A week of garment workers fighting against exploitation, a person being arrested for using an abortion pill and a hospital planning to deport a patient in a coma

Hi, I’m Marcela: I’m a comedian, I live Brooklyn, and I really like to tell people how to feel about the news. After wowing zoomers all over on TikTok by giving them news with a sense of humour and anarchy, I decided to start a weekly Sunday newsletter to share my feelings about more news. 

My weekly newsletter has evolved into this beautiful Tuesday weekly news column for shado which also covers international news. I hope the newsletter keeps you informed and makes you laugh a little. We live in hell and I believe humour helps keep this place a little bit cooler.

Today I’m sharing my feelings on a woman being arrested for taking an abortion pill in so-called South Carolina, garment workers in South and Southeast Asia fighting against exploitation, the UN Secretary General pretending to care about imperialism, and a hospital planning to deport a woman in a coma.

Onto the news…

News that made me say your body belongs to the state

This week a woman was arrested in so-called South Carolina because she took an abortion pill to end a pregnancy in 2021 because in South Carolina it’s illegal to self-induce an abortion. 

Which means in South Carolina, like much of the so-called United States of America, if you have a uterus, your body belongs to the state.

Sure the state lets you walk your body around most of the time and you can even eat Gushers if you want. However, if you dare to put some things inside your body without the state’s permission, off to prison you go. 

Let’s be honest, the only thing that the state wants you to do with your body is to serve the capitalists and watch Law and Order so you keep thinking the police are great.

What’s extremely scary about this woman’s arrest is that her own health care providers snitched on her. 

Obviously this is a teachable moment for all of us that not all cops wear badges; some of them wear stethoscopes and scrubs. Maybe the cop loving producer of Law and Order will come up with a new series called Law and Order: The Hospital Unit to trick people into thinking that it’s actually good for doctors to snitch on their patients.

The fact that healthcare providers are working with police to arrest people for having an abortion should remind you that fascism requires everyone’s cooperation. 

If the people at St. Francis Hospital didn’t decide to be free interns to the Greenville Police Department, the police wouldn’t have known this woman had an abortion. I’m now referring to all snitches as free interns to the police because that’s a more creative name for people who enthusiastically provide unpaid labour to the police.

If fascism requires everyone’s cooperation, that means we all have to actively resist fascism.

News that made me tell you Nike should be paying you to wear Nike clothes

Garment workers in South and Southeast Asia are demanding that companies like Nike pay them back for stolen COVID-19 wages instead of giving the stolen money to investors and carrying out stock buybacks. 

Turns out, when Nike says just do it, it means just unapologetically stealing from workers. The Nike check (swoosh) represents the fact that the company has checked off exploiting workers as a tool to make Nike’s billionaire owner richer from its list of exploitation tactics.

Other checked items on Nike’s list of exploitation tactics include tricking consumers into paying them to advertise their clothes. That’s right, every time you wear something that says Nike, you are providing free advertising to Nike. They should be paying us to wear their clothes, but somehow they have convinced us that using our bodies as billboards for their brand makes us cool.

This is not just about Nike: this is about large fashion corporations building wealth through imperialism and their workers saying “no thanks” to exploitation. 

However, on 27th February garment workers around the world came together in solidarity to demand that fashion companies stop exploitation through a campaign Fight the Heist. I love the name Fight the Heist because it’s calling out exactly what these corporations are doing – stealing.

Fight the Heist also sounds like a really cool movie about workers realising they already control the means of production and quitting their jobs to take care of each other instead of making ugly shoes with a check mark on them. Yes, I called Nike shoes ugly because anything made from exploitation is ugly.

Nonetheless, workers starting a campaign to stop stealing highlights the fact that stealing is only legal when it’s done by rich people. Capitalism is essentially a large crime syndicate that says the only people allowed to commit crimes are rich people.

Hence, if we want to stop rich people from committing crimes, we have to end capitalism.

News that made me say imperialism doesn’t have a price tag

António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations said wealthier countries should pay 500 billion dollars a year to low income countries who have been trapped in a poverty cycle through exploitation. 

What he didn’t mention was that the organisation which he presides over is one of the tools used for said exploitation.

That’s like me taking an edible and then getting angry at the edible for making me high. If I didn’t want to get high, then I wouldn’t take an edible. If you are still on the fence about whether or not the United Nations is a tool of exploitation, I would like for you to read about the P5 + 1. 

Hint: No, it’s not a trigonometric function. Yes, it’s an autocracy pretending to be democracy.

Now, I don’t know António Guterres so I will refrain from calling him a liar who is pretending he cares about countries that are being exploited while leading their tool of exploitation. 

What I will say to António is that if he really wants to stop the cycle of poverty, he should use his voice to tell poor countries to kick imperialists out. Telling imperialists to pay for exploitation with stolen money isn’t justice. It’s saying that it’s okay for you to do imperialism as long as you pay for it. Imperialism is not a mattress!

Even worse, António Guterres is putting a discounted price tag on imperialism. If you could put a price tag on imperialism, which you can’t, 500 billion dollars a year is nowhere close to returning all the stolen wealth that colonisers have stolen. Guterres, stop pricing imperialism like a mattress discount event!

News that convinced me we live in a real life horror film

Sometimes when I read the news I have to pinch myself to wake up because I just can’t believe the news I’m reading about is not a nightmare. If you are thinking I must pinch myself a lot, I actually don’t because ever since I found out about the existence of Joe Rogan I assume capitalism is capable of anything.

I did have to pinch myself when I read that a hospital in the place called Pennsylvania is attempting to deport an undocumented woman in a coma. Especially that they were going to deport her without reattaching the part of her skull that was removed during surgery. That is some extreme villainy that I only expect to see in one of the Saw movies. Full disclosure, I’ve never seen any Saw movie, but it’s the most evil horror film I can think of to describe this very evil act.

Maybe I watched too many episodes (by too many I mean one) of Grey’s Anatomy, but it was my understanding that the sole purpose of hospitals is to keep people alive. However, this is capitalism and in capitalism the only purpose of anything is to make money. 

So knowing all this I should have expected that if an undocumented woman who lacks funds needs her life to be saved, the hospital stops being a hospital and transforms into a scene from a horror film.

What’s additionally villainous about this news is that the reason why the hospital might be carrying out this deportation is not just because of the lack of funds from the woman, but potentially to avoid a malpractice suit. 

Now this part of the news I did expect. One thing I always expect from capitalists is to protect their wealth at all costs, including becoming villains in a real life horror film.

I took a break from the news to tell you the cure for fascism 

@feelthenewswithmarcela So I had like 10 minutes so I wrote an ad for the cure to fascism. Please excuse any typos in captions. #black #leftist ♬ original sound – Feel the News

See ya next week,

 Marcela