Tom Walker with his post on slavery and disobedience caused me to spend the
weekend, along with my flu and diarrhea to notice some things that normally
I might pass by:
1. Dateline - NBC Friday Nite - Segment on Saipan, an island battleground
in the second World War, an American Protectorate. Large textile factories
employing women from Communist China, imported and put inside barb wire
surrounded factories. Fourteen hour days, sweatshop conditions, minimal
living conditions, no legal redress, unfair labour contracts, employer can
force women to have an abortion if they become pregnant. The beneficiaries,
Laurens, Walt Disney, The Gap and most of the other name brand clothing
retailers who need "made in America" on their labels. The American
response, tsk tsk, we are looking into it. Right, at the speed of a snail
they are looking into it.
2. CBC NewsMagazine - Subject Peru and Canada. 15 minutes in how our
name brand Companies are trading in Peru. Pretty sickening watching
families stand around garbage trucks rummaging for food while happy little
capitalists are driving by in their Mercedes Benz. The old story, we loan
them money to buy our manufactured goods and they tax the hell out their
poor to pay off the loans while the well connected buy Villas.
3. Saturdays Ottawa Citizen. Korea declares Amensty for 5.5 million
prisoners. Stop a minute and let that number roll around in your head. 5.5
million people in jail for next to nothing - a city the size of Toronto and
suburbs. Let's not ask what kind of hell is being let loose on Korea under
the double whammy of mass unemployment being caused by the IMF and 5.5
million individuals let loose in society where there is no work and massive
dislocation going on. Do I blame the current Prime Minister - no, he is
trying to redress the problems of his predecessors - the rotten animals.
4. The United States accuses Canada of exploiting the Cuban People.
Thanks Jesse Helmes.
5. Sunday Globe and Mail - Headline story. US Border guards can ban
Canadian Citizens for 5 years up to indefinitely if they decide, without
proof, just on the word of the Border Guard that someone has lied to them.
Thanks, I'll stay home. Why don't you just put up the barb wire?
6. Slave auctions in Nepal, buy one get one free says the Ottawa Citizen
Sunday edition.
7. Excerpt from Le Monde
Central American workers in the hands of the maquilas
by Maurice Lemoine
The maquilas are factories working under contract to foreign firms,
designed to manufacture exports at minimum cost. They first
appeared in Mexico in the 1960s and are now proliferating in
Central America's free zones as part of the move to relocate from
the North and create jobs in the South. But this is far from
utopia. Trade unions are gagged and workers' rights are violated on
a grand scale. Employers are free to impose a 70-hour week (or
longer) on a largely female workforce. And pay them starvation
wages.
8. China in it's new drive towards capitalism and corporate markets is
talking about putting millions out of work from their socialist programs,
bad as they were, at least people had some access to livelihood.
That's a weekend reading and TV. I missed New Zealands problems, Burma,
Indonesia, malaise in Japan, barrios in Brazil, 5 pages in the Citizen on
how they are brutalizing children in Africa to make them into soldiers which
I couldn't read because I would throw up, Algeria, Kosvo, Mafia in Russia,
Afghanistan, Tibet, Tamil rebels, neo nazis in Germany, Right Wing
Christians in the US, Palestinians and Israel, Iran and weapons of mass
destruction with the US and to my shame, Canada ready to kill children that
we are not starving to death through sanctions.
Oh yes, let's not forget hours and hours of talk shows bemoaning the morals
of Mr.. Clinton with every bimbo who has ever been close to him coming out
of the woodwork with a story of his groping hands. Kenneth Starr, the
sanctimonious inquisitor who so far is restricted from torture to obtain a
confession - which I'm sure Pat Buchanan and his followers feel is an
oversight of US Justice in pursuit of the truth. A few turns of the
thumbscrew and Bill would tell all and then we could devise some especially
nasty death sentence for betraying the American people.
Oh, yes, I forgot the article from Britain about how their taxpayers have
been subsidizing a training program in which thousands of soldiers from
Serbia, African Nations and other trouble spots like Iran have been taught
to control populations. Of course, they probably took their curriculum from
the CIA.
Canada, is far from innocent here, we have our MAI supporters in government
like Sergio Marche, our fine Immigration minds who believe an immigrant must
know French or English before they can be let into Canada, RCMP Officers who
pepper spray Canadians protesting for the civil rights of others in
Vancouver while the Prime Minister jokes that he uses pepper on his meals.
A business community that tags along on Team Canada missions looking to find
places to relocate for lower labour costs so they can move their factories
and unemploy Canadians.
OH, and how about the headlines of JOBS JOBS, JOBS, which graced the Citizen
because the Unemployment Rate dropped to 8.2% last month. Just a minute
here. Am I to believe that for 8 years we could not get the unemployment
rate down below 9% and then in the last two monthly reports it has dropped a
full percentage point - in the middle of winter? In Canada, that can happen
in August - not in February! Where is the wonderful investigative reporting
that will expose this lie? Did Stat's Can change they way they do
statistics? Wow, they brag, 86,000 new full time jobs. It was only three
or four months ago I read that they had created 56,000 partime jobs with
nary a full time job in sight - give me a break.
When the lies become so big that the truth seems a lie then we have lost the
war. When the disasters become so big that the mind is in a constant state
of numbness, trying to comprehend then the only defense is to tune out which
allows the atrocities to continue. When those in power have strategies to
defuse honest questions, legitimate opposition and reasonable dissent, then
they have won. When the press is owned by business and practices the lie of
omission, then the citizen has no friend. When the injustices are so
numerous and so frequent and the redress so slow, then they have won.
Yes, Tom Walker, their is slavery in the workplace and in the world - and we
are the slaves!
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
