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A simple cotton T-shirt doesn’t seem quite so simple when you try to trace the vast global process involved in making it.

The extraordinary success of fast fashion giants like H&M, Zana and Forever 21 lies squarely in the ability to produce a massive amount of clothing – billions of garments a year – in the cheapest, quickest way possible. It seems pretty counterintuitive that the least expensive way to make a shirt is to buy cotton grown in Texas, mill and dye it in China, manufacture it in Bangladesh, and then ship it half a world away to an H&M or Gap store in San Francisco.  But when you factor in the dramatically lower labor and material costs offered by suppliers in developing countries, this kind of global supply chain model begins to make more sense.

In fact, the “Made In …” label on your shirt, actually only reveals a fraction of the many places involved in the process.

The visualization above takes you through the process – from cotton field to store – of how an average cotton T-shirt is made.  This is, of course, a hypothetical example based on the locales of the world’s top cotton and garment producers. It’s nearly impossible to trace the exact path of any given T-shirt. The cotton could just as likely have been grown in India or Turkey, milled in Pakistan or Mexico, and sewn in El Salvador or South Africa.  But the route below traces a pretty common path.

Most major retailers are secretive about who their suppliers are. And many brands have little or no connection with second-tier suppliers (who provide the raw materials). Gap, for instance, only gives a list of the nearly 50 countries where its primary suppliers are located. H&M is among the more transparent retail giants: – it recently released a list of names and locations of what it claims is 95 percent of the suppliers it contracts with – about 800 factories in Asia and Europe.

The map above, produced by the International Business Times, identifies the world’s largest apparel exporting countries. Click on the image to view the interactive version, as well as an interactive map of H&M’s listed suppliers.

In 1960, an average American household spent over 10 percent of its income on clothing and shoes – equivalent to roughly $4,000 today. The average person bought fewer than 25 garments each year. And about 95 percent of those clothes were made in the United States.

Fast forward half a century.

Today, the average American household spends less than 3.5 percent of its budget on clothing and shoes – under $1,800. Yet, we buy more clothing than ever before: nearly 20 billion garments a year, close to 70 pieces of clothing per person, or more than one clothing purchase per week.

Oh, and guess how much of that is made in the U.S.: about 2 percent.

Browse through the timeline below to see how dramatically the cost and origin of our clothing has changed. And then continue reading to find out why.

How did we get here?

The mid-1970s saw the emergence of large textile mills and factories in China and other developing countries in Asia and Latin America. These operations offered incredibly cheap labor and raw materials, as well as the capacity to quickly manufacture huge orders. By 1980, even though about 70 percent of the clothing Americans bought was still made domestically, a handful of big retail chains like Gap Inc. and J.C. Penney began transitioning away from actually making their own clothes.  Instead, they increasingly just designed and marketed them, but outsourced production factories overseas where the work was done at a tiny fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the same early adopters began to develop vast global supply chains that allowed them to divide up each step of the production process, sending the work to whichever location offered the cheapest, most efficient services. By 2003, Gap was ordering its clothes from more than 1,200 different factories in 42 countries, according to Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Fast Fashion.

A successive wave of trade liberalization polices in the 1990s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, effectively wiped out most import restrictions and duties on foreign-made clothing. American retailers increasingly looked to suppliers in the Global South for all manufacturing needs.

Not surprisingly, American textile manufactures couldn’t compete: between 1990 and 2011, about 750,000 apparel manufacturing jobs in the U.S. disappeared, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The average U.S. garment worker, among the roughly150,000 who still remain, makes about 38 times the wage of his or her counterpart in Bangladesh, according to Cline.

Today the U.S. apparel market is the largest in the world, comprising about 28 percent of the global total. And hardly any of this clothing comes with a Made in the USA tag.

Beneath the presentation is a diagram by the NY Times illustrating the various outcomes of the case.

Note: the presentation is best viewed in full-screen mode; use the arrows to advance and zoom in/out on any text or image

Possible outcomes

Source: New York Times. Click to view original image.

On March 20, 2003 U.S. forces invaded Iraq under the false pretense that its government was harboring weapons of mass destruction. Intended to be a brief mission to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime and find the weapons, the Defense Department estimated the effort would cost about $60 billion.  Today, 10 years later, Iraq is still reeling from a prolonged conflict that, according to a recent study, has cost the U.S. more than $2 trillion (and growing) and brought a death toll of nearly 190,000 civilians, soldiers, journalists and aid workers.

While the U.S. occupation did lead to the overthrow of Hussein and the semblance of a fragile democracy, it also launched the country into a state of civil war, fueled by an ongoing period of political instability and intense sectarian violence. The U.S. occupation officially ended in December of 2011, but today the bloodshed continues on a nearly daily basis as large swaths of Iraq remain mired in conflict.

This collection of visualizations illustrates some of the war’s cold hard facts, the big milestones, and the many layers of miscalculation and deception.

1. By the numbers: charting an expensive, bloody decade

This infographic, produced by The Guardian, details the high rate of fatalities and expenses associated with the Iraq War. Use the tool below to zoom in on details.

2. A chronology of war

Produced by the Council on Foreign Relations this timeline documents the major milestones of the War in Iraq, from the initial invasion on March 20, 2003 to the final exit of U.S. troops on Dec. 18, 2011.

3. Counting the fallen

Total deaths

A recently released report from Brown University’s Costs of War project, estimates that close to 190,000 people have died in Iraq since the war effort began. That includes close to 4,500 U.S. troops and upwards of  134,000 Iraqi civilians (about 70 percent of all deaths).

Source: Costs of War project

Using data from Wikileaks, the Guardian in 2010 created this interactive map detailing every recorded death in Iraq between 2004 and 2009.

U.S. soldiers deaths

This interactive, produced by CNN, shows the nearly 4,500 fatalities of U.S. armed forces in Iraq, with details on each soldier’s hometown and place of death in Iraq.

4. The tab

When the Iraq War began, the Defense Department anticipated that the effort would cost about $60 billion. While the U.S. price tag still remains a matter of speculation, even the most conservative estimates now place it at well over $1 trillion. The recent Brown University study estimates the current tab at around $2 trillion, and predicts it will eventually reach $6 trillion when accounting for residual expenses .

This animation, produced by Good Magazine – which places the current U.S. tab at a figure higher than most other estimates – details the elements that made the war so costly.

5. The spin and its deadly consequences

The U.S. invaded Iraq on the false stipulation that it had weapons of mass destruction. A mix of faulty intelligence and deception from the highest ranks of government resulted in an occupation that lasted longer than World War II. The first visualization below, by the Center for Public Integrity,  highlights the false statements made by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion. The subsequent interactive, produced by the left-leaning Mother Jones Magazine details the many layers of deception that led us into Iraq.

Center for Public Integrity

Source: Factcheck.org

Compared to other high-income nations in the world, America isn’t unusually violent; we’re just unusually lethal.

That’s according to David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. He argues there is a direct connection between the U.S. being leaps and bounds ahead of any other industrialized country in terms of overall gun death rates and gun homicides — and the fact that we have the highest gun-ownership rates in the world

“We are a nation which does not have more crime or more violence,” Hemenway said during a forum on gun violence held shortly after the Newtown shooting. “We are an average nation in terms of assault, robbery, and (non-firearms) homicides.” What distinguishes the U.S., he notes, is our rate of gun violence: “The United States has a very horrific gun problem … 85 people a day dying from guns from all sorts of injury … Compared to the other developed countries, we are just doing terribly.”

Below are a handful of particularly striking gun homicide stats, based on 2010 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scroll over the charts below for additional information.

*Note that stats on gun deaths vary depending on which government agency is reporting them.

The U.S. gun murder rate — which is now actually at its lowest level since the early 1980′s — is still more than double that of any other wealthy nation in the world.

Hemenway notes that a child in the U.S is about 13 times more likely to be a victim of a firearm-related homicide than children in most other industrialized nations.

Firearms were the third leading cause of injury-related deaths nationwide in 2010, following poisoning and motor vehicle accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For the sake of comparison, in 2010 there were more than twice as many firearms deaths in the U.S. than terrorism-related deaths worldwide.

The following visualization, produced by Periscopic, uses data from the F.B.I’s Uniform Crime Report (which reported 9,595 homicides for 2010, but did not include data from Florida and Alabama), in an attempt to calculate the years of life stolen from gun murder victims. Each strand in the graph below represents a person killed by gun violence. Visit their site to explore the data by sex, age group and region.

This map, produced by NBC News as part of its gun violence series, provides a sobering look at all the gun-related deaths (homicides, suicides, and accidental) that occurred over this year’s  Martin Luther King holiday weekend. Click on the image to view the map interactively on NBC’s site. Below that is a clip reporting the various instances of gun homicides over the course of that one bloody weekend.

There’s been a lot of news recently about the government’s ongoing battle over the deficit and the debt ceiling.

But what does it all really mean?

If you happened to be snoozing through most of your 12th grade economics class, here’s a quick refresher:

The deficit is the gap between what the government spends and what it actually makes in revenue (through taxes).

So, basically, to put it into first-grade math terms: (D)eficit  = (S)pending – (R)evenue 

Debt – as many college students are all too familiar with – is the amount you owe someone else.  The U.S. government has racked up a lot of it over the years in order to pay for all of its programs and services – more than $16.6 trillion, or roughly $52,000 for every American. The debt limit or debt ceiling is the threshold for how much the government can borrow to meet its spending obligations (this sets the limit for how deep into debt American can slide).

Over the years, as the national debt has grown, the Treasury has periodically bumped up against this ceiling. As required by the Constitution, Congress must then approve raising that limit so the government can continue paying for stuff.  Although never a particularly popular thing to do, Congress has agreed to raise this limit dozens of time with little fanfare (until recently). Because if the ceiling is not raised, than the U.S. would have to default on its debt. And that would be really bad news.

One way of making some sense of all this stuff is thinking about your own credit card account:

Let’s say you want to buy a new big flat screen TV that costs $2,000, but you only have $1,000 in your bank account. In other words, you have a deficit of a grand.

So, \what are you gonna do?

Well, while prudence might suggest saving up until you have enough dough to actually pay for the TV upfront, instant gratification suggests otherwise. So you reach for your credit card and charge it. That is, you pay for it with money you don’t actually have: you make the conscious choice to hold onto the $1,000 in your pocket – which you need to pay for your other expenses -  and agree to go $2,000 into debt to get the what you want right now.

But before you stepped into the electronics store, you had set your debt ceiling at only $1,000 – the most you ever intended to owe anyone at any given time. But now, since you’re borrowing $2,000, you’re actually raising your debt ceiling to pay for something that barely fits in your living room.

Of course, the credit card company isn’t lending you this money out of the kindness of its heart – it’s making a profit by charging you interest. A whole lot it. And the longer you take the pay off the debt, the more interest you rack up.

So, whereas that TV would have cost a cool $2,000 if you had the money to pay for it when you bought it, it’s now costing you a good deal more since you’re paying off not only the initial cost ($2,000), but also the interest (whatever huge percentage the credit card company is charging you). In other words, the longer you take to pay off the TV, the more debt you accumulate, and the more that TV costs in the long run.

To get a sense of just how fast the U.S. accumulates debt, check out this crrazy real time debt clock (click on the image below).

Source: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Gun control advocates say yes. Gun rights folks beg to differ.

Big surprise on that one, huh?

Source: Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, an advocacy group pushing for tougher regulations, assigned every state a grade based on 29 different policy approaches to regulating firearms and ammunition. California topped the list with an  A-. (New York – which now requires background checks for ammunition sales – has since surpassed California in the toughness of it’s gun laws. It’s the first state to enact such legislation following the Newtown shooting. And debates have begun in a handful of other states – including California and Colorado – to strengthen gun laws there.)

The Center points to 2010 statistics showing that seven out of 10 states with the strictest regulations also had that lowest gun homicide rates.

Click on image to explore interactively. Source: Guardian

But gun rights advocates opposed to tighter regulations argue that this correlation is inconclusive and misleading. A common counter argument is that stricter regulations don’t do anything to prevent  criminals from getting a hold of guns -  they just prevent law abiding citizens from being able to protect themselves. Many also point to states like Maine, which has some of the loosest regulations in the country (it received an F grade by gun control groups,  but also has among the lowest gun homicide rates in the country). On the contrary, they argue, the strict gun laws in cities like Chicago and Washington D.C. have  failed to prevent those rising homicide rates in those places.

“The gun laws in Chicago only restrict the law-abiding citizens and they’ve essentially made the citizens prey,” Richard A. Pearson, executive director of the Illinois State Rifle Association told the NY Times.

California vs. South Dakota: the toughest and loosest gun laws

Despite its  relatively low rate of gun homicides, South Dakota got smacked with an F grade by the Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which identified it as the state with the nation’s weakest gun laws. Here’s how the two states compare:.

99 ways states have loosened gun laws

Mother Jones magazine tracked 99 state laws passed since 2009 that have made guns easier to own and carry in public, and harder for the government to track. According to the report, these laws were pushed through by the National Rifle Association and allies in state capitols. More than two-thirds of them were passed by Republican-controlled legislatures, though often with bipartisan support.

Mother Jones highlighted some of the more striking laws it came across:

• Bullets and booze: In Missouri, law-abiding citizens can carry a gun while intoxicated and even fire it if “acting in self-defense.”
• Child-safety lock off: In Kansas, permit holders can carry concealed weapons inside K-12 schools and at school-sponsored activities.
• Short arm of the law: In Utah, a person under felony indictment can buy a gun, and a person charged with a violent crime may be able to retain a concealed weapon permit. Nebraskans who’ve pled guilty to a violent crime can get a permit to carry a gun.
• Sweet Jesus! In Louisiana, permit holders can carry concealed weapons inside houses of worship.
• Without a trace: Virginia not only repealed a law requiring handgun vendors to submit sales records, but the state also ordered the destruction of all such previous records.

The big players in the debate

President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner, gives his 2013 State of the Union address. (Charles Dharapak-Pool/Getty Images)

So, what did the big guy actually say? These four multimedia resources help sort through the nitty gritty of the president’s speech.

A breakdown of the 12 big policy goals

The highlights: an annotated multimedia presentation

As they did with Obama’s inauguration address, the New York Times has created a great annotated version of the speech, allowing reader to click on the various speech highlights, watch corresponding clips from the address, and read further commentary.

Fact-checking the president

So, was everything he said true? Politico offers an interesting multimedia analysis, with specific clips from the speech and commentary as to the accuracy of the president’s statements.

The words, visualized

How do the president’s words look as a visualization? This interactive, created by Dmitry Paranyushkin from Nodus Labs, uses text network analysis tool Textexture to show us the the most prominent concepts inside the text and the relationship between the words used. Words are represented as nodes and the closer they occur next to each other within the text of the speech, the more interconnected they are in the network. Clusters, created by certain words appearing more often next to each other than in the rest of the vocabulary used, indicate distinct topics in Obama’s speech. Kind of weird – but definitely worth a look.

(Click here to view the timeline in full screen mode)

More on the gun control debate

For a primer on the debate over firearms, scroll the following interactive produced by the Associated Press, with multimedia analyses of the issues, the players, the terminology and public opinion.

That controversial cartoon we mentioned …

The following cartoon, produced by the creators of South Park, was featured in Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary film Bowling for Columbine. It presents a satirical perspective on America’s infatuation with guns, and has an obvious political bent. It does not represent the ideas or opinions of KQED, but is worth viewing to encourage debate on the issues it raises.