You see something absurd. You hear something absurd. You read something absurd = Yeah,TNTG. Posts tagged capitalism.
“Imagine you were told your kids could grow up happy, but the price was someone else’s kids died. No need to imagine. That’s capitalism.” - @frankieboyle
posting by request!
(from my zine, available for free download here)
Blake Fall-Conroy, “Minimum Wage Machine,” 2008-2010
This machine allows anyone to work for minimum wage for as long as they like. Turning the crank on the side releases one penny every 4.97 seconds, for a total of $7.25 per hour. This corresponds to minimum wage for a person in New York.
This piece is brilliant on multiple levels, particularly as social commentary. Without a doubt, most people who started operating the machine for fun would quickly grow disheartened and stop when realizing just how little they’re earning by turning this mindless crank. A person would then conceivably realize that this is what nearly two million people in the United States do every day…at much harder jobs than turning a crank. This turns the piece into a simple, yet effective argument for raising the minimum wage.
ah yes totally mentioning this in my paper
“ For Mother Teresa poverty is the condition of saintliness. Poverty, then, ceases to be bad and instead becomes something to be celebrated. The poor can be treated with condescension as those who will redeem the world by their acceptance of charity. Such an approach becomes a part of a global enterprise for the alleviation of bourgeois guilt rather than a genuine challenge to those forces [i.e., modern capitalism] that produce and maintain poverty.
— Vijay Prashad, “Mother Teresa: Mirror of Bourgeois Guilt” (via jayaprada)
“ Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit. Neoliberalism is marked by a shift from the manufacturing to the service sector, the rise of temporary and part-time work, growth of the financial sphere and speculative activity, the spread of mass consumerism, the commodification of practically everything. Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions. Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating the concept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.
— Henry Armand Giroux (via mehreenkasana)
“ They wanted to create a world where the words “breast cancer” weren’t stigmata. And the original pink ribbon campaign didn’t start as a canny branding move to rake in profits for major corporations, but rather as a symbol of solidarity. Survivors wore the ribbons as open marks of their survival, to identify themselves not just to other survivors, but to society in general. A signal that they were alive, not going anywhere and determined to talk about the disease they’d experienced. But slowly, the pink ribbon came to mean something else. Rather than being a symbol of survival and strength, it became more generally a symbol of support, and then it was appropriated by firms that wanted to slap pink ribbons on their products for more profits. The Komen campaign realised it had a goldmine on its hands and it started aggressively protecting the pink ribbon brand. As the organization grew in size and power, it became harder and harder for activists to fight the commodification it promoted and the unhealthy business relationships it had with firms that wanted to exploit the ribbon, along with survivors and activists interested in directly addressing breast cancer.
—
Pinkification: how breast cancer awareness got commodified for profit (via apsies)
(via wienermeister)
#pinknausea.
(via timekiller-s)
“
I had my father get sick when I was 22. And I was poor, alright. And my father had an ulcer, and it exploded and you know all these toxins get in your blood. And basically, my father died, whatever, 50 days after his ulcer. So I had a father get sick while I was poor.
My mother got sick when I was rich. And my mother, you know… I don’t really want to get into it, but my mother was sicker than my father. And my mother’s alive. My mother’s fine, OK? I remember going to the hospital to see my mother and wondering, ‘Was I in the right place?’ Like, this was a hotel. Like it had a concierge, man.
People don’t… if the average person really knew the discrepancy in the health care system, there’d be riots in the streets, OK? They would burn this motherfucker down!”
—
Chris Rock [video]
Bringing this back, because some people don’t seem to understand that there is a discrepancy in the quality of care among poor, middle-class, and wealthy people, NO MATTER HOW DEBILITATING THEIR RESPECTIVE DISEASES MAY BE.
(via cgdageek)
This is relevant to what I posted this morning.
Love,
Rabble
(via rabbleprochoice)
ya know why rich kids dress like gangster rappers? they want an air of criminality about themselves. you want to dress like a real criminal? dress like your dad. dudes in suits have done far worse crimes than a gangster rapper could ever dream of. i guarantee you, a load of gangster rappers have never teamed up and stolen the mineral rights in a developing country. that’s never happened. the album would be too long
-Vinnie Paz, from Jedi Mind Tricks-
“Can the ubiquitous language of commodity culture and advertising be employed to speak to, and about, more than merchandise and celebrity? If so, to what end?”— Hank Willis Thomas
About an hour northwest of New York City, a small museum, The Aldrich Contemporary, is exhibiting from now until late September, the work of an artist who will make you think. Hank Willis Thomas’s series, “Strange Fruit,” isn’t pulling any punches. The title of a famous Billie Holiday song written to protest southern lynchings and racist violence, “Strange Fruit,” in the 21st Century, has even greater connotations.
Thomas’s images confront and provoke. They’re beautiful and they’re troublesome. Their impact, however, will be mitigated by what the viewer brings to the experience. For the values and ideas we all bear, frame our interpretations. I find these images potent and dark. They’re reminders of the complexities surrounding economics, history, race and class in our visual culture. But what others see, I can’t say. And like Hank Willis Thomas, I also ask, “If so, to what end?” —Lane Nevares
