Why you’ll never see me wearing Gold.

Posted on August 10, 2008

An exceptionally good story from the AP wire on child labor in Africa and the international Gold trade.  Think about this next time you see some sell-out corporate pop-rapper wearing giant gold chains.

AP IMPACT: Kids working in African gold mines

TENKOTO, Senegal – A reef of gold buried beneath this vast, parched grassland arcs across some of the world’s poorest countries. Where the ore is rich, industrial mines carve it out. Where it’s not, the poor sift the earth.

In a yearlong investigation, The Associated Press visited six of these bush mines in three West African countries and interviewed more than 150 child miners. AP journalists watched as child-mined gold was bought by itinerant traders. And, through interviews and customs documents, The AP tracked gold from these mines on a 3,000-mile journey to Mali‘s capital city and then on to Switzerland, where it enters the world market.

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Why Capitalists love Communists

Posted on July 15, 2008

A new article from the Washington Post explores why it is that “American” corporations are rushing to invest in Vietnam.

According to a report by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last
month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier
maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are
expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out products
for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct investment in
Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007, while it increased
just 14 percent in China.

The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory
workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn.

But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly cheap?

Vietnam’s edge, it seems, is political. “Communism means more
stability,”

Why Were We in Vietnam? By Harold Meyerson

Check out the full article on their website, and while you read it keep in mind that Anarchists like Bakunin predicted from the very start that in practice Marxism could only create tyranny and then think about all the dictators our government has sponsored around the world.  Capitalism and Communism aren’t ideological opposites, they’re two sides of the same coin – and they go together just fine.

Making Capitalism Obsolete: How & Why.

Posted on November 15, 2007

I’ve been thinking on this topic for a long time – close to ten years in fact – and done a lot of reading, a lot of thinking, and a lot of writing on and about it; but until now I’ve never actually laid out my ideas for the real nuts-and-bolts “how” of moving to a post-capitalist economy. This isn’t that complete article, but it’s a start; spurred by a couple posts I saw on Rethos about the nature of capitalism and inequality, alternatives to it, and how to make those alternatives a reality.

Lately it seems like it’s become popular for rich people to tell us how much they dislike inequality, just look at Bill Gates and his much-publicized efforts to support “development” around the world. Not that it’s a new phenomenon, really. Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other titans of the 1900′s-era “Robber Baron” capitalist class did much the same thing. Thing is, even as those men publicly demonstrated their desire to “give back” by building public libraries and such, they continued to violently abuse working-class people who dared to form unions and demand things like living wages, weekends, shorter workdays, and things of that sort. While the nature of the software industry means that Bill Gates hasn’t ever had to be as overtly murderous as Carnegie (whose empire was built on Coal and Steel), I find it a bit hard to believe that he’s really as dedicated to the cause as he claims to be; if only because any meaningful reduction in global poverty would directly undermine the capitalist system which he and others like him rely upon to supply them with such obscene wealth in the first place. Let me explain.

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