Those of you who read this blog regularly know I’m a big supporter of open-source and filesharing, including sharing of music. The fact that the RIAA had the balls to claim they’re suing people to “protect” artists - when everybody who knows a damn thing about the industry knows it’s really about making it more difficult for independent artists to get heard - leaves me livid. And the fact that they continue to get away with it burns me even more.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one who feels that way.
A few years ago I decided I was sick and tired of working shit jobs for shit pay. even the cool local anarcho-friendly worker-owned cooperative wanted to pay me $16/hour to do graphic design with them and billed their clients at $72 / hour. There was no boss to skim off the top, but rent in the bay area is insane and their office building and state of the art computers cost a lot of money, money that had to come out of the proceeds of their labor before they could afford to pay themselves. And that’s just no fun. So I started advertizing on craigslsit and set myself up as a graphic designer working from home. The job is still kinda boring and I’m not thrilled about all my clients, but I get to set my own hours, work as little or as much as I feel like, and I don’t have to pay a boss to tell me what to do. (Incidentally, it may suprise some of you that I have a job at all, but the thing about giving my music away for free / donation is that I don’t get paid for it…)
I’ve been self-employed for a bit over 2 years now and it’s good times, for the most part. The hardest thing about making the switch - aside from taking that first leap into the unknown - has been learning to motivate myself to work and manage my own time in a way that lets me do everything I need to get done efficiently, keep my clients happy, and still leave me plenty of time for music, activism, and just plain being a human. It’s was one thing to free myself from wage slavery (though, come to think of it, I still get paid an hourly wage. but at least I set it myself and don’t have to give a portion of it to my boss…) and it was another thing entirely to figure out how to keep from going totally broke. Learning to self-manage has been a long tough proccess, but is a critical one for anyone interested in smashing the tyranny of bosses and creating a self-managed society.
In that spirit I present to you the following flash movie, courtesy of No Media Kings.
They also have a text version (here) and a comic version, also available from their website. Check ‘em out!
An exceptionally good story from the AP wire on child labor in Africa and the international Gold trade. Think about this next time you see some sell-out corporate pop-rapper wearing giant gold chains.
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI AND BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writers Sun Aug 10, 3:25 PM ET
TENKOTO, Senegal - A reef of gold buried beneath this vast, parched grassland arcs across some of the world’s poorest countries. Where the ore is rich, industrial mines carve it out. Where it’s not, the poor sift the earth.
These hardscrabble miners include many thousands of children. They work long hours at often dangerous jobs in hundreds of primitive mines scattered through the West African bush. Some are as young as 4 years old.
In a yearlong investigation, The Associated Press visited six of these bush mines in three West African countries and interviewed more than 150 child miners. AP journalists watched as child-mined gold was bought by itinerant traders. And, through interviews and customs documents, The AP tracked gold from these mines on a 3,000-mile journey to Mali’s capital city and then on to Switzerland, where it enters the world market.
A new article from the Washington Post explores why it is that “American” corporations are rushing to invest in Vietnam.
According to a report by Keith Bradsher in the New York Times last
month, such multinational companies as Canon (the printer and copier
maker) and Hanesbrands (the North Carolina-based underwear empire) are
expanding or building factories in Hanoi, where they churn out products
for Wal-Mart and other American retailers. Foreign direct investment in
Vietnam increased 136 percent between 2006 and 2007, while it increased
just 14 percent in China.
The reason for the move south is straightforward: Vietnamese factory
workers make about a quarter of what their Chinese counterparts earn.
But why Vietnam and not, say, Thailand, where labor is similarly cheap?
Check out the full article on their website, and while you read it keep in mind that Anarchists like Bakunin predicted from the very start that in practice Marxism could only create tyranny and then think about all the dictators our government has sponsored around the world. Capitalism and Communism aren’t ideological opposites, they’re two sides of the same coin - and they go together just fine.
