Black Cat #14 (November 1948) Cover by Lee Elias
Fumes spewed from the machinery as workers — wearing only T-shirts, sandals and no masks — at a recycling factory in northern Malaysia manually sorted through mountains of plastic scrap.
The workers, mainly from Bangladesh, earned around $12 a day, sometimes toiling seven days a week.
The labour was “very cheap,” said one businessman, as he gave a tour to undercover CBC Marketplace journalists posing as plastics brokers from a fake Canadian company.
The factory was willing to buy the dirty plastic being offered — and said they would break the country’s strict importing laws to do it, advising the journalists to lie on the shipping container labels.
“Sometimes I leave the back door open for my deaf and blind dog so he can enjoy what the neighbors are grilling.”
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Eliot has been a leftist activist in the Pacific Northwest and proponent of armed self-defense since the 1990s.
He said his philosophy is informed by his early experience as an activist in Seattle.
“It was just sort of the standard procedure that you should know about labor history, you should know about working-class issues,” he said. “And it would be expected that you would also know how to use a rifle.”
Eliot said spontaneous violence is a serious concern at demonstrations like the Women’s March. He pointed to the white supremacist who stabbed two men on a Portland train in 2017 and the neo-Nazi who killed someone when he drove his car into a crowd of protesters in Charlottesville.
