9.25.2007
The Back To School Scam
© 2007 Stan Spire
Remember in college when you were required to buy a lot of expensive textbooks and you found out as the semester rolled on that you didn’t need all of them? Your instructor would say, “Well, those other books are additional background material. I’m not going to test you on that.”
But such scams aren’t necessarily limited to colleges. Take a look at the back to school sales for middle and high school students. Johnny or Jane comes home with a list of crap that the teacher says is required.
For example, the student MUST HAVE a plastic orange folder of certain size (and price). This particular folder will only be used to hold math assignments. Are today’s students so dumbed down that they need color codes to organize their materials? Then again, most dumb citizens pay attention to the spectrum of threat levels pronounced by Homeland Security. This one color per subject could be great training for future Amerikans. Pavlov’s dog whimpers when he sees the color red.
Why are these lists of required school supplies accepted without question by parents? How did it come about that an office supply store like Staples suddenly got into “educational materials?”
I suspect that there is some connection between big companies with product to push and schools short on cash. Look at the incident when a student wore a Pepsi t-shirt during “Coke In Education Day” at his high school. The student was suspended. After all, if Coca Cola wants to use a school to recruit more Cokeheads, then you better be a team player.
I’ve tried using a search engine to find articles online that at least raise the issue about back to school supplies and the companies manufacturing and peddling those supplies. Nothing. Not even a blog post. Apparently no one is curious about the back to school fad (or I haven’t hit the right combo of keywords yet). One article did say that the back to school season is second to Xmas in total sales. Consumers = lemmings.
One parent told me that a leading calculator company provides “free” instruction books when a school requires its students to purchase a particular calculator made by the company. I wouldn’t be surprised if more such deals are being made behind the scenes between various companies and cash-strapped schools.
I not saying there’s a great conspiracy, but keep in mind the main point of capitalism is to get money out of your pocket.
Setting that issue aside, there’s the validity of the back to school lists. I’ve heard from one student that as the school year rolls on, she found that she didn’t need all the items. Hopefully she’ll learn from this and avoid buying unneeded textbooks in college.
9.13.2007
Just Say NO To Diamonds
Blood Diamond. A movie nominated for 5 Academy Awards. So what.
This movie proves how Hollywood can trivialize an important social issue. Blood Diamond is set during the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999. At that time there was talk about "blood diamonds," diamonds sold to finance the bloodshed. If you wanted to be politically correct/socially aware, you had to ask your jeweler if he dealt in conflict or blood diamonds. (As if that made any real difference.)
The entire diamond industry is tainted, not just by the civil war that occurred in Sierra Leone. Right from the beginning of the diamond trade black Africans were forced to work under inhuman conditions to enrich a few white capitalists. How would you like to sleep on a concrete bed after a long day in the mines? And to end up with a pittance of what De Beers and other such companies were raking in?
Blood Diamond does raise a few issues, for example, how the major diamond companies buy up all the stones and hoard them, creating an artificial scarcity to keep the prices so high. Or how a man is told that he should spend at least three months of his salary on a diamond engagement ring.
But such issues are lost among all the action and violence during Blood Diamond. After a while the rapid pace of gunfire and last minute escapes becomes boring. Our heroes somehow serpentine their way through mass destruction and deadly chaos, but while everyone around them is injured or killed, they come through to face more danger. This movie could have been easily changed into Indiana Jones And The Blood Diamond.
Of course, this is how Hollywood tackles social issues. Keep the real issues in the background and dazzle everyone with a video-game plot.
At the end of the movie a statement is shown that buyers should make sure that they only buy diamonds of the non-blood type. If the viewer had been paying attention, he would remember how it was mentioned in the movie that blood diamonds were easily mixed in with "good" ones as they're sold along the way. But like I said, it doesn't matter, the entire diamond industry is tainted with blood.
Last Xmas season one of the big diamond companies ran a TeeVee ad featuring an upper middle class black couple at a posh restaurant, a heart-touching scene of a man giving his wife a diamond. I wonder if those black actors were aware of the history of the diamond trade.
And if they were - for shame.
(C) 2007 Stan Spire
