Walmart has some very low moral standards, so if they refuse to do business with someone they must be pretty awful, Did a Slave Process the Shrimp in Your Scampi?
Over the past 20 years, the rapid rise of South Asian shrimp farms has transformed our relationship to the tasty mollusk, shifting it from an occasional luxury to an all-you-can-eat commodity. Twenty years ago, most of our shrimp came from domestic wild fisheries. Today, we import 90 percent of it, almost all of it farmed. But who works on these foreign farms and processing facilities—and under what conditions? A new briefing paper by the well-respected International Labor Rights Forum and the Warehouse Workers United (WWU) alleges serious labor abuses, including illegal use of underage workers, at the Thai shrimp producer Narong Seafood, at least until recently a major supplier of Walmart and a leading shrimp processor for the US market, according to a recent analysis by the consultancy Accenture for Humanity United.
Narong, for its part, disputes the charges in the report. “We insist that Narong is against child labor or any unfair treatment to our staff or workers,” a company official wrote in an emailed statement.
Yet Walmart says it stopped buying from Narong in 2012, as a “result of our auditing process.” The Walmart press officer I corresponded with declined to divulge any details of the company’s audit, but added that “Walmart does not—and will not—tolerate child labor of any type in our supply chain.”
Accenture’s report on the Thai shrimp industry found that “exploitative labor practices have been established and institutionalized in an industry where significant export revenues and profits have accrued to transnational companies and to local elites.” And probably much lie America’s corporations and Chamber of Commerce these transnational companies and local elites will claim they are doing people a favor by creating jobs and critics are obviously anti-business commies. There has always been that low level corrupt segment of any population willing to sell-out their neighbors, like the union buster thugs that worked for the mine companies in the late 19th and early 20th century. What can be said for people who would treat their neighbors like trash so they can skim a little more for themselves. I feel like I have read a fair amount of literature on capitalism and the Austrian School of wackos aside, no reputable market theorist has proclaimed that a business owner of say a mutational corporation has the right to exploit workers so they can, what live in a McMansion instead of a nice little home, drive a Lexus SUV, live a decadent lifestyle – see Mitt Romney, the Koch brothers, the Walmart and Coors families.
Winter street, with car and lamppost in the snow, on an Amsterdam street. 1939. By Wiel van der Randen.
Probably like most people I think of viruses as being pretty nasty. It turns out that some of them are not so bad after all, Fast-acting virus targets melanoma in mice
“After injection into the blood stream of mice, the virus finds melanoma on its own, and is fast and aggressive with tumors,” said Anthony N. van den Pol, professor of neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine, investigator for the Yale Cancer Center and senior author of the study. “Because the virus replicates rapidly, it can kill the melanoma before the immune system responds and kills the virus.”
In the process of eliminating the virus, the immune system may also begin to target and kill tumor cells, he added.
Even more interesting in being injected with a cancer killing virus is that the virus seems to teach, to some degree, our body’s own immune system to attack the tumor.
inkbluesky 