Do you think it makes sense to subsidize cotton so that it's grown in the United States, ship it all over the world, some times even as far as Pakistan or China so we can take advantage of sweatshop or slave labor, then ship it through a complicated distribution network so wages can be crushed and profits increased?
Economists, not chosen by the vast majority of the public, think it is!
This isn't always quite as simple as this; however in many cases it's damn close; and the reason they get away with it is that they provide an enormous amount of propaganda about how great our free market capitalist system is and this only complicates the story which is almost entirely controlled by a small percentage of the public that refuses to report on the
If the media covered the whole story, and reported on candidates that actually represent the majority of the public, there's no way the public would believe that an economic system that pays deceptive advertisers, union busters, lobbyists, media pundits and other white collar workers that study how to rig the economic system enormous amounts of money and workers that provide services that improve the quality of life, whether it's factory workers teachers or other productive jobs have their wages slashed, is a good system!
This would be even more obvious if more people realized that while they've been shipping jobs overseas over the past few decades the quality of the merchandise has plummeted because they've been cutting manufacturing costs to the bone and sending shipping lobbying, advertising expenses, and profits through the roof.
If human rights organizations, unions, environmentalists, teachers, and social activists were involved in the decision making and reporting process then there are many more incredibly simple and obvious things that the media would report and they would take into consideration when making trade policy. As it stands the only ones involved in the media or that get coverage to enable them to get name recognition necessary to get elected are those that pretend to defend workers the environment and the public without actually doing so.
Thirty years ago toasters and coffee makers could be expected to last close to if not longer than ten to fifteen years; now they routinely break after no more than two or three years often less than one. For a long time we often saved our old appliances, perhaps because we thought we might repair them or something and after ten to fifteen years they piled up and I realized just how often they were breaking down, in addition to that we've also piled up numerous other broken items before eventually throwing them out, although bigger items get thrown out faster. There appear to be more than a dozen broken garden fittings that seem to break almost every year.
With all Trump's talk about trade wars none of this is even subject to debate in the commercial media which is distracting us from many of the most important issues; although some of his critics have been quick to point out that Carl Ichan dumped millions of steal related stocks the week before he announced his tariffs, which I'm guessing won't be put into practice anyway. They weren't so quick this time to remind the public that the Trump family including both Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka have been making YUGE amounts of profits from sweatshop labor while the workers that produce their products are treated like virtual slaves!
The quality of clothing is as bad, if not even worse, than appliances!
Forty or fifty years ago hand me downs were standard operating procedure for many families, especially lower income families, although thrifty middle class families benefited from this as well and enabled them to put the money they saved to more important things that improved quality of life including education; now it has virtually come to an end, with little or no notice from most people. Now clothes wear out faster so that they're useless for hand me downs, and jeans are among the worst. Blue jeans used to last much longer, for adults that wore them almost every day, often lasting over ten years, without rotating a large number of jeans!
For a while about six or seven years ago they started falling apart much quicker, and at a time that I received gift cards from Walmart, which I would never shop at otherwise, I noticed that the only jeans they had were their own brand name, Faded Glory and I gave it a shot for a couple of pairs, after no more than two years they fell apart, and since I wore shorts in the summer and rotated a modest volume it wasn't hard to estimate how long they lasted, which would have been no more than six months, if I wore the same pair everyday without working nearly as hard physically as I used to!
When I worked much hard and longer hours decades ago and wore old fashioned blue jeans whether it was Levi's Wranglers or what ever was cheapest at that time they lasted at least five to six times as long, if not ten times as long!
Thirty years ago when they first came up with pre-washed jeans that didn't have to be broken in there were people saying this was part of a scam to gradually reduce the quality of jeans so they could increase profits; this was approximately the same time they first tried to market torn jeans to kids, and it flopped because it was done so poorly.
You won't find reports about what changed since then in the traditional media; but if you're familiar with alternative media outlets and good non-fiction books, often discussed at the grassroots or by non-corporate organizations, but that the traditional media never promotes, and if you pay attention to marketing tactics it may not be hard to figure out what happened.
As Susan Linn and Juliet Schor pointed out the marketing industry learned that advertising is much more effective if they target children while they're young, and repeat their advertising over and over again, often even in schools, which never used to allow advertising, which is what they're doing. Schor and Linn, along with other good researchers like Roy Fox and Naomi Klein, have reported extensively on how they use psychologists to help advertisers manipulate children, not for their benefits but to sell them products often over priced and lower quality. By showing video's of stars like Brittany Spears modeling torn jeans that don't last nearly as long, but seem to look sexy while gradually reducing the quality of all clothes they managed to reduce durability without many people noticing until they get so bad that often they have many more complaints!
I happened to make a big deal out of it myself on a few occasions, but with an oligarchy system my complaints are unlikely to have done much if any good; which means if there is temporary improvement in quality it is almost certainly the result of a large volume of complaints from many other people!
And sometimes even fights at the cash register and people angry taking it out on the workers that aren't responsible for the reduction in quality. In addition to advertisers that study effective how children respond to ads; they also have sales analysts who study when sales go up or down for one reason or another. I've spoken to one or two of them and they explained that they tell their bosses which changes cause reductions in sales. This isn't something that is ever reported in the traditional media.
However it doesn't take much speculation to tell how this could potentially be used to increase profits by studying consumer complacency. If they reduce quality of merchandise gradually in one area they can have sales analysts examine any loss in sale, and if the customers don't notice they can gradually reduce quality all across the country. It's virtually guaranteed that this has been going on for decades!
Have you heard about this idea once in the media?
Not likely this type of research would be considered a closely held trade secret because they're obviously studying how to increase profits by committing massive fraud on the public!
Instead of passing laws requiring disclosure for this type of fraudulent practice, including deceptive marketing to kids, the elected officials, that collect enormous amounts of bribes thinly disguised as campaign contributions, pass trade secrecy or proprietary information laws. The media also collect an enormous amount of revenue in the form of advertising dollars, and often have interlocking board members or stockholders, so they have a major incentive not to report on it.
These same elected officials have been allowing the consolidation of corporations without much if any enforcement of antitrust laws which were implemented after enormous amounts of complaints from workers and corporations. Recently one of the pundits complained that Donald Trump was retaliating against CNN for political reasons when he raised questions about the latest merger, and he cited as justification for the merger and claims of bias the fact that few if any restrictions have been made on these mergers for the past thirty years, implying that this means that they should allow all mergers with little or no questions!
I'm no fan of Donald Trump and doubt if he really wanted to stop the consolidation of the media any more than I believe that he wants to defend worker, consumer or environmental rights or anyone else's rights except for the rich that he's been bending over backwards for all his life despite his lour rhetoric during the campaign.
The six oligarchies have known for decades how to rig elections, and prevent real anti-establishment candidates from getting elected, by simply refusing to cover them at all! Now they hardly even try to hide it!
In 1999 they virtually announced that the nominees would be Al Gore and George Bush saying they were the most popular, although they only allowed a few candidates to get any coverage and only mentioned them in the polls which is the way they rig the polls long before they rig the actual elections. By giving them an enormous advantage in the overage they ensured that they would win but at least they allowed other candidates to run or pretend to run and pout on a show. Bill Bradley was the only one running against Al Gore, which implies the Democratic establishment decided on him just like they decided on Hillary!
Then after they virtually announced who the nominees were they went through the process of a campaign that only covered those collecting money form multinational corporations and campaign operatives and advertisers spent as much money as it took to ensure that they were the two nominees ensuring that regardless of who won they would serve corporate interests. The only thing different was that they came so close in Florida that some of it was exposed and the Supreme Court rigged it for Bush without mentioning that the bigger rigging took place months earlier with the coverage of only candidates supported by corporations ignoring Ralph Nader, who many people at the grassroots remember and other candidates that even most grassroots observers forgot like John Hagelin, who I suspect was by far the best candidate that year, even better than Nader, but he didn't get any media coverage.
The vast majority of the public never knows about the worst election rigging because they never even hear of many of the best candidates!
Whether John Hagelin really was the best candidate that year isn't the point; the point is that most people never even got the chance to consider him and therefore never realized the media vetoed his chances of winning. This has been standard operating procedure long before and every election cycle since.
In 2004 John Dean pretended to be the progressive candidate like Bill Bradley, but took a dive the week before the Iowa caucuses, which was before the Dean Scream which many people remember. He made absurd blunders that angered a lot of local people that he should have known would happen virtually paving the way for John Kerry to put two Skull and Bones against each other; in 2008 they rigged the coverage for two more people chosen by the political establishment before the election; and in 2012 Mitt Romney was chosen as a sacrificial lamb just like Bob Dole where it was obvious even before they were nominated that they couldn't beat either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, but if there was a chance that McCain might win his choice of Sarah Palin enabled him to win easily.
Then in 2016 the rigging on the Democratic side was so obvious it's hard to imagine how anyone could even miss it. But this was part of an effort to rig it on the Republican side was real as well, since they've been pushing clowns in that party for decades and they had researchers studying how outraged the public was with the establishment they had to know that they were sick of falling for the same scam over and over again and they gave them a candidate that pretended to be anti-establishment and was going to stand up for the working class and bring jobs back ending unfair trade.
If you believe Trump is really anti-establishment, or that he ever intended to stand up for fair trade, I'll sell you a bridge! The media knew damn well that he was never a threat to them; otherwise they would have simply refused to give him all that obsession coverage while ignoring sincere candidates that didn't cater to the oligarchies.
The economy is rigged just like the elections, and evidence of it is only reported in alternative media outlets the media refers to as fringe, like Naomi Klein or Stacy Mitchell; who both reported on how slotting fees are used to turn department stores into consignment stores where only big corporations can participate. Naomi Klein author of "No Logo" and "Shock Doctrine" also reported about some of these corporations that are allegedly competing against each other are actually manufacturing some of these products in the same sweat shops in some cases!
This isn't a free market it's an oligarchy system where people in the corporate offices make all the decisions and those that help them learn how to manipulate the public get paid far more than those who provide work that actually improve the quality of life! If people like Kathy Lee Gifford, Paula Dean, Michael Jordan, Ivanka Trump and many other advertisers and executives are making massive amounts of money while the people that manufacture the products and provide services at the local stores have their wages suppressed this clearly has nothing to do with meritocracy.
The same goes for environmental protection when Lawrence Summers once wrote, "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ..... I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." (Summer's memo below) He wrote this back in 1991 and still gets nominated to one high profile job after another even by the Obama and Clinton administrations that pretended to defend the environment. Intentional exporting of pollution isn't limited to third world countries; Robert Bullard has written extensively about how an enormous amount of it is dumped in the poorest areas of the South, often in minority communities but also in poor white areas, and although Jonathan Kozol focuses mainly on education he's also reported on how the poor often have the worst waste dumped in their areas especially in abandoned inner cities.
But the mainstream media never reports on either of these investigative reporters or professors or many others that are only covered in alternative media outlets!
Part of the reason for this is that the oligarchy controls the government and instead of passing laws demanding disclosure of activities that might be fraudulent they pass trade secrecy laws that allow incredibly obvious crimes to be kept secret, often because of these non-disclosure agreements, similar to the ones being discussed in numerous sexual harassment lawsuits or virtual bribes to cover up Trump's affair with Stormy Daniels. Even Jackie Spieir, who says she wants to change these laws, at least when it comes to sexual harassment, said she respects these laws as her excuse not to tell the public which congressmen have used tax payer funds to cover up allegations.
These non-disclosure agreements are being used to make illegal, or at least seem illegal, to expose criminal activities. In the case of the sexual harassment cases they claim that they're innocent and wanted to avoid embarrassment. If this is actually true then the person making the accusation is actually committing extortion, and the congressmen are paying them off. If the congressmen's excuse is true, which it probably isn't most of the time, it takes figuring out which is true out of the public domain, and puts it in the hands of people with an incentive to cover up the crimes, either of the congressmen or those extorting them.
They should be able to come right out and say that non-disclosure agreements can not be legally enforceable when they're used to cover up criminal activities!
They don't do this of course, presumably because this is much more common than the majority of the public realize, even in trade conflicts or abuse of workers. Reporters like Naomi Klein have exposed how corporations abuse workers in illegal activities one time after another, often creating a state of virtual slavery in some of the poorest areas in the world, and these non-disclosure agreements are also used to cover up environmental destruction that is literally killing people!
Secret trade agreements make it even worse; there have been numerous reports about how the IMF have sued local areas that tried to pass laws to protect their own environment often by preventing water corporations from taking all the clean water or polluting in other ways. Trade agreements are being used used to prevent workers rights and the environment from being protected so that the oligarchies can increase profits by oppressing people and destroying the planet!
There's little or no reason to believe that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, who hardly hid her ties to Walmart, Wall Street and free trade, at least not to those with a medium term memory, have any intention of fixing this problem if they have any choice as long as they can continue confusing the issue as they have for decades!
As I finish this up there appears to be some reporting that might have gotten their second agreement to a raise thanks to an enormous amount of protests, although it's to soon to see if the government will keep their part of the deal after they broke it the first time. There are also a lot of establishment candidates, including some that pretend to be progressive like Kamala Harris, that have come out in support of the strike, but only after the teachers showed they meant it. They've used tricks like this before and will again but if there's a solution for either the teachers strike or unfair trade policies it won't be from the candidates packaged and handed to us from the commercial media that represents the oligarchy, not the public, it will be from grassroots efforts at local levels around the world including several times where people in China were so outraged that they took hostages to get their point across. Not that I recommend that but when the oligarchy pushes the working class to extremes sometimes that is what they get, so the best way to avoid is for the oligarchies to stop oppressing the public and they won't incite extreme activities!
If enough people learn how to sort through alternative media outlets and join active groups not controlled by the oligarchies then we might actually elect people that want to do a good job instead of those helping to rig the economy!
The following are some additional sources for this article including the Summers memo and articles about sweatshops, some from Ivanka Trump's clothes line; do you really think that someone without her name recognition and connections can get the publicity and sales needed to market all these products and keep all the profits while oppressing the workers?:
Lawrence Summers Export pollution memo 12/12/1991
Ivanka’s book should be called “Women Who Work… In My Sweatshop For $1 An Hour” 04/26/2017
Here Are Some Photos Of The Chinese Factory Where Ivanka Trump Shoes Are Made 06/01/2017
Revealed: reality of life working in an Ivanka Trump clothing factory 06/13/2017 Workers complain of verbal abuse, impossible targets and ‘poverty pay’ so bad they have to live away from their children
Trump confidant dumped millions in steel-related stock last week 03/02/2018
Radar investigation uncovers unsafe conditions at factories 11/22/2013
11 Facts About Sweatshops
Naomi Klein "Shock Doctrine"
Susan Linn "Consuming Kids"
Juliet Schor Born to Buy
Roy Fox "Harvesting Minds"
Bob Ortega "In Sam We Trust"
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