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IOL News
4 days ago
- Business
- IOL News
The metaphor of the lamb and the lion: understanding economic injustice
This article explores the metaphor of the lamb and the lion to illustrate the ongoing economic injustices faced by South Africa, highlighting the paradox of wealth accumulation and poverty. Image: Ron Lach/Pexels The story of the lamb and the lion bears testimony in today's experience of water runs upstream. The poor contribute continuously to the wealth of the rich, and are surprised by the unexplained riches of the rich against the wretchedness of the poverty in which they languish. Water continues to run upstream instead of downstream. Nothing ever trickles, let alone down under the trickledown economy of neoliberals. It only floods upwards away from the poor. When the story of the lamb and the lion was told under kerosene lamp to enthused youth with soot packed nostrils and mealie pap filled gums decades before Milton Friedman market fundamentalism of the Chicago School indeed were prophesy accomplished in their life time. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. 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Next Stay Close ✕ Decades later visited by crimson red gums with a dispersion of isolated lone brown teeth their fortunes of a river flowing up stream was real. For all they saw and witnessed was after years of dirt wages on the mines all they can see are pin striped suits donned by their counterparts who affirm that indeed water flows naturally upstream. As they should contend with their fate decades later, they have no other answer than the fact that the lion was correct all along after all – water flows naturally upstream. The tale is about a lamb that had lost its mother to a marauding lion. Little lamb was downstream drinking water when it got confronted by the raw upstream. You are dirtying the water just like your mother, the ewe. I am thirsty and I need to drink roars the lion. The lamb answers – how can I dirty the water when I am drinking down stream from you. I am just a lamb of yesterday. The lion roars just like the ewe your mother you are doing the same – dirtying my water as the lion charges towards the innocent lamb. This is the relationship the euphemistically referred to developing world when in reality they are constantly underdeveloped by the same lion that claims this developing world is dirtying their water. At no point was this so classically demonstrated than in the Just Energy Transition where South Africa was told in no uncertain terms that it was dirtying the world with its coal and it should stop. The Germans, French, Americans, and British have been drinking and dirtying the water upstream for ages, like the metaphoric lion told the lambs in the south that they are dirtying their water in the north. So obedient lamb, South Africa stood attention and stopped and Komati was killed with other coal fired power stations being continuously decimated merely for their age. De Ruyter the executioner was deployed for the mission. With metaphorical lads listening attentively under kerosene lamp are adult South Africans with crimson red gums and spaced brown spikes loosely dancing in their mouths today suffering from loadshedding driven by economics of Milton Friedman cohorts who are today saying South Africa is dirtying their water despite South Africa being downstream. Blessed is China, Malaysia and others who adopted a more measured approach to the roaring lion and told him in his face that they cannot be dirtying water when they are drinking downstream from those who dirtied years and years world without end. Little did we know that the lion will go back and dirty the water without being reprimanded. Germany ran for coal so is America under Trump. For how long should we stand this abuse of being told that we are dirtying the water when actually at all times we have taken water from downstream. At no time was this more irritating than seeing the 'graveyards' littering the roadside miles on end and the lion roaring that South Africa is dirtying its water through genocide and has decided to own the crosses and South Africa deserves punishment. Blatant lies are what lions are used to against lambs and when they have run out of tricks, they drag us into their stupid gimmicks. Time, we hold our own and respect our own and we should refuse to participate in this silly game of narcissists who have dirtied their water. Leave them to drink it. We should go for a different economic order, not the Milton Friedman Chicago School teaching that has caused the water to flow only upstream against all forces of gravity and the south is even blamed for being impoverished. We cannot continue to be bullied with lies under kerosene lamp as though we are the enthused youth with soot packed nostrils and mealie pap filled gums and live for decades on, visited by crimson red gums with a dispersion of isolated lone brown teeth letting our fortunes be of a river flowing up stream. That reality must be declared as one belonging to morons not us. The lion ate our parents and those before them. It should neither terrorise nor eat us for water we have not dirtied, let it die of its own sins. Africa is not Europe's or America's purgatory. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, among other hats. Image: Supplied
Business Insider
21-04-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
My company's American-made sweatshirt was called the 'greatest hoodie ever.' US trade needs a fundamental reset.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Bayard Winthrop, founder and CEO of California-based apparel-maker American Giant. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. I've had a career of running small consumer product manufacturing businesses. Early on, I had really taken the Chicago School libertarian economic thinking to heart. I felt that all trade was good trade, and that moving manufacturing overseas was what you did, and made financial sense, so I followed that script. Over time, what began to dawn on me is that I was becoming increasingly disconnected from the product that I was selling, and I really hated that feeling. I also hated that I would work with these people that helped me stand the business up and then, because I could get a part that was stamped for 10 or 15 or 20 cents cheaper, I could cut my labor rates. When I had my first daughter in 2010, I just didn't want to do it anymore. I got this pretty naive notion to start American Giant. I grew up in the 70s and 80s with the great American clothing brands like Levi's and Wrangler and Champion and Red Wing and Woolrich. Not only did they make the best products and clothing in the world, but I also felt that they said something about me when I wore them. They were substantive. By 2010, there were no clothing brands like that anymore. They'd all shipped overseas. I launched with a men's sweatshirt, because I was just interested in that category, and a news article called it " the greatest hoodie ever made." That article just went crazy. It tipped us into a back-order status for almost three years, and it convinced me that there was a real consumer demand for this. The last 40 years have been really bad for the working middle class When you live in a place like San Francisco, where I do, and you're surrounded by people with college degrees, like I have, and you've been in the stock market, life looks pretty good. But if you've been living in a rural or urban community, and you have a high school degree, and you don't own stocks, the last 40 years have been really bad. I think that sets up a bad framework for the country, and I think we've got to do something about it. American Giant was my small way of trying to build a business that I felt was contributing and was doing the right thing. With the textile industry in particular, the US basically took a very robust, rapidly modernizing industry and basically stopped it in its tracks. In 1970, something like 95% of all clothing bought by Americans was made in America. Now it's less than 5% so the bottom is falling out of that market. What has been left is a very kind of disaggregated supply chain, meaning you'll have a yarning operation here, a dying and finishing operation there, a knitting operation there. If you want to have production domestically, you have to support all of that separated and atomized production, and that just makes it harder. In China, you can go and say you need 100,000 purple T shirts with frills on the sleeves, and you'll have 20 factories bidding. We had to really get into the supply chain, assemble it ourselves, in many cases, and hold it together. It's gotten a lot easier now because our volumes have grown and now we're not the only people doing it. It's harder and it's more expensive, but I think the quality is a lot higher because you can just get a lot closer to the source. It's definitely not the easy way. There's a lot of misunderstanding about what's possible here You can absolutely, particularly in knitwear, make very high-quality, very large volume knitwear in the United States — most companies have just forgotten how to do it. Instead, we have trade agreements that are in varying degrees of bad or less than ideal. I think China is squarely in the zone of really bad. US trade needs to get fundamentally reset. Trump's tariffs have shoved that entire conversation into the middle of the country, which I think is a good thing. The country is finally having robust conversations in DC and on Main Street about what is wrong with our trading relationships and what needs to get fixed. This was not part of the national discourse eight years ago. It is now. The fact that we are aggressively targeting, in my judgment, China is a good thing. As the pandemic showed, if they turn off supplies like medical masks or medical gowns, it's very bad for the country, and it puts the country at risk. On the other hand, I think that the way that the administration has been communicating this has been very disjointed. People say Trump is a master negotiator, and that all may be true, but for private businesses big and small, it is very destabilizing. When private sector businesses feel like things are unpredictable or unstable, that freezes capital and people stop moving — and stop investing. There are going to be supply chain ramifications for the current approach, and so the speed at which it plays out is going to be challenging. There are still many, many things that we rely on China completely for, like pipe fittings, that we take for granted and make the economy work. What happens if those become two or three times more expensive to small, medium, and large businesses that supply our plumbers? I don't like the instability. I don't like the threat of the speed and the breadth of this stuff. And I certainly don't think that we ought to be treating, you know, our friendly allies, like, let's say Canada and Vietnam, the same way we're treating China. Those are very, very different situations, and ought to be treated as such. The United States was the knitwear capital of the world for a very long time The US is still a net exporter of cotton. Our primary yarn supplier is a net exporter of yarn. There is plenty of cotton and yarn to handle whatever business we could throw at the US supply chain. Dying and finishing capacity would be fine. It's really at the very end — the sewing, which is the most manual step in the process — that would take some time to spin up. We now have a T-shirt program at Walmart that is very large volume, and we've had no problem meeting that demand, and it could quadruple overnight fairly easily. And that's just little old American Giant. So there's plenty of knit capacity here, and plenty of cotton and yarn capacity to handle any kind of increase in volume. Much of textile machinery is coming from Korea, Japan, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, which raises an interesting question: Why is it coming to the United States versus being made here? The skills gap question is also a really interesting one. We don't have people who want to fill some of these jobs. How do we convince people to come over here instead of working at a fast-food restaurant? We'll train you to seamstress, we'll give you 40 or 50 hours a week, you could learn a lot, you can grow. I think that will happen, it just will take a bit of time to respond. Rebalancing trade will involve some trade-offs I am a believer that if the net effect of these tariffs are that we do have to pay a bit more for a T shirt and that results in increased labor rates for people that are living in places like Middlesex, North Carolina, I'll take that trade-off. The speed at which this is all happening, however, I think that's going to create some problems. My hope is that there is this shift toward better-quality stuff made closer to home that provides good, viable work to people that need it. If the effect of that is that average Americans need to begin to be a bit more conscious of how they're consuming, I'll take that trade. This shouldn't become such a crystallized, polarized discussion. It should matter to all of us as Americans. We can't build a country that has half the country in the stock market and doing great, and the other half struggling to find work. It just doesn't work. We're not going to rewind the clock to the 80s, and we're not going to revert back to a place where everything that we consume is made here. But between there and where we are now, there is a more rational middle ground that I think will reinject some vitality back into these communities that need work.
