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Quote by Raj Patel

“Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work. In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care. The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That's a strategy of Cheap Food....You can't have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy. There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money. Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of animal and human life -- such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color, and immigrants -- have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element -- the rule of Cheap Lives. Yet at every step of this process, humans resist....”

Quote by Raj Patel

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Raj Patel
Raj Patel

Raj Patel is a renowned journalist born in 1972. He is known for his in-depth investigative reporting and his focus on global inequality issues. more

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“The Revolution wants the destruction of the social kingdom of Jesus Christ, it wants to erase every last trace of it. The Revolution, that is the totally de-Christianised society, that is Christ pushed away to the corner of the individual conscience. One wants to banish Christ from the public and social sphere; banished from the State, which refuses to seek in His authority any more the affirmation of its own; banished from the laws, of which His law is no longer the sovereign rule; banished from the family, which is excluded from His blessing; banished from the school, where His teaching no longer constitutes the soul of education; banished from science, where He obtains as His only honour only a kind of neutrality that is just as offensive as contradiction; banished from everywhere, except perhaps from that little corner of the soul where one still grants Him a remnant of rule.”