Month: July 2010

The Citizen

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by VIKAS BAJAJ

“Bangladesh has the lowest garment wages in the world, according to labor rights advocates.” PHOTO/NYT

Already, in factories behind steel gates and tall concrete walls, tens of thousands of workers, most of them women, spend their days stitching T-shirts, pants and sweaters for Wal-Mart, H&M, Zara and other Western retailers and brands.

One of the Bangladeshi companies here, the DBL Group, employs 9,000 people making T-shirts and other knitwear. Business has been so good that the company is finishing a new 10-story building with open floors the size of soccer fields, planted with row after row of sewing machines.

The New York Times for more

(Submitted by Robin Khundkar)

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

It’s Obama’s fault, too, that, as a communicator, he cannot rally and inspire the nation from its fears. From his earliest years he has schooled himself not to be excitable, not to be an angry black man who would be alarming to his white friends at Harvard and his later corporate patrons. Self-control was his passport to the guardians of the system, who were desperate to find a symbolic leader to restore America’s credibility in the world after the disasters of the Bush era. He is too cool.

Counterpunch for more

by SETH FREEDMAN

The US president’s scapegoating of BP is a distraction; the only way to clean up the oil industry is to put it under public control.

In Sonia Shah’s definitive history of the oil industry, Crude, the base greed and exploitative nature of oil company executives is detailed time and again, and the laissez-faire attitude of the respective governments involved in green-lighting their activities is an ubiquitous trait throughout every stage of the process. Public and private sector prospectors thought nothing of wreaking environmental havoc wherever they sought black gold, more often than not causing massive social upheaval to boot in the countries into which they expanded.

Guardian for more

by JOHN CHERIAN

THE assassination attempt on the former army chief of Rwanda, Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, who was until recently the country’s envoy to India, has brought into international focus again the authoritarian rule of President Paul Kagame. Nyamwasa, who was granted political asylum in South Africa in February after his dramatic escape from Rwanda, was shot by a lone gunman outside his residence in a posh Johannesburg suburb in the last week of June. At the time of writing this report, his condition remained critical, though doctors have said his chances of survival are high.

Frontline for more

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by GEORGE BLECHER

It takes a good deal of selective reading to see it, but the US economic picture isn’t looking quite as rosy as the end-of-recession optimists maintain, and it seems like it’s getting worse. According to the US Census Bureau, the market for new housing is the worst that it’s been since 1963, when they started keeping records. Homeowners are abandoning their houses and apartments by the thousands because they can’t pay their mortgages. Eighty-three US banks have failed this year, more than double last year’s rate. And then there’s the continuing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, which has put thousands of people out of work.

All this doesn’t seem to influence the behaviour of corporate America, which continues to create an atmosphere of suspicion and resentment. In April, a coal mine in West Virginia exploded, killing scores of miners – and immediately questions were raised about whether the owners had been collecting piles of violations and bribing inspectors to overlook them.

Eurozine for more

DNA

ISLAMABAD: Despite strong protest by Pakistan’s Hindu community, an 87-year-old pre-partition Hindu temple in Pakistan’s garrison town of Rawalpindi is facing demolition.

According to Jagmohan Kumar, the head of the Hindu community in Rawalpindi, the templewas being used by Hindus and Sikhs to perform last rituals of their dear ones.

According to the plaque fixed on the building, Lala Tansukh Rai, the Raees-e-Azam Rawalpindi, had constructed the temple in memory of his wife. “The ‘Shamshan Ghat’ is not only used by the locals but by the foreign missions of China and the Buddhist community as well”, Kumar said.

DNA for more

by DENNIS OVERBYE

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

The New York Times for more