Consumption Corruption

this is a school project

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omgggggg CONSUMERISM MUSICAL

enjoy amazingness at its finest :D

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Black Friday Consumerism at its best

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Flight Attendants Reject Air Canada Deal

MONTREAL - Air Canada (TSX: AC.A) is facing more labour turbulence as the airline's flight attendants rejected a second tentative deal and served strike notice on Sunday.The 6,800 flight attendants will be able to walk off the job as early as 12:01 a.m. Oct. 13, said a news release from the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents the workers.The union said 65 per cent of those who voted rejected the deal, but didn't say how many took part in the vote.It's the second time the flight attendants turned down a tentative agreement.

This is an example of how the Flight Attendants of Air Canada Air Line formed a labour union to fight rejected Air Canada's Deal

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Swap City

Today we had the privilege as grade 9's to commemorate in a consumerism activity right inside our class room. We had the chance to do a "swap city" which is were you bring in an item, skill, or special service that you are willing to share with others in exchange for their item, skill, or special service. 

we were then asked to bring in our item, skill, or special service. And of course I tried to remember and forgot to write it down :/. So the thursday I was in kind of a pickle with a few of my peers. But instead of not participating we made a "coupon" which entitled our service/skill and we would opt to teach people it or to bring them an item at a later date. At the end i ended up with a future grape juice and the ability to learn how to get any app for free on an ipad (not sure if deal, or setting me up for lawsuit). 

Personally i thought that the swap city was a success and that it really showed how the act/skill of bargaining alone could get you from the bottom to the top in a matter of climbing the "ladder" of goods and services. 

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This photo as a quick glance doesn't highlight what you would think is consumerism. But the message sure represents just that. 

The message being portrayed is that the consumer (in this case the husband) as we are drived by our wants rather than our needs, and in this case the demand for that alpaca drove above the husbands needs aspect. 

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In this debate we argued the fact of Canada vs. America in the act of their economy and how "scarcity" has effected the quality of their life. 

Before i even dove into the research on these aspects of canada and america. I thought of how media and global issues mended a picture personally to me on the thought of these countries. When i think of america there are obviously some words that are more prominent in my mind like freedom, debt, and legislator. These words are used daily in the topic of america on its national debt, home of the free, land of the brave. 

Just like america canada has been portrayed in social media in such a way as well. When i hear Canada i think of health care, taxes, free land, and i just picture forests and open fields and lands that stretch to the horizon. Now obviously this isn't the case for everyone but at the same time neither is my opinion. 

During the debate i heard a lot of interesting themes and topics that would have never crossed my mind alone. The fact of how the people arguing for america only really had the thought of land of the free and individual living (ex; personal healthcare), really shocked me because my points back at them and the thoughts that i thought they would have attacked us with were not on track for the most part. It was like we had a different view of the 2 countries but yet we still lived in the same one. 

All in all this debate was one that i couldn't find as easy of a connection as i would have liked. My personal opinion on the quality of life in america vs. canada is that canada has a much more promising and reliable/stable economic action plan. Also the fact that canada's economic growth is stable and relays a possible sky rocket into the financial world, places them above america by far. 

Home of the free, Land of the brave....In the end its just a big shopping mall.

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couldn't agree more at christmas time :D

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“A shopping cart flipped upside down forms a cage that I use to protect myself from consumerism.” ― Jarod Kintz, Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4157885.Jarod_Kintz

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Gins/Economic systems       

    The book I am reading for my GINS (global issues novel study) is Shattered by Eric Walters. He is a rich boy how is trying to put in his volunteer hours by working at a soup kitchen in the shady part of town. He then realizes how lucky and wealthy he is while he sees and has confrontations with the less fortunate crowd, and the choices he makes as a consumer can effect him in different parts of the city.

A great example of this is near the beginning of the book when Ian has that confrontation with the “thugs” in the park when they wanted his shoes, this is an example of how someone buying a product for their self needs can also have a negative effect on them like if you lived in a place where there was a lot of robberies and you buy a big and nice house with lots of windows and no security.

Another connection I made right away from the book is after his first endeavor with the soup kitchen, his mom picks him up in a 100,000$+ Mercedes and Mac the owner of the kitchen suddenly has a different view of him. He views Ian as a snobby rich boy who could care less if the homeless didn’t have a place to eat and just shows up here because he wants to fulfill his hours. Ian interprets this and quickly reassures Mac that this isn’t the case so that just because of the products and things that he wears and owns shouldn’t make him anymore important than even the homeless men.

Talking about the homeless men also brings up another very important point, the fact of why are these men homeless? Well it can be of a variety of things from running away as a kid, to getting divorced and then getting caught in a net of consumerism, to running on debt, all the way to simple things like being addicted to alcohol, or drugs and spending your life savings cause you cant shake cravings. In my book a lot of the homeless men that came into the shelter were described as smelling like alcohol from Ian’s standpoint. One man though did not be like that at all, and that man was also the guy who saved Ian’s life and shoes. He was known to be a veteran from war and it was unclear as to why he fell into this whole of homelessness, but non the less it comes apparent throughout the book that his life as a veteran might come in dire greatness to Ian.

All in all in it’s very easy and simple to get caught in the net of consumerism and fall into that debt and get caught without money and without hope. 

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The Pursuit of Happyness Specific Tumblr Post

Today we finished our film review on the movie The Pursuit Of Happyness. This movie followed the main idea of how if you have determination and work hard enough, you can achieve anything. Chris in the movie started his life of poverty by a bad decision at the beginning of his life, which we found out about later in the movie. This decision was the one to spent all of his life savings on these “High Density Bone Scanners” in the thought that this would be his lucky break. This can be an example of how we get all these thoughts in our head and think about what the future can behold for us if we play this off right, but sadly reality works a little bit different than that. Obviously you couldn’t say that this was the only reason for his poverty recession because in the movie I noticed certain jesters like how when the dad dropped off the son the mom was in the back ground and she had a cigarette in her mouth so she had what I think was a smoking edition and that could have also helped dig their debt hole. Smoking is a great example of want vs. need as the cigarettes are an example of want that has conjectured into need.

Theme Stament: "Good things come to those who wait, greater things come to those who are willing to work for it"

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Week Of Food Tumblr Challenge

We were approached by our teachers and showed pictures of groceries for a week from different countries around the world. After making observations on these photos we were asked to do the same with ourselves. So here is my photo of what my family eats in a regular week. I have a lot of fruits and vegetables (could not include all). All of my carbs are in the form of pasta, or rice. My steaks and chicken in the middle, the turkey was kind of a special occasion this week but non the less, crackers, protein bars, vinegars (white, red, wine), the cereals at the back, the only foods that I consume that are canned are usually canned crab, white tuna, flaked Salomon, and tomato soup. I feel that this photo can portray my family and country as it contains a wide variety of foods and food types and food genres. This also represents who I am as a person and who are family is as a group, because in this photo we portray the fact that we eat healthy and we eat a lot of sustainable foods like seeds and hemp and fruit and vegetables.

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Nike Boycott

  Nike is most defiantly a popular brand among many genres of people. This huge consumer base has helped Nike become not only on of the biggest sporting companies in the world but it has also had negative effects on the company.

In 1996 a statement was made on CBS by two workers in a Vietnamese Nike factory saying, “The physical pain didn’t last long, but the pain I feel in my heart will never disappear”. Although just a 6 O’clock new stamen, it turned out to be just a scratch on the surface of a Nike third world factory epidemic. After this statement was released in 1997 it was documented and confirmed that the workers at this Vietnam Nike factory and other third world Nike factories were not only being granted necessary worker requirements but studies have confirmed that Nike did not pay its Asian workers enough to live on.

Definition Of Boycott: withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest.

This is exactly what Nike didn’t do, they simply stocked up their PR staff to go out and seduce the public with promises of change and well being of workers in countries like Vietnam. Sadly these promises were emptier than the tortured and abused workers. Often companies can use boycotts to en power their company as almost as a positive way to get advertising and they word about their company out their. How could Nike possibly use a boycott like human abuse in their factories as a positive? Well they didn’t really, what did Nike do if a Labour organization was standing in its way? Sabotage it, Nike even went to such existents as the send a “private” letter to the Vietnam government and say that the us Labour organizations were trying to re write the Vietnam Labour rights in an act to maintain trust of the Vietnam government.

All in all I am not here to trash or send hate mail about Nike™. I have and still do buy Nike products and before I started researching about this Nike boycott I had no idea that their laboring was this extensive. This does not change my buying aspects towards Nike but it defiantly changes my view of the company to some existent. Nike still does offer great and for the most part really popular products so I do not think that this boycott of Nike is as widely known as Nike’s symbol stills fly’s higher than most.

  - Nicholas Morrison

    Bibliography:

  http://www.saigon.com/nike/

Saturday November 9th 2013

  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2012/jul/06/activism-nike

Saturday November 9th 2013

  http://boycott-nike.8m.com

Saturday November 9th 2013

  http://culturejam2009.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/slaverynike1.jpg?w=500&h=333

Saturday November 9th 2013

^^Powerful but simple image on how Nike has been portrayed as a company

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This is a photo of the beloved black friday in America. This is a day that is equivalent to "boxing day" in canada. It is after christmas when a lot of products and supplies go on sale. These huge sales attractive enormous amounts of people as shown in this photograph above waiting in line for the chance to "shop till they drop".

http://mysticpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/culture-of-consumerism-a-brief-history-of-black-friday-e1353737635731.jpg

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“Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?”

― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby