One of the problems is that when you go to Wal-Mart or an expensive department store, odds are its all sweat shop goods. It’s sickening, but in a modern society it’s unreasonable to live “backwoods” by making your own clothing and such. Sorry, show up to a job interview dressed like a relic from a few 100 years ago and you can’t afford to live because you can’t work.

Historically the wealthy or noble – whatever you want to call the actual or de facto ruling class in any society – force or effectively force the “peons” to do things. When the average American is starting to look forward to nothing but working FOR Wal-Mart, where else are they going to shop? Increases in wages in this country are not proportionate to the increase in taxes over the past few decades. Not even close. While the “average” American may be the one buying things that support slave labor, it’s the fascist combination of the wealthy, the coporations and the governments that have, more or less, made too expensive for “regular” people to do anything else.

A lot of us would like to “buy American” just as much as we’d like to “eat organic.” However, in the end things like “wearing any clothing” and “eating anything” and oh, I don’t know, “paying rent” win out. This is not to say that the average American is blameless, but placing all the blame on your minimum to low wage workers who have little choice is like blaming European serfs for the vile imperialism of their leaders in the middle ages. Yes, they could have stood as one to fight back and revolt (and did at times), but few people are willing to die and suffer for such things. Are you?

Wal-Mart is just the 21st century “company” store, only the greedy bastards that run these corporations have become far more sophisticated in the last century. For instance, in the USA a lot of people think we “defeated” slavery with the civil war. When, in fact, the industrialists of the north had figured out that it was much more effective to have slaves who had the illusion of freedom.

I mean you’re on a computer and so am I. Certainly it’s not just clothing made in China and other portions of Asia that’s sweat shop material. Thanks to allowing corporations to tap into the high profit margins yielded by nations who allow their people to be treated with few rights and no dignity there’s almost nothing you or I can buy in an industrialized nation that doesn’t fuel sweat shops in some way. Even if it’s “Made In America” or wherever, odds are tons of the parts and raw materials are imported from slave labor camps.

What I do agree with is that we need to take a stand in industrialized nations and particularly in America where it’s our damn birth right and DUTY. The best way to take a stand isn’t to grow cotton or live like the Amish. All you end up doing in that case is looking like a crazy person who, while taking a personal stand, isn’t really doing anything to change the injustice he/she is opposed to.

The best way to take a stand is to simply say, “No.” Say no to government. Say no to all the things that create this blight in industrialized nations. I really admire Rosa Parks. She demonstrated how much a simple “no” could change things. Until the people of this country are willing, in a large number, to stand up against high income tax, foreign affairs, corporate rampages, and similar problems and face the consequences of doing so, like their forefathers did, like the brave minorities during the civil rights movement, we’re simply going to dwindle. It’s not just a matter for standing up for ourselves either. It’s a matter of telling these greedy tyrants all over the world that we will not stand for putting children to work for 16 hours a day making sneakers!

When a nation has no factories at home and is totally dependant on foreign labor, it’s in trouble. Dependancy on a thing makes you a slave and a servant to that thing. The solution is easy, deregulate small business (lower their prices and increase their employee wages), penalize corporations with taxes for setting up shops in countries that do not meet certain human rights requirements (make it too expensive to use sweat shops), increase trade tariffs on countries that use slavery to compete (their economy is, in many ways dependant on ours and to survive they must change) and stop taxing the locals to death! Nested taxes (the direct AND indirect ones) are what make it too expensive to run a manufacturing business in the US of A.

Anyone replying to this might consider “bitching” to be “free speech.” One of the biggest problems in this country is that a lot of people seem to think that just because they can still say certain things that somehow not only is SOMETHING being accomplished, but that until they can’t say it anymore that there’s no reason to really fight back. You don’t wait until your chains are forged and being put around your neck to fight back. Or, to use a more modern analogy, you don’t wait until your rulers are piling you and those like you onto to trains set to arrive in death camps before saying no. Rights are responsibilities, not gifts. Until a society realizes that it will never be free.

If industrialized nations don’t stop buying into this “global economy” bullshit and don’t do something to make slave labor more expensive than honest and fair labor then this so-called “global capitalism” IS going to make us all equal. It’s going to eventually make us all equally third world with our ruling CEO masters whose power and influence is truly multinational. How exactly do these pro-outsourcing CEOs think we are going to be able to afford their high-priced products when our jobs have been outsourced overseas and there are none to be had here in the U.S.?