“

Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty.

Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes.

The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big-picture level, TOMS (and other buy-my-product-and-donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it.

It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes.

“ People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is a ruling class in a capitalist society.

“

The claim that a company like McDonald’s can’t afford to pay wages over the minimum is absolutely insulting when you compare the salary of its CEO to one of its crew members.

I worked at a McDonald’s in New York over the summer and did a little math while I was there. In 2011, former McDonald’s CEO James Skinner made $8.75 million with compensation, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In comparison, crew members made $7.25 an hour, for about $15,000 a year, if they stayed at the job year-round.

If you take Skinner’s total salary in 2011 and assume that he worked 40-hour week, he would have made $4,200 an hour. In one hour, he made 580 times more than the average McDonald’s worker. James Skinner made $33,600 a day, which is twice the salary tht a McDonald’s crew member makes in a year of full-time work.

Looking at it another way, the average worker would have to work for almost 600 years to make the salary that Skinner made in 2011. In one year, Skinner makes more than I could make in at least six lifetimes.

“ Most people on food stamps work full time. They work full time but they don’t have enough money to pay for food for their kids. So really, in some ways, food stamps are about a business subsidy because it allows low wage business workers to… feed their families and continue working. But we call it charity, or the Republicans call it charity. They want to cut food stamps so badly that every church, synagogue, mosque, house of worship in the United States—every single one—[would] have to raise an additional $50,000 every year for ten years to replace what he wants to cut. It’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna work.

“ It’s Bob Marley and the Wailers, not Bob Marley and the Whiners.

“

**TRIGGER WARNING: Rape/sexual violence, physical violence**

We should recognize that, at least to some extent, the over-reportage of transit oriented violence plays on the fears of those who are not transit dependent– a commuter class that might have various options for getting from place to place, not a gendered working class that must inhabit and pass through urban interstices daily. That being said, we should continue to invite a multitude of voices in our critical dialogues and look at platforms like HarassMap (for example) as blueprints for how transit riders might participate in the mapping of public violence rather than simply running scared that they may be attacked at any given moment.

Public transit is not just backdrop to these events- it is often rehabbed as a viable ‘green’ option for the new urban cool or it is tragically pathologized. There is a logic at work, which influences how different bodies are understood in relation to these particular types of spaces. It is precisely because certain types of bodies are seen as disposable in the first place that these violent acts continue to occur. Therefore any critical reflection must employ an intersectional approach that takes up the politics of mobility, in relation to race, class and gender and space.

“ When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

“ Of course, the ravages of addiction are more glaringly obvious in the lives of the poor and dispossessed because they have neither the means to engage in the cover-ups so effectively employed by privileged addicts nor the access to recovery programs.