...that people who bought cotton from the South could also be anti-slavery, cuz we all get caught up in the net of trade and need to stop and think about things, and take a lot of time and personal effort to track products back to their source and to evaluate information, and make ethical judgements. It's not so easy to do. Was everyone in England who bought a dress or shirt of cotton spun in India but manufactured in England responsible for the poverty in British-run India? They had to think it through (with Gandhi's help). And what about the horrible conditions in the sweatshops in England itself? Was everyone who bought a dress or shirt from those shops guilty of oppressing and killing the poor women who made them? It's difficult to take responsibility for everything we buy.
And it's even more difficult now, in our wildly "consumer society" with products not only from everywhere on the globe but often from multiple countries--for instance, cotton from the toxic fields of Uzbekistan, spun I don't know where, is then shipped by oil-dripping tankers to the sweatshops in the Mariana Islands, where poverty-stricken women shipped in (as "indentured slaves"
from Asia turn it into Gap jeans and sweatshirts, which are then shipped to our ports. Not until I read a dockworkers pamphlet from a union in Oakland did I have any idea that toxic cotton growing was a main cause of turning the Aral Sea into one of the ten most toxic places on earth; and my knowledge of the Mariana sweatshops came by another, indirect route. Now I boycott Gap stores but this information was not easy to get--and where does the boycott end? Other transglobal clothing manufacturers are equally bad. I could go on and on about them and other U.S.-based retailers in Latin America. And, of course, then there are food, household appliances, electronics and...hey!--electronic voting machines for the U.S. "market" manufactured in sweatshops in the Philippines! Our voting machines!
It's a BIG and COMPLICATED problem--and it's easy enough to pick one big company, like Apple, and dis all of its customers because THEY outsourced to China and the customers ought to know this and ought to do something about it.
The problem is political, here. We need to take back our government--not easy to do, but it IS the source of this multi-faceted problem and would be the vehicle to solve it with, if we as a people had any such power left. Of course we can do boycotts and pressure campaigns and we can think and think about all of the products we buy, and do research, and try to avoid transglobal corporations (try doing that with oil!) and try to help local "good guys" (or even distant "good guys," on coffee beans, for instance). But we can't do it for everything and we can't stop it happening, again and again, that products sold here are harming workers and the environment somewhere else, for the profit of the very rich. It will keep happening until we reclaim our democratic power. My suggestion is to start with the corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines foisted off on us during the 2002 to 2004 period to keep this Corporate Coup d'Etat in place over us forever. And start with the truly "bad guy" corporation that controls most of those 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines (and manufactures them in the Philippines): ES&S (which bought out Diebold).
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