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Dirty Cotton: Dirty Tricks
Stop buying clothes you don’t need and make any changes you can to preserve the environment and lives
Douglas Rushkoff seems like a really great guy with a lot of knowledge of how our unsustainable, extractive, and exploitive economic and social systems degrade the environment along with our daily lives. He is writing a series about how the economy and trade used to be before capitalism, and one would hope, proposing ways we could move in a more positive, healthful, life-affirming (for all living creatures) way in the future.
So, Douglas wrote,
The American Revolution was a rebellion not against England so much as the British East India Trading Company dominating commerce in the new world. Colonists were free to grow cotton but had to sell it to the monopoly company at fixed prices.
Ah, “King Cotton.” We should all know something Douglas didn’t specifically mention about how the benefit from those fixed prices was maximized: human beings were kidnapped from their homes, transported across the Atlantic, and forced to pick cotton or die to enrich a small number of planters: about 395,000 or a little…
