Posted by Diarm (194.125.207.3) on January 30, 2003 at 04:44:55:
In Reply to: Re: To any vegans posted by Emily (68.13.144.194) on January 29, 2003 at 22:30:02:
Flower and Emily, you DO support slavery, sweatshops and all that nastiness.
You do it through your banks primarily.
All the major financial institutions support this evil stuff, and they do it with your money.
There is a much more effective way to end that kind of thing than consumer, retail boycotts.
(Remember, when you refuse to buy sweatshop products from a retailer, you hurt the retailer but NOT the sweatshop. The sweatshop has already got its money by selling its product to the wholesaler. If the boycott is successful, it might trickle down to the sweatshop eventually, but these boycotts have never succeeded so far).
"What can I, as an individual, do about that!" you might say. The question is rhetorical, because, *as individuals* you can do nothing. That doesn't absolve you of responsibility, in my opinion. We can choose to stop being lone individuals, in a financial sense.
In the USA alone there are about 20 million people who are strongly anti-sweatshop, a similar number in the EU.
If those 40 million people would only transfer their banking business to an ethical financial house, the whole sweatshop racket would suffer badly. They'd be forced to adopt ethical labor practices.
But people want to be individuals, even on something as petty as banking, so sweatshops continue, financed by people who hate sweatshops.
I don't absolve myself from this, though I promise that my money will go directly to such an body as soon as the activists decide to take a break from marching and make a real difference by creating one.
> > FP: That is good about them not buying food from sweat shops. I hope that silk company goes out of business or lost a lot of customers after Dateline aired that segment about children who were close to being slaves for the sake of captialists to profit on silk that they suffer over. I think the name of the company is called Nelli. Will you tell me how could I find out where to shop and where to not shop because I don't want to support slavery.
> Oh man I saw that too...that was horrible. I don't purchase silk or leather or wear them either.