Ordinary Sunday Brunch: Culture Links

Saul Degraw says:

Erik Loomis at LGM rips into the Triangle article you linked to as a piece of corporate ass-kissing by a lickspittle lackey:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/12/hot-historical-takes-new-gilded-age

This gets straight at the problem of consumer-based activism: it so often takes attention away from who are really responsible for problems. Fight to ban straws, ignore the plastics and petroleum industries! Yes, people like low-priced clothing. But it’s as if when these workers starting forming unions and the minimum wage was established, etc., that clothing prices skyrocketed and all of a sudden consumers couldn’t afford clothing. It made no negative difference at all to consumers! And yet, this article takes the blame straight off the men who murdered 146 women (and who soon reopened another factory with the same safety problems) and depoliticizes it by naturalizing a process of exploitative capitalism through saying it’s all about consumers. Moreover, the desire for regulation and enforcement hasn’t abated; decades of capitalist propaganda and structural economic changes and made workers afraid to fight for regulations in fear that companies will just close up and move overseas. Moreover, everyone wants safe coal mines or whatever except for the Don Blankenships of the world who give millions to rich Republicans to do their bidding to make sure they aren’t safe.

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