Patriots Please Step Up Get Out Of Line

I’m bothered by the 99cent stores, by all the value menus out there, no bargains here, its still true, you get what you pay for. The power of a dollar, I’d like mine to have some, I think it can do so much more if it weren’t just buying up cheap shit, another empty purchase at the dollar store, it all just goes away. A common belief, the Ostrich, a bit brain less, faced with danger it simply buries its head in the sand, if he doesn’t see the threat, he’s good with it, wouldn’t it be nice, Slavery Does Not Exist! Today it’s called free trade, what a find, cheap TP at the dollar store, a Chinese import, sometimes I forget how lucky I am to be living in these times. Then I remember why I find all these bargains making me feel so good, you know, its been hard, no work, my moneys tight, its not that I like it, its just nice to know there’s someone out there looking out for me, giving me a way to live on the cheap. And then my dollar goes away, just like that cheap TP, my dollar is flushed away. I guess Buy American is no longer the popular rallying cry, why make it here, when it can be made there. On PBS, a documentary on labor conditions in China. Through the eyes of a 14 year old girl, she’d left her home, her family, to work in the city, to do work in a jeans factory. In her dorm, in the beginning she was so overjoyed with the running water, with the toilet, with all the comforts that as workers they were provided. That was about as good as it got, 20 hour work days, deadlines, her job was hard, she was treated bad, no overtime pay, they all got a free snack at midnight. But we’re talking TP here, why should I care, I thought a bit about that young girl working in the Chinese factory, then thought maybe I could afford to spend a little more, you know, that sometimes cheap isn’t always better, maybe it’s better, purchasing products, produced by people properly compensated for their efforts, maybe it’s better if I payed more attention to this. The rallying cry in the early 1980’s was Buy American, today, supply comes world wide, those buy American Days might be done, that is no excuse for me to be buying without a conscience, I want my dollars to grow long legs, I want to see them do some good, to move around. There is the factory complex Foxconn, in Shenzhen, Southern China, where 420,000 live and work, the minimum wage is about $150 a month, management will be installing 1.5 million square meters of netting, they want to try to save lives, you see, the workers are jumping, so you think our computers are cheap! New I Pads for five hundred bucks, cheap phones, this factory complex is where products are built for Sony Ericsson, Hewlett Packard, Dell and Apple to name a few. Our world is our community, everything comes from everywhere, but you know we need to set some standards. I don’t care who is doing the work, I really don’t care where, hell, for all that it matters to me, it could be getting done in Timbuktu, what matters are the conditions in which it gets done, Slavery Does Not Exist!