Category Archives: civil rights

Show me the money…

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Adidas is not paying workers of a factory closed even though they have promised to adhere to a code of conduct.

After I became aware of the use of sweatshops for clothing, I started to deny my kids certain clothing they wanted because it was made in a country operating sweatshops.  I recall yelling matches with one of my daughters because she couldn’t have the “cool” clothes these stores were selling.

At my university, there was a hunger-strike because the university was using sweatshops for its apparel.  There was a lively discussion on it in one of the classes (a rare thing, believe me, because classes were set up to have lecture-only–rarely did we have meaningful discussions)  –angry students were going to grill some steaks by the hunger-strikers.  These folks had done nothing to them–they were protesting mistreatment to other human beings—so why would that anger them? Unbelievable.

I used to own several shirts with the university’s logo on it.  I threw them out when I learned of the sweatshops.  What still boggles me is when people find out that the chic clothing they’re wearing is made by someone earning a $1 per day, they merely shrug their shoulders and go on with their lives.

As it became harder and harder to buy non-sweatshop clothing, I thought I could just sew all my clothes, but when went to the fabric stores and looked at the place of manufacture–yep, you can guess it–China, Guatemala, etc.  I couldn’t even buy fabric made in the U.S. to sew with.

Here’s a website of stuff still made in the U.S.A.  I can’t make any claims to know about the fair wage practices of the manufacturers, so enter at your own risk.

 

 

Chicago public school teachers to strike

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Story here.

Emanuel is just another member of “the team” that is trying to undermine public education.  (haha, I typed “undermind” at first–perhaps a better term? 🙂

…because, you know, bankers, financiers, business-oriented people who look at kids as products or resources to be exploited.  They look at the kids with $$ in their eyes–what can we squeeze out of them?  What kind of profit can we make off of them?

This report from Indiana.

From the story:

But Russ Simnick, president of the Indiana Public Charter School Association, said it’s disingenuous to compare charter schools with other schools based on the ISTEP results. For one, such comparisons are between individual charter schools and the overall results of school corporations, in which high and low ISTEP scores are lumped together. Thus, he said, larger corporations have a better ability to mask their lower scores than smaller individual schools. A more honest comparison, he said, would involve lumping all charter schools together and treating them as one school corporation in order to compare with others.

Simnick also disputed Schnellenberger’s statistics on the lowest 50 ISTEP scores; he said only four were charter schools, and all of these opened in 2008. He said it’s not fair to expect such young schools to post high ISTEP scores, especially since many charter schools are in some of the most challenging communities and take in students who just transferred from poorly performing schools.

 

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Unbelievable.  What a way to worm out of accountability.  The teachers from public schools have made the argument for not giving them a failing grade for the above reasons–children from “challenging communities” are difficult to bring up to speed if they are poor, the parents are not involved, and there is some learning/behavioral difficulty.
But charter schools officials want to claim it’s not their fault that the kids are failing?

This from Pennsylvania.  Nepotism? Um, yeah.  Nice little game they have going there.

Notice how they use the same lines as the Indiana officials–the kids are poor performers, they’re special needs…blah, blah, blah.  If you’ve got only a 15% graduation rate, you’re not the people to be teaching kids. Period.

This from Miami.  Taxpayers should not be funding them at all.  But that would cut into the profit margin for the education vultures, wouldn’t it??  You know, privatize the profits while socializing the costs, eh?

 

 

Being Peace

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Rev. John Dear has this up on Sister Anne Montgomery, and her work for peace.

I was raised to believe that peace would only be attained if we were all Christians.  After studying Buddhism, Hinduism, Tao and Confucious in college, I discovered that all religions said the same thing–they all say, in so many words, “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”  All of them say it…so in my view, it isn’t that we should all have the same way that we worship, but that we actually follow that simple sentence.

I think peace will only be attained when we put it into action…not as easy as it seems…it takes actively thinking about it with every action/every decision we make–and not believing that we all have to have the same religion.  I truly believe that we are individuals led along a certain path and those experiences along that path lead us to our spirituality–and no one has a right to interfere with that or impose their own beliefs upon another.  That’s just wrong to me.

Doublespeak

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…is a word in Communications for when you’re talking in such a way that it seems you mean something when you really mean something else…

…such as this.

This is why I am upset that people who went to Obama fundraisers didn’t put that money towards a third party candidate–someone who will restore the Constitution, not sign anymore Free Trade agreements, not sign legislation that gives the top 1% tax breaks, push for livable wage, get us out of all conflicts, and will push for re-regulating banks and sustainable farming/regulating environmental polluters.  And what happened to our antitrust laws, again?

That’s the candidate I want…