phew!

it's a good thing we had fair trade in the house for the recent best of panama auction. if it weren't for them, people would have been taking advantage of these poor, helpless independent farmers and paying them less than the arbitrary amount of $1.20/lb, come rain or shine.

oh no, wait. what's that you say? transfair/fair trade wasn't a part of this auction? they weren't policing the event, ensuring that nobody but themselves could set the power of life and death--or at least life versus a better life--over these farmers? you mean to tell me nobody from fair trade had the good sense enough about them to travel down to panama to mobilize the poor, backward, defenseless farmers who were out there all alone against the coyotes gringos de cafe who would rob them blind and take their coffee?

from the look of it, the only people who made out like bandits were the not so poor, not so backwards they couldn't get their crops onto an inernationally attended internet auction, and not so defenseless farmers who, even the very least of them, mustered on their very own without fair trade's help, a minimum $1.50/lb and an average of $4.72/lb. (how much would they have had to pay fair trade for the "right" to be oppression-free?)

too bad for fair trade. you've just become one more nail's worth of irrelevant.

now, anyone in possession wanna make me less irrelevant and score me a bag of any of these?