- McDonald's -
takes more than charity,but almost anyone can do better than the government.
Posted by: Luke Kuhn ( Utopian Anarchist Party, USA ) on December 06, 1997 at 02:07:16:
Mike, saying that McD's charities do a better job than the government isn't saying very much. Even the Black Panthers were able to run a food program for poor children better than the government in Oakland, California during the Vietnam era-and they had a lot less resources.
Also, it takes a lot more than charity to stop poverty and exploitation. The first thing that has to happen is that people have to start refusing to be exploited. Otherwise the bosses woud be stupid NOT to exploit the people, because someone else would do so and his lower prices would run the "honest" emloyers out of business. The more shit you take, the more shit you get-no matter whether you are one person, a whole village-or an entire socioeconomic class.
The next thing that has to happen is that the government has to get out of the way-or be pushed out of the way-of lower class people who create their own jobs. A gooexample of this is intensive regulation,licensing(with a quota system)and police harassment of street vendors and cab drivers.
There was a time when if you were poor,you didn't HAVE to rely on welfare. You could fit your car out as a taxi or go into the food vending business. Now, even selling just sodas(from sealed containers) will bring down the health dept like a pack of hyenas-and sodas, unlike hot dogs, cannot be made unsafe by the vendor.
In Washington D>C>, for example, when the new MCI center basketball stadium opened, the city kicked the vendors off all the nearby streets so the concessions inside would make the corporate bosses even richer. In fact, earlier this year, a Control-board appointd panel advised cutting the number of vending licenses inhalf and putting the other half out of work. I suggestd that if this passed all the vendors should go to the welfare office En Masse and sign up, then give copies of thier applications to Newt Gingrich as an example of how microbusiness is being prohibited to benefit big business.
It ha alays been the store owners who have called for banning the street vendors so they could fatten their own pockets.As you see, the answer to this is empowerment of the poor, not just more charity that sticks to every hand it passes through. For a long time,big corporations have used charitable works to soften their public images, and this goes back to the dawn of the industrial revolution. Yet, history still judged many of these bosses to be "Robber Barons."
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