A Big Box Store owned sweat shop in Bangladesh collapsed into a twisted pile yesterday, 90 known dead and hundreds still missing. When I say the Walmarts of the world own these sweat shops, I mean it in an economic sense, not in the paper fiction consisting of layers of corporate ownership that they hide behind to evade criminal responsibility. If you or I did the things the Walton family have done behind the bureaucracy of their corporate holdings we would never see the light of day again. That's not to say they are the only ones doing this, the decriminalization of mergers & acquisitions by the Reagan Adm has put most of the world's corporate holdings in the hands of sociopaths.
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The fiction promoted by the corporate media is that these garment factories are locally owned, but the margin they operate on is so small that they have no choice but to do exactly what they are told by their corporate masters. It's true that they aren't explicitly told to lock the fire exits and ignore the giant cracks in the concrete, but they'll be joining the ranks of the starving poor if they don't, and they will simply be replaced by someone who will. The thing is, it really doesn't make the poorly made shirt that you buy cheaper, labor is not a big portion of the cost, it just deprives people a living wage, and that is the goal of the Neo-Cons.
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