cost to their health, livelihoods and traditional cultures.

7. Slave Laborers Cut and Polish Diamonds
More than one-half of the world's diamonds are processed in India where many of the cutters and polishers are bonded child laborers. Bonded children work to pay off the debts of their relatives, often unsuccessfully. When they reach adulthood their debt is passed on to their younger siblings or to their own children.

8. Conflict Diamonds Fund Civil Wars in Africa
There is no reliable way to insure that your diamond was not mined or stolen by government or rebel military forces in order to finance civil conflict. Conflict diamonds are traded either for guns or for cash to pay and feed soldiers.

9. Diamond Wars are Fought Using Child Warriors
Many diamond producing governments and rebel forces use children as soldiers, laborers in military camps, and sex slaves. Child soldiers are given drugs to overcome their fear and reluctance to participate in atrocities.

10. Small Arms Trade is Intimately Related to Diamond Smuggling
Illicit diamonds inflame the clandestine trade of small arms. There are 500 million small arms in the world today which are used to kill 500,000 people annually, the vast majority of whom are non-combatants.

References:

Collier, Paul, "Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy," World Bank, June 15, 2000.

Epstein, Edward Jay, "Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?", The Atlantic Monthly, February 1982. www.theatlantic.com/issues/82feb/8202diamond1.htm

Global Witness, "Conflict Diamonds: Possibilities for the Identification, Certification and Control of Diamonds," A Briefing Document, June 2000, www.globalwitness.org/text/campaigns/diamonds/reports.html


Human Rights Watch/Asia, "The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor In India," Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project, www.hrw.org/reports/1996/India3.htm .

Human Rights Watch, "Children's Rights: Stop the Use of Child Soldiers;" www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/index.htm .

Kerlin, Katherine "Diamonds Aren't Forever: Environmental Degradation and Civil War in the Gem Trade," The Environment Magazine, www.emagazine.com/september-october_2001/0901gl_consumer.html .

Le Billon, Philippe, "Angola's Political Economy of War: The Role of Oil and Diamonds, 1975-2000," African Affairs, (2001), 100, p.55-80.

Mines and Communities, "The Mining Curse: The roles of mining in 'underdeveloped' economies," Minewatch Asia Pacific/Nostromo Briefing Paper, February 1999, www.minesandcommunities.org/Country/curse.htm .

Other Facets, Number 1, April 2001; Number 2, June 2001; Number 3, October 2001, www.partnershipafricacanada.org/hsdp/of.html

That’s Not Your Marble Bleeding...

This is a quote from Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed. In this book Ehrenreich works minimum wage jobs to see if she can survive on them. Here she is a maid:

“Self-restraint becomes more of a challenge when the owner of a million-dollar condo…who is (according to a framed photograph on the wall) an acquaintance of the real Barbara Bush takes me into the master bathroom to explain the difficulties she’s been having with the shower stall. Seems its marble walls have been ‘bleeding’ onto the brass fixtures, and can I scrub the grouting extra hard? That’s not your marble bleeding, I want to tell her, it’s the world-wide working class—the people who quarried the marble, wove your Persian rugs until they went blind, harvested the apples in your lovely fall-themed dining room centerpiece, smelted the steel for the nails, drove the trucks, put up this building, and now bend and squat and sweat to clean it.”

Although I am only about halfway through it, I really recommend this book as it is full of amazing insights such as this and is wonderfully written.