Written by paul bamberger   

Would you buy products made in factories that force pregnant female workers to have abortions to keep their jobs or from factories that put children to work who have had to quit school and go to work to keep families from starving? You do. We Americans pride ourselves that we have eradicated slavery from our society. A myth. We have simply out-sourced it. Today, Three billion people, two hundred and forty million of them children, work in sweatshop factories in the poor nations of the world for two dollars a day in what are well-documented slave conditions producing goods mostly bought by the middleclass consumer. Thomas Jefferson wrote that a people cannot be both ignorant and free. Yet, the well-informed middleclass consumer continues to buy products made under these conditions, keeping him or herself "ignorant" of what he or she is well-aware. Although many in the middleclass will point to corporate greed as the problem, corporate greed can only exist as long as there is a personal greed on the part of the middleclass consumer for the products they offer. Corporate greed then feeds of middleclass greed. (Most of the products bought go well beyond the scope of what is needed to live a decent life. They are bought with discretionary money that would be better used redirected into earth-sustaining projects.) Without this willingness on the part of the middleclass consumer to ignore what they know in order to continue buying these products, the large retailers would have no incentive to contract these factories to produce "competitively priced" goods. V. Lenin wrote that the impoverishment of people strengthens capitalism. The middleclass is a willing partner in an economic system that is doing just that. Call them what you will, the working poor, forced labor, cheap labor, renewable human resource, it comes down to one thing, they are all slaves working for you. So next time you look in the mirror and say to yourself "Lookin' good", check the labels on your clothing and ask yourself, are you really lookin' that good?