Sweatshops

Monday

Ross Anderson

The useful influencers of Shein

The Soviets had a problem. On March 5, 1940, Stalin had given the order to massacre 14,700 Polish officers, which his vicious secret police NKVD happily did. Job well done; until they lost Poland to the Nazis, who discovered some mass graves in the Katyn forest. Goebbels began using this to paint Britain’s ally as monsters (which, in hindsight, was fair).  This was a disastrous public relations problem! And so, they turned to the press, and those like Ralph Parker of the Times of London, who traveled by caviar-supplied trains to Katyn, bedded Soviet honeypots and came back repeating the Soviet line.

shein

Saturday

Deborah Ross

In this instance, greed isn’t good: Greed reviewed

From our UK edition

Greed is Michael Winterbottom’s satire on the obscenely rich and, in particular, a billionaire, asset-stripping retail tycoon whose resemblance to any living person is purely intentional. (Hello, Sir Philip Green.) Plenty to work with, you would think. Low-hanging fruit and all that. But as the characters are so feebly sketched and the ‘jokes’ — ‘jokes’ in quotation marks; always a bad sign — are so heavy-handed it drags (and drags) rather than flies. Greed is good, greed works, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street. But in this instance it isn’t. And doesn’t. Greed is good, Gordon Gekko famously said in Wall Street.