Hicks On Marketing

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 215, 216

I work at Trader Joe's in Issaquah, WA. It is unbelievable what gets thrown away every day. If ONE egg is cracked in a carton, the whole carton gets tossed. A tiny cut in the cellophane covering the tray containing a New York steak, and that gets thrown in the garbage. Anytime a package has a tear, out it goes. It amounts to several thousand dollars each week (the totals for the weekly "spoils" are posted in the employee break room). It would be so easy to replace the one cracked egg, but that's too much work. Collecting these perfectly good edibles for a homeless shelter is apparently also too much trouble, or maybe Issaquah is too upscale to admit that they, too, may have hungry people in their town. It is very upsetting, but as a "part-timer" you don't have any say and are unlikely to be able to "change the system". At a minimum, you should think that they would let their employees take home (or buy at half price) the perfectly good items or at least the flowers or plants in broken pots, but I was told that's against company policy. Things sure change when a "neighborhood grocery store" becomes a corporation.

Posted by: ilsewdm on Apr 1, 2008 7:50 AM
RE: "Yeah, we could get food poisoning, or rabies" - oh someone will
Comments section, Food Bills Getting You Down? Try Dumpster Diving

By Nicole McClelland, AlterNet. Posted April 1, 2008

TTTT

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There is no scarcity. There is more
than enough for us all.
Susan Rosenthal

Power and Powerlessness

Wise Old Woman 3

I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military occupation. We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War II, but this time by an army of marketeers. We have, as the occupied nations of Europe had, puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupier. We have, as they did, collaborators.

We, like the French and Norwegians at the time, have to protect our families and so are forced on occasion to work with the occupiers to survive. Like the citizens of Nazi-occupied Europe, however, we must also develop strategies for building a resistance movement. We have to reclaim our country from those who occupy it on behalf of their global masters, who have only contempt for those whose territory they now rule.

The goal of the occupiers is privatization, which, in its most brutal terms, means to provide investment and profit opportunities in all those areas that people previously had set aside as common holdings - culture, health care, education, publishing, housing, nature, sports, prisons. Once dismantled, the "public sphere" can be more easily "occupied" - turned over to what I call the Empire of the Marketeers. These warlords will convert the ill-health and misery and basic needs of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of global capitalism.

Regrettably, our occupiers, unlike their German military predecessors, do not wear uniforms, and so we can't identify them as easily as military occupiers could in the past. But this in fact is more of a technicality than a matter of substance. There are other and equally effective ways of identifying our corporate overseers and their agents.
Ursula Franklin

Anti-Wage-Slavery, Pro-Freedom Quotations 213, 214

Most poor saps in this country are corporate slaves and you know it. Get up at the crack of dawn, commute too far for a boring job that doesn't pay enough to put food on the table, much less a roof, live 100 miles away so you can afford it, then spend 60-100 dollars to fill up your tank in some cheap, ugly car that gets the same mileage no matter where it was built, then come home after the family has finished some boxed dinner and you plop on the couch and watch 30 minutes of useless feel-good drivel called the news then 30 minutes of some stupid sitcom that might give you a laugh or two, then you collapse into bed so you can repeat the process until you die.

I'm tired of hearing how apathetic "the public" is.
Posted by: jiclemens
on Apr 1, 2008 8:09 AM,
comments section
Cusack on Military Contractors in Iraq...




Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property and corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.
William Blum