Reading into it

Having finished Carole Maso's AVA, I had been picking away grouchily at the damned huge Pynchon novel, when a friend loaned me a nonfiction book called Factory Girls, written by a young Chinese American woman who spent ten years writing for the Wall Street Journal about China. This background makes me suspicious that the author is some kind of free market proponent, but I'm not far enough along in the book to be able to tell. The WSJ is generally too right-leaning and corporation building for me, but they did used to have a few interesting pieces every once in a while. Now "WSJ" should stand for White Suckers' Journal, as in sucking the planet dry of resources in the name of "productivity". Anyway, this book is about young migrant Chinese girls who leave their rural homes for factory work in the cities, to try to claw their way out of poverty. At the time this book was published, there were 130 million of these migrant workers; biggest human movement in search of work ever recorded. Since Bush and his crew made the world economy crash, this migration has reversed...
Saw a hideous example of American consumption today: Older white guy in shades, balding all the way back to his long white mullet, slowly driving along in his white PT Cruiser convertible, blasting Earth, Wind and Fire as he looked around arrogantly, sucking on a lollipop. Some scenes sear the brain.