The fashion industry is the epitome of the destructiveness, slavery, wastefulness, pollution, genocide, structural violence, classism, sexism, and racism of market capitalism. This documentary "True Cost" documents this. Our cultural obsession with fashion is a direct by-product of the vanity, materialism, superficiality, consumerism, vain status display, and narcissism directly promoted and created by the brainwashing, hundred billion dollar a year advertising industry. Our addiction to shopping and buying endless amounts of clothing is a product of the disconnection, disenchantment, disillusionment, and disenfranchisement that most of us feel as a result of being mere human resources, disposable wage slaves a.k.a. employees, and commodities in this global predatory capitalistic system. The clothing is made to be disposed of in a matter of weeks, new fashions are constantly being invented every two weeks, we are constantly being told to buy more of it so we can be "cool", "fashionable", and "hip", and we crave the crab because of the emptiness and insecurity that we feel inside. All the stuff we have has only made us bigger, highly anxious assholes. We are less empathetic, more disconnected from loved ones, more depressed, more anxious, and more anti-social. This obsession with material goods has also destroyed relationships and made them less genuine and authentic. We see each other as commodities or objects to be bought, used or exploited, and discarded.
Meanwhile, the fashion industry is destroying the environment through the endless of amounts of pesticides, GMOs, monocrop agriculture, and industrial pollution from clothing factories. It is destroying literally via death hundred of thousands of poor Indian farmers who commit suicide after their genetically modified cotton crops fail which is bound to happen as GMO cotton produces less cotton even though it is more expensive. Thousands of people are poisoned and have health problems and birth defects through the vast amounts of pesticides and fertilizers which the cotton crops require. Cotton also requires very high amounts of water and the global production of cotton is responsible for the water scarcity that the world is witnessing. Thousands of workers unnecessarily die from the unsafe, sweatshop working conditions. The people who suffer these workplace deaths are poor women of color in the Third World. These women live in absolute, abject poverty and paid slave wages to make clothing for billionaire corporations where the owners have a collective combined wealth of $48 billion dollars. The fashion industry is a huge user of highly exploited child labor and even outright slavery too. Millions of pieces of clothing are discarded and dumped into ever expanding landfills because of the huge planned obsolescence built into the fashion industry where is clothing is made to be inferior and made to last for months thus forcing you to buy more clothing. Even more, millions of piece of clothing are donated or thrown away due to the perceived obsolescence where fashion companies constantly creating new fashions. These donated clothes are then usually dumped into third world countries thus exacerbating the grinding poverty found in these countries by destroying local garment industries. However, several of the richest men on the planet are in the fashion industry and this predatory industry has produced millions off the backs of the poor and highly marginalized. Every year, more and more clothing is sold to the planet's and humanity's detriment. This is the epitome of capitalism. It is all the pathological pursuit of profit and continued growth. The negative costs are socialized and the rewards i.e. profits privatized by a few billionaires. The farming of cotton under Soviet style state capitalism i.e. communism destroyed the fourth largest lake in the world and brought the area to ecological collapse. It is a rapacious machine totally disconnected from the realities of the natural world which cannot stop until it only eats itself. Endless economic growth on a finite world is utterly impossible and utterly insane, suicidal, and homicidal. Capitalism can only destroy itself and everything along with it. We must destroy it and or will bring us to the point of human extinction.
Learn more about a new sane economic reality as proposed by the Zeitgeist Movement here
References:
http://www.rt.com/news/206787-monsanto-india-farmers-suicides/
http://www.thefashionglobe.com/modern-day-slavery-in-the-fashion-industry
http://wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/fashion-and-retail-shine-on-forbes-worlds-billionaires-list-10093179/
http://guardianlv.com/2015/06/capitalism-the-cause-of-human-extinction-in-the-next-100-years/
http://ihscslnews.org/view_article.php?id=65
http://www.ecouterre.com/vanessa-friedman-driving-force-of-fashion-is-planned-obsolescence/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/overdressed-book-elizabeth-cline_n_1587413.html
http://threaddocumentary.com/learn/faqs/
http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=101
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re5DgTJE0S4
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120409175915.htm
http://www.treehugger.com/economics/materialism-leads-to-depression.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/15/psychology-materialism_n_4425982.html
http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshwater_problems/thirsty_crops/
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/20/cost-cotton-water-challenged-india-world-water-day
http://electrictreehouse.com/cotton-and-the-disappearance-of-the-aral-sea/
http://www.whydev.org/dont-be-clothes-minded-understanding-the-impact-of-donated-clothes/
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