Exploitation

State Power, Corporate Power Or ‘Little Powers’?

July 13, 2025 Christine Dann, Resilience. Educate! Democracy, Energy, Exploitation, New Zealand

As I write, New Zealand is also facing the biggest sucker of electrical energy ever created – digital data storage and delivery. This was bad enough when it was being sent directly to electricity-powered digital ‘appliances’ (phones, personal and commercial computers, screens of all kinds),9) but in 2023 a new and extremely energy-intensive function was introduced – machine learning, commonly known as AI. It is extremely difficult to get accurate data on the contribution of different industries to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as each one has an obvious interest in disguising how big their contribution is.

The Global North Lives Off Intellectual Rents

June 27, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Exploitation, Global North, Global South, Intellectual Property

The number in the graph above, based on data from the International Monetary Fund, is not an exaggeration. Despite the growing technological and industrial capacity of countries in the Global South, countries and corporations in the Global North continue to own intellectual property patents on key products, locking the South into indefinite patent payment regimes. These include patent payments for pharmaceuticals, digital technologies (such as licensing fees for software and telecommunications infrastructure), and agricultural goods (such as genetically modified seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, and equipment).

New Research: Amazon’s Monopoly Tollbooth In 2023

September 23, 2023 Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Educate! Amazon, Capitalism, Exploitation, Monopoly

Amazon’s dominance of online retail means that businesses that make or sell products have little choice but to rely on its site to reach customers. Amazon exploits its power as a gatekeeper to pocket a growing cut of the revenue earned by these businesses. It does this by imposing ever-larger fees on them. In effect, Amazon controls a monopoly tollbooth that sits between businesses and the online market. Over the last few years, it has sharply raised the price of passing through it. In the first half of 2023, using a variety of fees, Amazon took 45 percent of sellers’ revenue in the U.S. That’s up from 35 percent in 2020, and 19 percent in 2014. These exorbitant fees make it nearly impossible for small businesses and other sellers to sustain a viable business online. Most fail.

This World Cup Is Brought To You By Abused Migrant Workers

November 25, 2022 Saurav Sarkar, In These Times. Educate! Exploitation, qatar, Worker Rights and Jobs, world cup

In a full-throated defense of 2022 World Cup host nation Qatar, FIFA president Gianni Infantino said in a press conference on Saturday, “Today I feel Qatari, today I feel Arab, today I feel African, today I feel gay, today I feel disabled, today I feel a migrant worker…because I know what it means to be discriminated, to be bullied.” Criticizing the West, and Europe in particular, for migration policies, corporate profiteering off of Gulf oil, and “what we Europeans have been doing for 3,000 years around the world,” Infantino tried to draw attention away from multiple controversies plaguing the 2022 World Cup. FIFA, the governing body for world soccer, is expected to bring in $6.5 billion in revenue from this year’s World Cup, a 25% jump from the 2018 games. Infantino himself made $3.2 million in 2019 alone.

Wealthy Liberal Arts Colleges Are Exploiting International Students

November 15, 2021 Olivia Wood, Left Voice. Educate! Exploitation, Foreign Students, Higher Education, Worker Rights and Jobs

Language assistants at Grinnell can be asked to work up to 20 hours per week, although it’s unclear how many hours are actually scheduled for the typical student worker. However, if someone worked 20 hours per week every week for the full academic year (nine months) at $12/hour, they would still only make $9,072. Even including the value of room and board, which the language assistants receive for free, their income is still only $23,470 for the year — about $5,000 less than what is considered a living wage for Poweshiek County, Iowa, where Grinnell is located.

Modern US Racial Capitalism

September 22, 2020 Charisse Burden-Stelly, Monthly Review. Educate! Capitalism, Exploitation, Neoliberalism, Racism

In recent years, “racial capitalism” has ascended across the humanities and social sciences. It has arisen as a conceptual framework to understand the mutually constitutive nature of racialization and capitalist exploitation, inter alia, on a global scale, in specific localities, in discrete historical moments, in the entrenchment of the carceral state, and in the era of neoliberalization and permanent war.1 This increased interest, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary in nature, is conveyed in the myriad race and capitalism debates...

Another Tourism Is Possible

March 30, 2020 Ranjan Solomon, Popular Resistance. Create! Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ecosystems, Exploitation, Tourism, Workers

The members of the Tourism Alert and Action Forum come from organizations around the world that have joined in solidarity to oppose exploitative forms of tourism and to act in solidarity with communities against such practices. We are watching the pandemic crisis with great concern, grounded in the knowledge that such crises: impact the most vulnerable communities disproportionately; that such crises are used to enact authoritarian policies and surveillance that long outlasts the crisis; and that corporate sectors and elites stand set to take advantage of this crisis. The corporate tourism, hospitality and events sectors have been brought to their knees by efforts to curtail and control the pandemic. Borders have been shut, travel has been banned, social activities have been curtailed and people told to stay in their homes.

‘Crude Truth’ Protest At National Portrait Gallery BP Awards Exhibition.

October 23, 2019 Staff, Realmedia.press Resist! BP, Climate Change, Exploitation, Protests

The final day of the BP Portrait Awards exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery was interrupted by protesters from various campaign groups working together to highlight BP’s part in the exploitation and repression of frontline communities, especially in the Global South, as well as its role in the climate and ecological crisis. The National Portrait Gallery flaunts its 30 year relationship with BP, but recently the RSC announced that it was ending its association with BP, and the National Gallery has also jettisoned Shell...

Efforts To Claw Back Stolen Wages Painfully Slow, As California Employers Who Cheat Workers Often Get Away With It

October 16, 2019 By Eli Wolfe, Fairwarning.org Educate! California, Exploitation, Wages, Workers

In February, when California labor officials announced the biggest wage theft case against a private company in state history, they made sure to include a warning for all bosses: “Stealing earned wages from workers’ pockets is illegal in California and this case shows that employers who steal from their workers will end up paying for it in the end,” said Labor Secretary Julie Su in a press release announcing nearly $12 million in citations against RDV Construction, Inc. RDV has appealed the penalties.

The ‘Forbes 400’ List Is Basically Class Warfare

October 9, 2019 By Opheli Garcia Lawler, Mic.com Educate! Exploitation, Profit, Ruling Class

Could you spend a billion dollars? How about $90 billion? Here, try. It’s actually kind of hard to do if you’re used to living, as most Americans do, paycheck to paycheck. In your head, you’ve probably already started allotting money to issues you care about, problems you’d solve with that kind of money. Maybe you’d Oprah your whole block or build a school. The billionaires on Forbes 400, a list of the 400 richest people in America, they all have at least two billion dollars. In total, they’re all worth “a record-breaking $2.96 trillion,” a sum that could eliminate the American student debt crisis twice...

Making Corporations Pay For Big Pay Gaps

October 2, 2019 Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, Ips-dc.org Educate! Corporations, Exploitation, Inequality, New Economy

For two full years now, publicly held corporations in the United States have had to comply with a federal mandate to report the gap between their CEO and median worker compensation. The resulting disclosures, this report makes clear, have produced truly staggering statistical results. Americans across the political spectrum have been decrying the yawning gaps between CEO and worker compensation for several decades now. Yet Americans still, the research shows, vastly underestimate how wide these gaps have become.

Teachers Are More Stressed Out Than You Probably Think

October 1, 2019 Steven Singer, Gadflyonthewallblog.com Educate! Class Struggle, Exploitation, Labor, Teachers

When I was just a new teacher, I remember my doctor asking me if I had a high stress job. I said that I taught middle school, as if that answered his question. But he took it to mean that I had it easy. After all – as he put it – I just played with children all day. Now after 16 years in the classroom and a series of chronic medical conditions including heart disease, Crohn’s Disease and a recent battle with shingles though I’m only in my 40s, he knows better.

iPhone Workers Today Are 25 Times More Exploited Than Textile Workers In 19th Century England

September 27, 2019 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Educate! Exploitation, Technology, Workers

A recent report by the International Labour Organisation shows that the total global labour force is now measured at 3.5 billion workers. This is the largest size of the global labour force in recorded history. Talk of the demise of workers is utterly premature when confronted with the weight of this data. Most of these 3.5 billion workers, the ILO says, ‘experienced a lack of material well-being, economic security, equal opportunities or scope for human development. Being in employment does not always guarantee a decent living.

Drop The Term “Austerity” – It’s The Race To The Bottom

September 26, 2019 Glen Ford, Blackagendareport.com Educate! Austerity, Exploitation, Ideology

Let’s get straight to the point. The striking General Motors workers are locked in an epochal struggle against the global corporate drive to reduce the entirety of the world’s working class to a state of abject desperation, leaving the great mass of people -- from Detroit to Bangladesh -- with no options but to accept whatever wages and conditions of labor the bosses offer. This is the essential, global imperative of today’s late stage capitalism, and the tie that binds the money-men that control both U.S. governing parties, their counterparts in Europe, and billionaires the world over.

The Companies Behind The Burning Of The Amazon

September 10, 2019 By: Glenn Hurowitz, Mat Jacobson, Etelle Higonnet, and Lucia von Reusner, Stories.mightyearth.org Educate! Amazon Rainforest, Capitalism, Exploitation

Both domestic and international demand for beef and leather has fueled the rapid expansion of the cattle industry into the Amazon. From 1993 to 2013, the cattle herd in the Amazon expanded by almost 200% reaching 60 million head of cattle. While deforestation for cattle had been reduced thanks to both private sector and government action, the new wave of deforestation this year shows that the large international beef and leather companies and their customers and financiers continue to create markets for deforestation-based cattle.

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