SMASH THE STATE OR SOMETHING.

can you believe this crap? on friday there was a water main break in my office building. i had to carry my bike down 18 flights of stairs. in the stairwell someone had written this on the door near a sewing shop where chinese women sew clothes. i put it up because it's so fucking asinine. my friend ken had some really good points about this. the midtown sewing factories are not neccessarily sweatshops. they are often the only opportunity for people without papers who don't speak english to make a liveable wage. they're not necessarily sweatshops and it's offensive and paternalist to assume the people working in them are helpless. there's a bigger immigration and labor standards question at hand. say the sewing shops in my building really are paying substandard wages, rather than fixing that situation, government intervention would deport people. say those contracts went overseas and were subcontracted to a factory in china with no labor standards and no accountability for the companies doing the subcontracting? i'm saying all this because it's a complex issue that needs attention on lots of different levels. this image is a great example of what idiot conclusions not to jump to. and, for the record, a factory subcontracted by wal-mart was found guilty of the most egregious human rights violations in a factory to date. wal-mart refuses to comment.