blog secret

i found this via my friend sara


BLOG SECRET

so...basically

just putting that out there

Top 10 Worst Sweatshop Abusing Companies

Here's a little top ten list of sweatshop abusing companies...

1) Primark – Cheap clothes from cheap labour…
In 2008 Primark were exposed employing people in sweatshop conditions in Bangladesh, long hours, hazardous and unhealthy conditions for very low wages. In 2009 Primark were exposed by the BBC for employing people in similar conditions in the UK. Meanwhile, with amid the onset of a recession, Primark recently announced record profits!

2) Topshop – They’ve done it before they’ll do it again…
In 2002 No Sweat and the GMB Union exposed Topshop using sweatshops in the East End of London. Topshops response was to shut down the factories and burn the clothes, ruining lives and the environment. In 2007 The Times found out that Topshop boss, Philip Green, had simply moved his sweatshop conditions abroad, employing hundreds of Sri Lankan, Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Mauritius where they labour for up to 12 hours a day for 30 pence an hour

3) Asda/Walmart - Slave drivers of China & Bangladesh…
As part of the same report into Primark, Asda were also exposed for using some of the same Bangladeshi factories. In 2007 Hong Kong based group SACOM published a report detailing the sweatshop conditions workers that make toys for Asda’s parent company, Walmart. Late last year Walmart decreed that its Chinese suppliers have to respect workers' rights, including the right to organsie. Unfortunately Walmart palmed the cost of better wages and conditions on to the factory owners themselves, leading to mass factory closures and further impoverishment for workers

4) Tesco – Every little help, except in sweatshops…
In 2006 and again in 2008 the charity War on Want exposed Tesco for exploiting people in Bangladesh. In WoW’s report Fashion Victims they reported bullying by managers in factories and intimidation by employed thugs, awful working conditions and long hours. All the while Tesco reported record profits and opened stores across the globe!

5) Nike – Nasty old Nike, always exploiting their workers…
Nike are the experts at exploitation, ever since the anti sweatshop movement emerged, Nike have always been in the top ten of sweatshop abusing companies. Reports from 1996 were describing conditions where workers have to meet a quota before you can go home, no matter how long they’ve been there and without extra pay. In 2007 reports came through that little had changed in Nike sweatshops and workers were forced in to the desperate situation of striking for better pay, striking in countries where such actions can get you beaten or killed.

6) Adidas – Sweatshop made, Olympics specials…
The company that won the contract to be official sports brand behind the Olympics 08 use sweatshop labour to produce the Olympic gear. The money they earned from that contract never came anywhere near the workers at the bottom. A football stitcher in India would have to sew over 12 million balls/year to earn as much as Adidas CEO Herbert Heiner did in 2007 (that’s 100 balls per minute for a 48 hour work week)!!


7) Disney – Magic for some, hell for others…
2007 saw workers at a factory producing toys in Shenzhen, China fighting for their rights. Workers had been forced workers to sign one-sided ‘contracts’in which wages, work hours and benefits were left blank. Wages had been withheld, overtime unpaid, working hours excessive and living conditions in the dormitories atrocious. In addition, Tianyu management falsified contracts and concealed labour violations from social auditors. The workers fought back while Disney ignored their demands.

8) Burberry – Off to China for cheap workforce & fat profits…
In 2007 Burberry shut down its unionised South Wales factory to move garment production to Chinese sweatshops. Burberry moves to factories in Shenzhen in the Guangdong province of China where production is likely to involve employing child labour or use forced, prison labour. Workers in Britain lose their jobs while workers in China are signed up for exploited labour, all the while Burberry gets fat on the profits.

9) Starbucks – Crap coffee, crap employers…
Coffee growers receive little more than $1.10 (50p) for a pound of coffee, which is then sold for $160 (£80). Oxfam launched a campaign against Starbucks in October 2006 after it effectively blocked Ethiopia's attempts to trademark its coffee beans in the United States. Meanwhile, Starbucks workers in the US earn as little $6-$8 per hour depending on the location. Every single barista in the US is part-time and not guaranteed any work hours per week. For example, a Starbucks worker can get 35 hours of work one week, 22 hours the week after, and 10 hours the following week. In Britain baristas get a little over the minimum wage – in other words poverty pay.


10) Planet Earth Inc – Sweatshop labour across the globe…
Sweatshop labour isn’t confined to just a few companies in a few countries, it exists all over the world with factories ignoring basic right to decent conditions and pay while producing products for a whole variety of companies. Big companies make big profits from contracting their production out to middle men with the proviso to produce as cheap as possible to a certain standard. To reach that standard workers bear the brunt of long hours, low wages and terrible conditions. To keep the workers in line bullying and intimidation are commonplace.Sweatshop labour is modern, global capitalism striped bare.



please help by showing solidarity to your fellow workers and organizations like No Sweat you can join them as a fan on facebook or join as a facebook cause. they also have a twitter if you're into that

i don't trust men with necklaces

i couldn't get anyone to cover my shift at stella lucy today but i got sent home for being sick anyways. i closed the store three hours early, hopefully no one drove up from san diego today...i'm always surprised at how many times i hear that a day. BUT while on my sick bed i was looking up artists i haven't heard from in a while, one of them, Matty Pop Chart, i saw in arcata two winters ago when i lived up there...weird that it was that long ago. regardless... he's really adorable and sincere. he played with kimya dawson up at the green house. i hadn't heard from him in a while but apperantly he has been up to making some muzak thankfully

Matty Pop Chart » Under the Sea

Shared via AddThis

i found this band as well which i admire for their strings and also that the drummer is using a snare and a suitcase...hmmm good band name anyone?

Busman's Holiday - (Mr.) Spaceman from If You Make It on Vimeo.

ran across Heathers shortly after and i'm not sure if i love them or not but their harmonies=perfection

Heathers - Waiter from If You Make It on Vimeo.

last one, i sware.... paul baribeau sings a leonard cohen cover

Paul Baribeau - Chelsea Hotel No. 2 from If You Make It on Vimeo.

very very important

i just realized that i have not posted this video yet. please watch it.
it is very important, please watch the whole thing.






this isn't peta.


the least you can do is watch it before you make fun of me or look down on me for being vegan again

i refuse

to ever fall out of love with elliott smith

catch up//thunder on our backs

my kitten friends from oakland








We made some delicious gluten free vegan brownies. soo chocolatey. i used half egg replacer and half banana for the eggs. good choice.





when we cut them they fell apart and looked like poop, delicious delicious mushy poop







also i tried one of these today... also delicious

Alexander

thanks for answering your phone, even if we didn't go to the show


quote of the night:

daniel : "how funny that i'm seeing the hangover with two straightedge kids"

alexander and julie : ....



also i almost forgot about this photo. it's one of the first ones i ever took and developed myself (i think i was 15). this is when i was really into adding dust and scratches, which i guess never changed.


i'm having a hard time getting my mind wrapped around the idea of getting a digital camera... it just doesn't seem real to me... the pictures i mean. they look beautiful in their own way i guess but there seems to be some sort of emptiness involved to it... i may have to take a break from photography for a while since i plan on never doing manual again

cheese

i know many people who want to go vegan but have a hard time giving up cheese. it seems i hear vegetarians say that can give up cheese as much as omnivores say the can't give up meat. the answer... is of course you can.

but to those doubters i found a good post bob and jen(vegan freak) put up which i thought made some pretty good points. they will expand on it further in their book. the second edition is coming out in october. i recommend it for vegans and non-vegans alike




Though not cheating is easy for a lot of foods, some people find giving up cheese particularly difficult. For us, it wasn’t hard. We just went vegan one day, and didn’t look back, but for a lot of people we’ve talked to, cheese is the lone item that often still has its hooks in them. So many people have complained to us about how hard it was to give up cheese that we almost felt like we needed to set up some kind of support group in the basement of an area church where we served burnt coffee (with soy creamer) and let people talk about how many days cheese-clean they’ve been. Frankly, the whole thing was perplexing for us until we read up on casomorphins, or opioid chemicals that are present in cow’s milk (and by extension, very much present in cheese). Evolutionarily, these peptides probably had the function of creating a positive association between the calf and its mother and her milk. Now, however, humans consume more cow’s milk than calves do, and – improbable though it sounds – those who consume large amounts of dairy products are probably mildly addicted to them. It isn’t like you’re going to get the DTs or have seizures if you give up cheese, but certainly, these opiate effects can help to explain the more than mild cravings that lots of people have. A study underway during the time we were writing this book is looking at how casomorphins work in the human body, operating under the functional hypothesis that because cheese is one of the most commonly craved foods, it may be exerting mild opiate effects on its consumers. If this hypothesis is true the correct solution isn’t weaning yourself from crackcheeese slowly. As we suggest above, that would probably only lead you back to eating more cheese. The right solution is to stop eating cheese now, and to make an agreement with yourself never to eat it again. If you feel tempted to eat it, slide a paperclip over this page, and when you’re on the verge of eating cheese, come back here and remind yourself of these disgusting cheese facts:



Cheese is made from milk, and milk almost always contains pus. You may comfort yourself by thinking that the pus is pasteurized, and certainly, pasteurization will prevent you from becoming ill, but you’re still eating pus. Look at it like this: you could stick a dog turd in an autoclave and render it biologically harmless with significant pressure and heat. Yet, we’re willing to wager that you’d not be anxious to eat it unless you have some very strange proclivities indeed.


Forget about being vegan – most cheeses aren’t even vegetarian. Rennet, a stomach enzyme common to most mammals, is used to make cheese by “digesting” it, leaving behind a solid and a liquid. Rennet is often harvested from the stomachs of cattle in slaughterhouses, and used directly in cheese. Though there are vegetarian rennets synthesized by other means, it is difficult to know which cheeses use vegetarian rennet and which cheeses use the stuff scraped out of the stomachs of slaughtered animals. Yum! Cow stomach excretions obviously go great with pus!


In order for you to have your beloved cheese, someone had to produce the milk to make the cheese, and we don’t mean a dairy farmer. The someone in this case is a nameless dairy cow, identified only by a number and probably an radio frequency identification tag in her ear that helps the slave ownerfarmer track her productivity so he can send her to slaughter once she underproduces. In the larger dairy operations, this cow may never go outside, and she will repeatedly give birth to calves who will be stolen from her almost immediately after they are born. She will live a short and miserable life, and end up as hamburger on the plate of some fast food consumer, all because you could not find the guts up to stop eating cheese or drinking milk. And you say you care about animals?


Beyond being a disaster for cows, cheese is a disaster for you. A cup of diced cheddar has a whopping 532 calories, 385 of which come from fat. That includes 28 grams of saturated fat, which is 139% of amount recommended for total daily consumption by the United States government. And really, do you think those figures haven’t already been manipulated by decades of dairy and meat industry intervention in the government? To all that fat, you can add 139 milligrams of cholesterol and 820 mg of sodium. For comparison, if you decided to reach for a cup of chopped carrots instead, you’d be taking in fewer than a tenth of the total calories (52 calories for the whole cup) and less than 1 percent of the fat (3 calories versus 385 calories) than if you ate the cheese.



Cheese may taste good to you now, but really, like every other animal product, there’s no good reason to eat it. It is bad for you and bad for the animals that have to make the raw ingredients that go into it. Give it up now, call it quits, and go cold tofu. If you can do that, maybe you can come to our cheese-eaters anonymous meetings, sip some bad coffee, and tell us how many days you’ve been clean.


the original post can be found here