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New light cast on 'Sweatshop Christmas'
December 21, 1996, Metro Edition "Sweatshop Christmas," U.S. News & World Report's cover story about the Third World elves who slave away making the Barbie dolls and Disney toys for America's children, could have been a real bummer.
Under less sophisticated or more manipulative editorship, the magazine's survey of the low pay and lousy working conditions in the factories and sweatshops of Pakistan, China and New York's garment district could have been just a cheap way to ruin many a merry First World Christmas.
But the intention of U.S. News obviously was not to instill guilt or incite outrage. It was to inform consumers about the complexities of global trade in a comprehensive, balanced and unhysterical way and to provide them with practical advice about finding out where and how an item they want to buy was made.
As described by writer William Holstein, the global workplace is not pretty: Children in Pakistan bloody their fingers sewing panels on Reebok soccer balls. Factory workers in China earn $ 1.99 a day manufacturing dolls for Mattel. Mexican couples in Los Angeles working for a Guess jeans subcontractor are forced to take work home with them to meet their quotas.
But as Holstein makes clear, Americans have to keep things in perspective. What look like horrific working conditions or slave wages to people in the world's wealthiest country "are not just acceptable but actually attractive to others who live overseas or even in 'Third World pockets' of the United States."
Also, Holstein says, the current system of global sourcing used by America's $ 1.3 trillion retail industry is not all bad. Lower labor costs have greatly benefited American consumers - apparel prices have actually declined in real terms in recent years. And in many poorer countries, he points out, if workers weren't sweating away for pennies an hour making Nikes, they would be making less elsewhere or wouldn't have jobs at all.
"The silver lining," Holstein says, "is that if Americans respond to even some of these concerns, they could enjoy their shopping and improve the conditions that millions of people around the world encounter in their daily lives."
Much ado about stogies
It's as heavy as a brick - 3 pounds, 2 ounces, more than 20 times the weight of last week's issue of Time. It's got 538 oversize pages, it's profusely illustrated and it's devoted with a near-messianic zeal to the greater glory of . . . the cigar. It's Cigar Aficionado, the perfect Christmas gift not only for devotees of the stogie but also for connoisseurs of the absurd.
In the current issue, there's a story on college professors who smoke cigars and a story on TV newscasters who smoke cigars and several stories on actors who smoke cigars - including Danny DeVito, who is shown savoring a fat robusto while sprawled on a leather couch in his pajamas.
There's a story on Parisian bars where you can smoke cigars and a story on American bars where you can smoke cigars and a story on how to create a nice place to smoke cigars at home. There are interviews with a cigarmaker and a cigar seller, and there's a story on the racehorse Cigar, the only celebrity in the magazine not pictured smoking a cigar.
In the magazine's lavish photo spreads, cigars are displayed with the kind of loving care seen in Playboy pictorials on the Girls of the Big Ten.
It's hard to fill a magazine with stories about cigars. Cigar Aficionado solves the problem by running stories that are only tangentially connected to tobacco. For example, the Dominican Republic makes good cigars, so the magazine runs a story on Dominican baseball. Fidel Castro is a famous ex-cigar smoker, so the magazine runs a photo essay on the day Castro seized Havana in 1959. For fans of photojournalism, that article alone is worth the $ 4.95 cover price.
Exner's exploits
The initial rumble of media noise about Judith Campbell Exner's allegation that she aborted President John Kennedy's child in 1963 has passed like a summer thunderstorm. But the details of Exner's surprising but possibly true claim - first revealed by gossip columnist Liz Smith in December's Vanity Fair - is worth reading.
Exner, 63, reportedly carried on a 2 1/2 -year affair with Kennedy. Carrying on with Kennedy was nothing special, as we all now know. But while Exner was sleeping with the prez, she was also good pals with Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, whose organization is said to have helped JFK win elections and was involved in Kennedy's CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Exner, who served as JFK's money/message-courier to the Mob, has been accused of being a call girl, a Mafia mistress and a hustler, but Smith says Exner was none of the above. Yes, Exner told some lies in her 1977 book, Smith says. But Exner says she lied because she was afraid the Mob would kill her.
Smith buys Exner's version of events partly on faith, but Exner also has proof. She was a pack rat who kept hotel receipts, phone records and the bills for her abortion at Chicago's Grant Hospital.
- The December issue of Black Enterprise magazine shows how much potential consumer muscle blacks have to flex over the TV and film industry. In a special entertainment issue that features Spike Lee holding hands with Johnnie Cochran and Olden Lee, two of the investors in "Get on the Bus," the magazine explores how blacks can influence Hollywood's portrayal of them on the big and small screen.
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