DL Open Thread: Sunday, March 24, 2024

“The Brutality Of Sugar”:  You might want to reflect on this next time you reflexively reach for a Coke or Pepsi:

The two soft-drink makers have helped turn the state of Maharashtra into a sugar-producing powerhouse. But a New York Times and Fuller Project investigation has found that these brands have also profited from a brutal system of labor that exploits children and leads to the unnecessary sterilization of working-age women.

Young girls are pushed into illegal child marriages so they can work alongside their husbands cutting and gathering sugar cane. Instead of receiving wages, they work to pay off advances from their employers — an arrangement that requires them to pay a fee for the privilege of missing work, even to see a doctor.

An extreme yet common consequence of this financial entrapment is hysterectomies. Labor brokers loan money for the surgeries, even to resolve ailments as routine as heavy, painful periods. And the women — most of them uneducated — say they have little choice.

Hysterectomies keep them working, undistracted by doctor visits or the hardship of menstruating in a field with no access to running water, toilets or shelter…

But for many sugar laborers, the operation has a particularly grim outcome: Borrowing against future wages plunges them further into debt, ensuring that they return to the fields next season and beyond. Workers’ rights groups and the United Nations labor agency have defined such arrangements as forced labor.

The abuses continue — despite local government investigations, news reports and warnings from company consultants — because everyone says somebody else is responsible.

Big Western companies have policies pledging to root out human rights abuses in their supply chains. In practice, they seldom if ever visit the fields and largely rely on their suppliers, the sugar-mill owners, to oversee labor issues.

The mill owners, though, say that they do not actually employ the workers. They hire contractors to recruit migrants from far-off villages, transport them to the fields and pay their wages. How those workers are treated, the owners say, is between them and the contractors.

Those contractors are often young men whose only qualification is that they own a vehicle. They are merely doling out the mill owners’ money, they say. They could not possibly dictate working conditions or terms of employment.

Let’s cut through the crap:  Coca Cola and Pepsico could end this tomorrow if they truly wanted to halt this exploitation.

Never Thought I’d Be Interested In A Profile Of Gillian Anderson–But I Was:

I have a tendency to be cast as those types of women who have unbelievable brains,” says Gillian Anderson, running her hands through her glamour of blonde hair, “because my resting face is intellectual, as if I’m thinking about Proust or the world order. When in fact it’s usually, actually, dinner.” The next unbelievably brained woman Anderson will play is British journalist Emily Maitlis, in Scoop, a film about the process of securing her 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. This was the interview in which he discussed his friendship with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, his inability to sweat, and the Woking branch of Pizza Express, and, in 50 fast minutes, managed to do more damage to the royal family than five seasons of The Crown.

The only character, in fact, that has lingered in Anderson long after the work ended was Blanche DuBois. “With all the characters I’ve played, even Scully, who I played for the longest, it feels like there’s a sheath between me and them, whereas I feel like Blanche could come back in a split second.” This was the Young Vic’s 2014 production of A Streetcar Named Desire, when Anderson said she immersed herself so deeply she was hanging on to reality by a thread. Talking to the director after one show she had a vision of a train. “It’s not in heaven, but somewhere in another dimension, a train that has continuous cars that’s just going and going ad infinitum. And everybody who’s ever done a Tennessee Williams play is on that train. And once you do it, a part of you can never get off.”

Hey, man, it’s Sunday.  Take your mind off the relentless madness and enjoy a profile of quite an interesting person.

‘Climate Boomtowns’?  As in people fleeing red states for blue states?  I’m all for it:

My destination was the working-class city of Ypsilanti, and a meeting with Beth Gibbons, an urban planner and specialist in climate adaptation. Gibbons served as the founding executive director of a planning consortium called the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP), which was formed in part to consider how the country could anticipate and prepare for large-scale American climate migration. Gibbons believes that sooner or later a growing chunk of the nation’s population will be arriving in the Great Lakes region. Ypsilanti was an interesting place for us to meet: Many Black migrants from the South had moved here in the 20th century, and during World War II, some were employed building military aircraft. Now the city stands to be transformed again, this time by a great climate migration.

As climate change brings disasters and increasingly unlivable conditions to growing swaths of the United States, it also has the potential to remake America’s economic landscape: Extreme heat, drought, and fires in the South and West could present an opportunity for much of the North. Tens of millions of Americans may move in response to these changes, fleeing coasts and the countryside for larger cities and more temperate climates. In turn, the extent to which our planet’s crisis can present an economic opportunity, or even reimagining, will largely depend on where people wind up, and the ways in which they are welcomed or scorned.

Since When Did The French Bulldog Become The Most In-Demand Canine?  It was while I wasn’t looking.  Can’t rightly understand it:

Frenchies remained the United States’ most commonly registered purebred dogs last year, according to American Kennel Club rankings released Wednesday. The club calls the Frenchie the most popular breed, though other canine constituencies may beg to differ.

Is it a coup to be celebrated? Au contraire, say longtime fans who rue what popularity is doing to the breed. Nevertheless, after lapping Labrador retrievers to take the top spot in 2022, the bat-eared, scaled-down bulldogs held on in the new standings, which reflect puppies and other dogs that were added last year to the United States’ oldest dog registry.

The breed also is now a lightning rod for canine controversy and cultural critique.

There are the foreshortened snouts that can result in labored breathing, gagging, difficulty with exercise and other ills — concerns that prompted the Netherlands to ban breeding certain individual dogs with muzzles deemed too short. There are pet-store heists and violent robberies, at least one of them deadly. There’s a proliferation of Frenchies with unusual coat colors and textures, which have Frenchie folk squabbling over longtime standards.

I’m calling it–the French Bulldog market is fixin’ for a plummet.  Sell your stock now.

What do you want to talk about?