Blood All over the Labels

By Andrea Jones

Blood all over the labels. An interesting expression from Claudias perspective since it represented the tip of the iceberg not only in regard to what was taking place in coercive, slave labor garment factories all over the worldwhere human lives were cheaper than dirt and where the corrupt use of substandard materials was common practicebut also what was occurring in quite another context in the mental health (and law enforcement) professions in America today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483678221

Andrea Jones

Andrea Jones specializes in photographs of landscape architecture, gardens, and plants. Her work regularly appears in House & Garden, Country Living, Gardens Illustrated, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, Sunset, Organic Gardening, Fine Gardening, and GardenDesign. She runs a stock photo library called Garden Exposures. Jones is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and exhibits her work around the world. She has been recognized with multiple awards from the UK’s Garden Media Guild.

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Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Jones.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4836-7821-4

                eBook           978-1-4836-7822-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 07/15/2016

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I want to thank Lydia Eccles for all her invaluable help, support and encouragement.

When I told her what someone had said: Why do you want your manuscript to be so perfect, it’s not like it’s going to be a best seller and when I later expressed all kinds of hurt feelings about how nobody would even read what I had written, she said: Do it for me. So I did.

Thanks, Lydia, for your caring support and encouragement.

DEDICATION

I want to make it clear that the one thing I don’t mean by the title, Blood All Over the Labels, is that real criminals should not be punished or that they should be given special treatment or coddled. There are many times when labels are perfectly appropriate. My book simply tries to make a case for the other side of the story which is not often heard about.

I would like to dedicate my book to my family of origin.

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Claudia was understandably upset today. (In fact she was more than upset, she was fuming). She had just read something in the paper that had turned her stomach completely, forcing her to make a beeline to the bathroom and vomit up the admittedly meager contents of her stomach into the toilet basin. She could not believe the horror of what she had read. It was beyond outrageous, it was toxic and mind numbingly atrocious.

It was a headline making story about a disaster in a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than a thousand workers last month by burying them alive under a landslide of murderous concrete when the entire scaffolding of the building housing the garment factory suddenly collapsed around them.

The real truth, Claudia later found out, was that the owners themselves set a fire in the sweatshop to collect on the insurance money. With no regard whatsoever for collateral damage. Or the death toll and terrible agony the workers had to endure when so many of them were buried alive.

In America, this same problem existed as well, Claudia thought to herself. But—since it did not take place in a third world country—it was covered up under a deceptive guise of democracy.

And even though the workers were the real under the table, unsung heroes who carried the entire burden of the work, they often got very little credit beyond a kind of democratic lip service.

The deck needed to be reshuffled in America as well, Claudia thought to herself. And real life designations for helper vis-à-vis helped redefined and reconfigured into a more upfront and honest representation of what really took place.

In the published description of what had taken place the photo/ journalist warned the American people to be very careful what clothing labels they buy since so much of what is unknowingly purchased from abusive, slave labor garment factories has real, human blood all over the labels.

Which can’t be seen with the naked eye, but is nonetheless present.

An interesting expression from Claudia’s perspective since it represented the tip of the iceberg not only in regard to what was taking place in coercive, slave labor garment factories all over the world—where human lives were cheaper than dirt—but also what was occurring in quite another context in mental health (and law enforcement) in America today.

Law enforcement departments such as that in Ferguson, Missouri (where an unarmed black teenager was recently shot to death) and the New York City Police Department (the NYPD), rumored to be the worst—and most lethal—in the United States, where police got away with anything and everything simply because they had a badge.

Where labels are sanctimoniously, cavalierly and all too often indiscriminately handed out and cruelly affixed like invisible handcuffs. Or the damning letters tattooed in a concentration camp to identify prisoners. Of course, it went without saying that mental health and law enforcement were backed up by the entire legal system.

All systems worked together hand in glove (and always had).

You know the old expression, "An iron fist in a velvet glove. And that other Teddy Roosevelt expression: Walk softly, but carry a big stick." Well, that about said it all.

And these mental health (and law enforcement) labels in America were every bit as monstrous and controlling to those forced to wear them as the coerced slavery of those trapped in a system of living death in all those outrageously substandard factory buildings in Bangladesh and all around the world.

Factories manufacturing something as seemingly innocent as clothing, but implicated under the table in a flagrantly abusive network of industrial corruption and imperialistic control. And the newspaper article had certainly been very forthcoming, specific (and graphic) about "blood all over the labels."

And, as time wore on (although it was usually impossible to prove a thing) there was undoubtedly a similar quantity of undetected innocent blood spilled all over those mental health (and law enforcement) labels in America as well.

As the wrong people languished in jail or in psychologically demeaning positions for years and years (not all jail cells are equipped with physical bars after all) for behavior that never took place to begin with in the way it was alleged. And for which new evidence came to light only very, very infrequently.

As those condemned to this ugly, but legalized, monitoring fought back time after time only to be cruelly beaten down again and again. Sadly enough, it was the only way the system worked for these people. (To the small extent that it could be said to be working).

Everything was classified, pigeonholed, filed away and bottom lined according to typology. According to how it was perceived (and what it meant statistically) to some out of touch white collar authority figure in some clerical office somewhere. Some pure as the driven snow big shot who could not be talked back to (or challenged).

Even if that destructive labeling slowly (and invisibly) became extremely dangerous and life threatening to the subject of the labeling.

And most of the time when people fought back against these half truths or outright lies, they only made it worse and worse for themselves.

And that was precisely because confidentiality laws, invoked as being in everyone’s best interest without any conflict of interest at all, actually accomplished the main function of covering the organization’s ass (along with the rear ends of those in charge) and eliminating the need for real transparency.

But without transparency there is no democracy at all.

Nothing ever changed. (As in that old saying, The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.) It had happened to Amanda Knox over in Italy. And it happened—for very different reasons—right here in America as well.

And, on another level, nobody understood at all. When you were on the outside looking in, the mainstream—like a carefully picked jury placing you on trial for your life—always sat invisibly in judgment and you couldn’t prove anything about anything.

And the more you fought back, defended yourself, or tried to give your side of the story, the guiltier you were perceived to be from the perspective of the mainstream agenda.

As Claudia’s mother had said before she passed away: "Be careful what you say. They won’t say anything at the time, but they’ll remember it and hold it against you."

And because people only went by what they saw, or thought they saw, the mere act of fighting back was invariably turned around, misinterpreted—and misconstrued— as incontrovertible proof of guilt.

Their rationale went like this: you wouldn’t have to defend yourself so much if you were innocent. (Apparently they had never heard about being falsely accused).

All part of that other ridiculous assumption, acting guilty (or appearing guilty) automatically means you are guilty. (No matter how outrageous, people only went by what they saw).

Outside the box social control that goes unacknowledged, of course, forces people to wear shoes that don’t fit at all.

And it’s not a simple, straightforward matter of "If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it." Not only because you can’t just ignore everything, but because that other nasty point of view ("If you don’t like it, don’t come") is built into that way of seeing it as well.

As a result all too many people are forced all their lives (something like Cinderella before her prince finally arrived with the slipper that fit perfectly) to continuously accommodate themselves to disfiguring shoes that have never fit from the very beginning.

Shoes that cripple their feet in horribly painful ways that nobody even suspects, or could care less about even if they did.

People desperately needed to stand up to the system of control. But when they tried to they sooner or later discovered that (even with the best of intentions), it was almost always only a pretended (or lip service) dialogue.

Something like what happened to the little mermaid in the fairy story who fell in love (from a distance) with an earthly Prince and gladly sacrificed her fishtail to become a human being.

Only to discover (sadly) that not only was the transition to human legs so painful it resembled walking on knives, but that it was a totally wasted effort.

Not being a part of his established social clique, she had never even stood a ghost of a chance of being admitted to the Prince’s inner circle to meet him in the first place.

When she was a lot younger, Claudia had worked for the Civil Service at the Military Records. When the government bureaucrats she worked for weren’t ridiculing the idea of ruling (by waving big rulers around to make fun of themselves), they embodied all the concepts they claimed to be rejecting, did a complete about face and turned into total stick in the muds firmly entrenched on their civil service thrones.

Claudia had a sense of humor about the whole