Writing

Intricate supply chains reinforce the Western colonization of the atmosphere, with transnational corporations deploying the strain of industrial agriculture to global South nations like Pakistan. There, workers endure hazardous environmental conditions and unfairly low wages while only making the richest Western corporations richer. 

Globally, women represent less than 50% of the labor force despite contributing $10.8 trillion in uncompensated domestic labor every year. In conducting essential household tasks such as cooking, subsistence farming, cleaning, transporting water and more, they are a part of an invisible industry valued at three times the global technology industry.

In the same way that we respond to pain in one part of the body as something to remedy immediately, we should see it as our priority to alleviate the pain of the many people and natural elements constituting our economic body. Our inability to do so is our tragedy.

Founded in a deep irony, capitalism promotes the moral framework of autonomy while at the same time eroding the true freedom of the vast majority. Where the human body has become nothing more than a mere tool for production, we have lost our freedom over our emotions, over our bodies — and over our right to flourish as human beings.

It is now brought to public memory that perhaps we are reentering The Gilded Age — an era marked by rapid prosperity, technological advancements and economic growth, its golden exterior of prosperity disguising the destitution within.

The pillaging of Africa’s resources by some of our nation’s most revered companies serves as a brutal reminder that even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, American corporations do not practice this formal equality beyond its borders. With the onset of globalization, they have merely transferred their system of exploitation overseas.

As the impact of the 2008 recession dwindles into America’s amnesiac consciousness, the nation’s economy has seen the rise of another subtle but looming economic catastrophe. Student loan debt, already at a record high of $671 billion in 2008, rose to $1.52 trillion last year according to the Federal Reserve – a figure higher than the current standing $1.3 trillion GDP of Spain.

It is the worst of times because our government does not shy from restricting consumption when it appears detrimental, but refuses to regulate a production scheme that has been complacent in the shredding of human dignity; and unless we vehemently transform ourselves, we too will be complacent in this genocidal process of mass affliction against not just human lives, but our planet as well.