Occupy Sandy: Liberating Tarps In A Dickensian City

Egalitarian-minded residents fed up with seeing two post-Sandy New Yorks - one a cold dark wasteland where people still wait in line for blankets, fill milk jugs with water from hydrants and shovel toxic debris by candlelight , the other a gleaming metropolis where " the gears of capitalism grind away" - have by-passed "clueless FEMA workers standing around (in) government-issued rain jackets" and quietly begun taking tools and materials from luxury construction sites and redistributing them to hard-hit working-class areas. To each according to his or her need.

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How Badly Do We Want Our Cheap Stuff, No Matter How It's Made and At What Cost?

Officials now say the deadly fire at the Tazreen factory in Bangladesh that killed at least 124 workers was deliberately set. Even as Walmart reluctantly acknowledged its connections to the disaster, a labor rights group cited a dozen other brands made there, company executives called themselves "victims," and The Rude Pundit wondered at what point we carry blame for insisting on cheap stuff made by young women toiling in slave-like conditions for 21 cents an hour.

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