Victoria’s Secret Revealed in Child Picking Burkina Faso Cotton

reply to post by poet1b


So tell me, who owns the farm where she "didn't have a job"? I don't believe that Victoria's Secret owns the farm, although they are a "partner". And yet the article is slanted to affect Victoria's Secret. I hear people on this forum blaming the country, Victoria's Secret, Capitalism, etc etc.
But in classic Statist fashion, you feel you have a right to tell Uzbekistan what to do. How come you don't feel a right to tell Egypt or Tunisia what to do? You don't mind if Iran slices of women's heads somehow...or do you?
And guess what, this practice in this region goes back to Soviet communist era. Figure that one out. But you are going to blame this on the evils of Capitalism and the evil Victoria's Secret and their customers.
I found this article on Uzbekistan

Cotton is big business in Uzbekistan, and a vital source of hard currency in a country which is chronically underdeveloped and where many live below the poverty line.
But last year some Western clothes retailers threatened to boycott Uzbekistan - one of the world's leading cotton producers - if it did not stop using schoolchildren to pick this vital harvest.
As a result, the Uzbeks officially banned the use of child labour, but they now seem to have reneged on their promise, with children as young as 11 or 12 working in the fields.

According to other residents, streets are festooned with slogans dating back to the Soviet era calling on everyone to help with the harvest. Government activists with loudspeakers are driving around reminding people to do their bit.
"My daughter is anaemic and has been taken to a cotton-growing area far away with her college. I couldn't do anything," one mother from a rural area in central Uzbekistan said.

news.bbc.co.uk...


This is not Capitalism and it's not free enterprise. It is Statism. Institutionalized labor. What say you to that Poet?

And yet they use the free market to sell to other countries who don't boycott

Recently Uzbekistan signed big contracts to sell cotton fibre to countries like China, Russia and Iran.

Many Uzbek farmers do not want to use child labour, but they are powerless to negotiate the price paid by the state and the extremely low wages on offer put adults off picking cotton.

None of this was in the Bloomberg article that I remember. I will have to go back and re -read it. The Bloomberg article clearly implicated Victoria's Secret and not the Uzbek govt for institutionializing this practice.
Why don't we have the same standards for Communist China that we do for Uzbekistan? After all, China institutionalized infanticide.

I can't believe the insanity I've read the last few pages, it borders on psychopathic. I'm also tired of the word Marxist being thrown around to describe anyone left of center. Being aware of a problem and having the heart to try to correct it does not make one a Marxist. Enough of it already.

We are seeing that "Fair Trade" is a farce, at least in this instance...more research is required to determine the validity of other companies claims of fair trade. Should they all prove a farce does not mean we should abandon the idea, it means we need to ensure that the fair trade label means what it says, and yes that means paying more for goods because fair trade is supposed to ensure that a product doesn't cost less because workers are actually slaves and that's how the money is saved. If we want laborers paid a decent wage, we have to pay more for the product.

It's like saying that because some murderers are never caught that law enforcement is ineffective and we should just stop making murder illegal.

reply to post by Kali74


I was just now discussing the Art of policing entire countrie's labor policies. You go right ahead and spearhead that. Start with the UN please.
Oh wait! Fair Trade IS involved with the UN. Seems they were represented at the UN climate conference in Durban

www.fairtradeafrica.net...

reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus


Yes there is a lot of corruption within capitalism AND the policing of capitalism. We know that regulations are bribed away, we know that companies lie and do dirty things behind our backs and that those who are supposed to be making sure we aren't harming our planet or exploiting people are being bought off. It doesn't mean that we should just accept it. It means we need to work and learn and hold people accountable.

reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus


All you are doing is pointing out facts that support what I have been saying on these boards for years, which is that free market economics is in fact communism/fascism.

People claim that a free market is a market system, but it is not, it is communism mislabeled. It is skunk water bottled and called perfume.

Slave labor is slave labor, where ever it is allowed to happen, and we shouldn't trade with countries that practice slavery.

Originally posted by Kryties

Originally posted by supine

Now, please explain to me how the 99% who think the US is in such bad shape can justify purchasing stuff that is basically eye candy? This is the kind of situation people should be protesting if they think they have it so bad.

Please provide evidence that the 99% actually does shop at these places.

My guess is you can't, and that you just used this as a platform to have a dig at the 99% and OWS.

Poor form mate.

Do you even know who the 99% are? You, myself, and everyone on this site = 99% (unless someone in the top 400 is a member here lol). You want proof that the 99% shops at Victoria's Secret? GO TO ONE.

By the way, nothing wrong with shopping at VS... I never minded going there with my ex girlfriend

reply to post by Domo1


Sadly this is coming soon to a town near you!!! yes this is where we are all going to be if we let things roll the way they are as of now. Don't beleive me, or do. I don't much care, people have spoken, erm not spoken and made the bed they will have to let their children lie in.

Originally posted by Kryties

Originally posted by supine

Now, please explain to me how the 99% who think the US is in such bad shape can justify purchasing stuff that is basically eye candy? This is the kind of situation people should be protesting if they think they have it so bad.

Please provide evidence that the 99% actually does shop at these places.

My guess is you can't, and that you just used this as a platform to have a dig at the 99% and OWS.

Poor form mate.

I agree, I mean they are "Lazy, unemployed, slacker, liberal, hippies who don't bathe" and they're going shopping a VS???

I wonder how they afforsd it with no jobs.

ETA: I am referring to OWS as the remark made by this poter was in fact a lame attempt to throw criticism at OWS and not "99%" of the world. Not Kryties, I mean teh poster he was responding to, Supine.

reply to post by Kryties


This sounds like Newt Gingritch....isn't he proposing this idea on his platform right now? To put children to work? Even though that is illegal, no one seems to be referencing it as illegal on the mainstream media. I know CNN shows him saying this all the time and they speak of it as if it were normal. How do these politicians keep doing what they are doing today that is illegal for us....yet when they do it, it is ...just business as usual? Why are these politicians proposing illegal activities and like Bush and Obama, actually doing illegal activity on a daily basis....and they never get arrested? Does anyone else see this? (rhetorical, I know we all see it)

Originally posted by supine

Originally posted by Kryties

Originally posted by supine


I am part of the 99% who does, ermmmmm or should I say my husband when he wants to pretend he is buying a gift for me.

Love that line lol. so true

I simply don't understand how anyone can be defending this or the system that encourages it. Children are getting beaten, communities are being enslaved and all for rollback sales. Can someone please explain how the agenda of free markets and deregulation is an economic white buffalo again? This is evil. Anyone who believes that this is the way it has to be is devoid of empathy. Get serious, and stop defending the vampires who enable this in the hopes that they pass the savings on to you.

Originally posted by VivaDiscordia
I simply don't understand how anyone can be defending this or the system that encourages it. Children are getting beaten, communities are being enslaved and all for rollback sales. Can someone please explain how the agenda of free markets and deregulation is an economic white buffalo again? This is evil. Anyone who believes that this is the way it has to be is devoid of empathy. Get serious, and stop defending the vampires who enable this in the hopes that they pass the savings on to you.

The sheeple, for the most part, don't understand the cycle. The don't understand their cheap walmart products are made in abusive sweatshop conditions.

Walmart would lose money if they had to improve these conditions.............not that they wouldn't still make a profit, but some exec wouldn't be able to afford a 100 million dollar yacht versus a 50 million dollar one.

Originally posted by VivaDiscordia
I simply don't understand how anyone can be defending this or the system that encourages it. Children are getting beaten, communities are being enslaved and all for rollback sales. Can someone please explain how the agenda of free markets and deregulation is an economic white buffalo again? This is evil. Anyone who believes that this is the way it has to be is devoid of empathy. Get serious, and stop defending the vampires who enable this in the hopes that they pass the savings on to you.

It is not free market. Uzbekistan and Kazakstan are former Soviet Satellites who still hang on to old Soviet style communism.
I'm trying to post on this but I keep losing the page.
www.thenewamerican.com...

The mass media tells us that communism around the world fell with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It’s almost become a proverb. But in some places communism never fell
Communism still stands in the central Asian “stans,” though often under a different name. The “Stans” are Asian, mostly Muslim former Soviet “republics.” Most of the nations’ names end with the suffix “-stan” in the English language (“stan” means “nation” or “land”), and without exception all are still burdened with one-party, brutal tyrannies — along with leadership derived from Soviet-era apparatchiks.

Kazakhstan declared independence from the old Soviet Union on December 16, 1991, claiming that it was creating a separate secular state from the old Soviet secular state. The last Soviet “republic” to separate from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan “elected” Communist Party First Secretary Nursultan Nazarbayev as its first leader. Nazarbayev had been a lifelong Communist Party functionary who publicly converted to Islam in the mid-1990s when he sensed a change in the political winds.

The U.S. State Department explains that Nazarbayev has successfully given himself dictatorial powers that any Soviet-era leader would have envied. “In 1995, President Nazarbayev called for a referendum that expanded his presidential powers: only he can initiate constitutional amendments, appoint and dismiss the government, dissolve Parliament, call referenda, and appoint administrative heads of regions and Astana and Almaty.

Uzbekistan: Plantation 
Communism Continues

In the United States, slavery is associated with the enslavement of African-Americans before the Civil War who were usually forced to work on cotton plantations as slave laborers. This is still the case in Uzbekistan today, where the government conscripts slaves to work for the cotton harvest every year. Slave labor in Uzbekistan, according to the U.S. State Department’s Country Human Rights Report for 2008, includes child slave labor, mostly on an annual basis to harvest the government cotton crop: “The constitution and law prohibit forced or compulsory labor, including by children, except as legal punishment such as for robbery, fraud or tax evasion, or as specified by law; however, there were reports that such practices occurred, particularly during the cotton harvest, when authorities reportedly compelled medical workers, government personnel and others to pick cotton.”

The State Department stresses that Soviet-era socialism continues unabated, with “property law … weighted against private property holders.” Tajik government officials seize private property at a whim under secret proceedings, and without advance notice “notified residents that they must leave their property and offered very little compensation. If residents did not comply, city officials took them to court; court hearings generally resulted in an eviction order

www.thenewamerican.com...


So I would recommend that you and others here who believe this to be due to the evils of Capitalism adjust your perceptions of the issue. It is not free enterprise, although these States do choose to sell product to countries which do not boycott them over human rights violations. Communism really has a history of human rights violations but I guess the Marxist professors in colleges in the US do not explain the gulags and labor camps that existed during and after the Bolshevik Revolution to build up the Soviet empire.
So, maybe people like you can study what communism is and was always about, who is and was communist, and what practices occur in communist dominated countries and stop foolishly relegating the abuses of communism to Capitalism and the free market.

reply to post by VivaDiscordia


What makes you think that deregulation had anything whatsoever to do with that girl in Uzbekistan? Seeing that it was never regulated to begin with, the practices are more in keeping with soviet style communist labor camps. If you must listen to the nonsense being spewed by liberals in the US who are obviously uninformed, please at least get a counter opinion.

Stop buying that stuff, or any 'stuff' you don't need, and you'll never complain again. Just a thought.

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


The IMF and World Bank are an apparatus that at best is attached to the One World Govt and NWO. It is not strictly a function of Capitalism. And since the Fair Trade people are using the free trade apparatus of charging whatever the market will bear, they nevertheless are manipulating the prices by instituting a price floor. This is also done here in the States and that is why it is not truly a free market economy, but it somewhat mimics it. It works because there are a lot of people who purchase these things as a way to support poor people through charitable means. It is nevertheless still in the vein of subsidies.
I read also that the Fair Trade is represented at the Millenium and Climate Change conferences now. That means they are NGO operatives of the UN, which also means they are part of the One World Govt apparatus.

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus

 

All you are doing is pointing out facts that support what I have been saying on these boards for years, which is that free market economics is in fact communism/fascism.

People claim that a free market is a market system, but it is not, it is communism mislabeled. It is skunk water bottled and called perfume.

Slave labor is slave labor, where ever it is allowed to happen, and we shouldn't trade with countries that practice slavery.

You should have told Hillary that when she sat on the board of Wal Mart.

Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus

 

All you are doing is pointing out facts that support what I have been saying on these boards for years, which is that free market economics is in fact communism/fascism.

People claim that a free market is a market system, but it is not, it is communism mislabeled. It is skunk water bottled and called perfume.

Slave labor is slave labor, where ever it is allowed to happen, and we shouldn't trade with countries that practice slavery.

Oh by the way, the new name of the communist party in Uzbekistan is :

The People's Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (O'zbekistan Xalq Demokratik Partiyasi, OXDP or PDPU) is a political party in Uzbekistan which was founded in October 1991 after the Communist Party of Uzbekistan voted to cut its ties with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and change its name to PDPU. The party has been led by President Islam Karimov since its foundation.

en.wikipedia.org...