The great muckraking journalist John Pilger has produced this horrifying and ominous video that exposes the wealthy capitalists of the world along with their crimes against humanity. He focuses on the beautiful land of Indonesia, whose capital Jakarta has rows of "economic processing zones" - what the rest of us call "sweatshops," where thousands of impoverished women are paid 4 cents to make a boxer short that will be sold in western countries for $8.00. GAP and Old Navy corporations have numerous sweatshops in Jakarta, where the women are crammed together like sardines in buildings in 40 degree centigrade heat, with air conditioners reserved only for the CEOs upstairs. The women churn out thousands of boxer shorts daily, working shifts from 7:30 am to 7:30 am the following morning, and often get then just a two-hour break and resume yet another 12 hour shift. How far have we advanced since the heroic struggles of the great American woman Mother Jones who fought tooth and nail against capitalist exploiters to get better wages, health care and pensions for the slave wage workers of her time? How far have we advanced? Or have we regressed in our treatment of human beings as being nothing more than wage slaves? And when the wage is just a 4 cents, do we call them wage slaves or simply slaves? President Sukarno from power. In the 1960s then President Sukarno had protected the people of his country, keeping out multinational corporations, keeping out the U.S. corporate agents referred to as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He worked his heart out to protect the economic well-being of his people. But then in that same decade the tragic and fatal disease called economic globalization struck Indonesia when army general Suharto, aided by the United States and Britain, used nefarious means to route Sukarno from power. When Suharto took over, he brought in the US corporations who proceeded to rape the land of its vast mineral wealth, and who continue to do so in the present - while the teeming masses live in slums with no clean drinking water and dengue fever rampant due to mosquito-infested open sewers. We, the people, need to understand the unbounded crimes of the capitalists, the corporations. We need to expose their crimes every second of the day, because once the people understand why they are working for slave wages, they will cease to tolerate their wretched conditions, and they will rise up and fight this brutal beast. And once the people understand, then we need to spread the word about cooperatives - the only alternative to companies and corporations - we need to explain that cooperatives are the way out of economic hell and the only path to economic peace and stability. This is our job today. Upton Sinclair was fighting capitalism in the early 1900s, along with Mother Jones. Today John Pilger is likewise fighting capitalism by exposing their crimes against the poorest of the poor in Indonesia and elsewhere. We all need to join this fight, this march to expose the exploiters of the people. Only when capitalists have been toppled and their corporations demolished do we have a chance to build a new economy on the ashes of their corpses.
Posted by proutist-universal on December 19, 2006 3:31 AM
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |