This week: • Wal-Mart • Wolfie • Alba •
• Bookman • TWOT™ • Biofuels • Google • Stuff •

 

Errr we really don’t have an excuse this time, except, well, err, we’re crap and we’re back and we’re reporting for duty having gone AWOL for a while. Apologies.

 

Wal-Mart keeping all our salaries down

In the last year or so we have observed how corporations increasingly like to refer to their global sourcing strategies as ‘China plus one’ — ie they have an alternative to the world’s most populous nation just in case.

Possible political instability, the rise of the Chinese currency are often cited as reasons for this insurance policy, yet the real reason is far darker than that. For China to have assumed the dominant situation it has on the world export scene it has had to maintain slave like labour conditions where wages are next to nothing. Hence how we were able last year to trundle up the Canton Fair in Guangzhou and bag a Krups style espresso machine for just US$10 and a decent blender for a mere US$8. Then we read James Kynge’s China Shakes The World and came across this sobering stat: in real terms Chinese workers earn just half what workers in Chicago made … in 1850.

However, pressure is growing to improve the lot of the Chinese labourer yet this is receiving flak from giant conglomerates, the Wal-Marts and General Electrics of this world. ‘China plus one’ is a threat directed to Beijing to make sure wages and work conditions remain firmly in the nineteenth century.

A report just out by Global Labor Strategies details the struggle to improve conditions for the Chinese workforce and why it matters to everyone in the world.

In March 2006, the Chinese government, with considerable popular backing, proposed a new labour law with limited but significant increases in workers’ rights. But the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Shanghai, the United States-China Business Council, and US-based global corporations have since lobbied hard to gut the proposed law, threatening to leave China for such countries as Pakistan and Thailand if the law is passed.

Their aggressive tactics appear to have had an impact. Last December, the Chinese government released a revised draft of the Labour Contract Law with significant changes in contract, collective bargaining, severance, and other rights guaranteed for Chinese workers that would favor corporate interests.

The corporate community quickly claimed credit for these revisions. The US-China Business Council declared the draft a “significant improvement”. Individual corporations were also pleased with the results of their lobbying campaign.

Scott Slipy, director of human resources in China for Microsoft, recently explained to Business Week: “We have enough investment at stake that we can usually get someone to listen to us if we are passionate about an issue.

“Comments from the business community appear to have had an impact. Whereas the March 2006 draft offered a substantial increase in the protection for employees and a greater role for unions than existing law, [the new draft] scaled back protections for employees and sharply curtailed the role of unions.”

Despite successfully removing important pro-worker provisions from the first draft, the business community has launched a major new lobby effort to further gut the legislation

The US-China Business Council, for example, has told the Chinese government that elements of the revised draft are “burdensome”, are “prohibitively expensive”, and will have “an adverse impact on the productivity and economic viability of employers”. One corporate lawyer ominously warned: “We will have to wait until the final draft is written and see how the law will be implemented. If the law is too negative for employers, then we might see a slowdown of recruitment.”

So why should you care what lowly Jonny Wang in the boondocks of the Yangtze makes? Here’s why.

About 25% of the global workforce is now Chinese.

“China increasingly sets the global norm for wages and working standards as it attracts jobs at both the high and low ends of the production chain. As a result, the hard-won gains of workers in the global North are being rapidly undermined while the aspirations of workers in the developing world are being dashed as China becomes the wage-setting country in many industries,” the report noted.

Roughly 66% of the increase in Chinese exports in the past 12 years can be attributed to non-Chinese-owned global companies and their joint ventures. Foreign-owned global corporations account for 60% of Chinese exports to the US.

Indeed, if the US retail giant Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China’s eighth-largest trading partner.

“The ‘Chinese threat’ is less about trade with China than it is about trade with Wal-Mart and GE. Global corporations move to China to lower labour costs - and they use those lower labour costs as a lever to drive down wages and working conditions for workers in other countries, and even within China itself,” the report noted.

“The reform of China’s labour law is important to workers everywhere. Chinese wages and conditions set those around the world not only in low-wage industries but increasingly in those with the highest of modern technology. Low wages and poor working conditions in China drive down those in the rest of the world in a ‘race to the bottom’. Failure to raise standards in China will have a devastating effect on workers around the world,” the report concluded.

 

 

Wolf whistles for Wolfie

Paul Wolfowitz, chickenhawk-in-chief of the US’s Iraq war effort, left the Pentagon to take over the presidency of the World Bank. He took with him noble goals of stamping out corruption not only around the world but within the bank itself, and ending poverty in Africa. His most notable achievement, apart from unilaterally suspending aid to corrupt countries like India and Chad, has been to arrange the temporary transfer of his girlfriend, bank employee Shaha Riza, to the US State Department (to work under Elizabeth Cheney, the vice president’s daughter) and end her poverty by raising her salary from $132,660 to a tax-free $193,590.

“I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” Wolfowitz said addressing hissing and booing World Bank staff. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis testify to other mistakes Wolfowitz has made.

Wolfowitz’s crime is typical of the Bush administration’s complete corruption — its kowtowing to industry, led of course by Halliburton.

Wolfowitz, the architect of the quagmire that is the Iraq war, has used his time at the World Bank to pay back favours. For instance, of the top five outside international appointments he has made during his nearly two-year tenure, three were senior political appointees of right-wing governments that provided strong backing for US policy in Iraq.

Of course Wolfie’s actions at the World Bank are hardly surprising. The body itself is essentially a coercion tool for US foreign policy — devised to reward and restrict nations accordingly.

Joe Stiglitz, former Chief Economist for the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in Economics was fired when he exposed the endemic corruption in the World Bank.

In 2001, Greg Palast interviewed Stiglitz in London. Palast wrote that in 1999 the World Bank fired Stiglitz after he went public about how the World Bank fixed foreign elections (e.g. Yeltsin in Russia) and robbed natural resources and capital from poor nations to feed the US Treasury which is 51% owner of the World Bank.

As president of the World Bank Wolfie deliberately gains a stranglehold on the economies of poor nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, plunging them into prisons of debt that rob them of their own struggling economies, their water, food, health care, education, self-determination and sovereignty

But firing Wolfowitz is like putting a bandaid on a malignant tumor of a victim that is terminally ill. The World Bank, WTO and IMF have been instruments of theft, misery and death around the world, just like the Pentagon was when Wolfie was there. All four institutions must die.

 

 

An alternative to the World Bank

Hugo Chavez has long realized the chains that the World Bank places on nations. With high oil prices he has been able to propose an alternative to the Washington bank that is working and may finally end the misery created by the World Bank.

The Bolivarian Alternative called ALBA, initiated by the oil rich Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is rising in Latin America. ALBA is buying the World Bank debts from countries like Argentina and paying them off, loosening the World Bank noose. ALBA is providing loans to countries without the manipulations and burdens placed upon them by the World Bank.

ALBA’s new economic system is reinforced by Banca del Sur, Telesur, Mercosur, Petrosur and ALBA-Petrocaribe. These institutions are developing an economic and political block that has already weakened the role of the World Bank, WTO and IMF in Latin America.

Now all we need is for Iran to buy up its neighbours debt and China, with $1.2trillion in foreign reserves, to bail out the rest of Asia and all of Africa.

 

 

On Wolfie … and other matters

We welcome Fantasy Island’s honourary mayor, Nick the Bookman (pictured), as our latest columnist who this week ruminates on Wolfie before taking more tangents than there are streets on our fair isle

So, Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, is in trouble. He joined in mid-2005 and organised a transfer to the State Department for his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza so there would be no conflict of interest. He also fast-tracked her severance pay without proper checks and clearance.

Apparently Miss Riza is making more than her boss, Condoleeza Rice. Such behaviour would make him appear to be either stupidly corrupt or arrogantly incompetent. If so, he ought to go. Lesser valued minions can be protected by a stratagem of Upward Failure (promotion so no one gets any blame and, oh you know) This works unless the Glass Ceiling is your See-through Floor. So how bad is this scandal? Here’s one way of looking at it…

Let’s say for simplicity that Paulie W makes US$3.65 million a year (it’s probably more). That works out at US$10K per day. Every day. That doesn’t include expenses - the perks of the job. He’s known the bewitching Miss Ali Riza for two years. They’re both high fliers, different departments so they may get together oh twice a week for sexual congress. That’s about 100 times a year - each year. If Paulie W gets sacked or whacked or whatever, his money’s gone. That means each blow/bonk session cost him in the region of US$36,500. Big bucks. Not in the realm of felonious American football players (“$81,000 on the stripper’s table”). Or the jaded progeny of Middle Eastern potentates. But it’s still expensive. Reminds me of Dorothy Parker. She said: “The (sexual) screwing you’re getting isn’t worth the (financial) screwing you’re getting” .

Wait, there’s more. If Paulie W is smart enough to strap on his “golden parachute” he could save what? About 50% of his wages for one year? That’s US$1.825 million. This means he gets US$3.65 million times 2 years = US$7.3 million + US$ 1.825 million = US$9.125 million overall. Divide by 200 (sessions overall) and it increases his porking prices to US$45,625 a session. Talk about more bucks for his bangs! The bad news is that the World Bank’s clients (NOT the Board) will be subsidising his jollies. Bet they don’t even get a complimentary video.

If he’s smart enough to do this, then he’s not stupid so he’s corrupt. Isn’t this circular logic easy? The basis of all religious discussion (we exist, therefore we were created, therefore there is a Creator, aka God, who created us so we exist) Sorry, wandered off there for a moment.

Time for full disclosure. I made up those figures for Paulie W and his ex-live-in lover. But, I think they’re within the limits of credibility (allowing for the rationalising of the fantastical). Maybe some other sleuths can unearth the real numbers. Do a time/motion study perhaps. How much fuck/suck for your buck? How many cents to the inch? I used as my model of probity the Bush Regime. If it’s OK for them to use WMD (Words of Mass Deception) to justify their senseless invasion of Iraq then what the hell. Never mind that it’s the wrong war, wrong time, wrong place, wrong leadership, wrong tactics and antiquarian and inadequate resources. Someone’s not reading their Sun Tzu right? Or maybe all bets are off if this is considered The First World Corporate War as espoused by Robert Greenwald’s great Iraq For Sale documentary and religious terrorism is just another offshoot.

And it’s not just Paulie W (anyone remember that photo of him with his big toe sticking out of his holey sock?). There’s John Bolton (a wanderer in between jobs - he was the former UN Ambassador). There’s Alberto “Spiceball” Gonzales, the under-fire (and soon-to-be-fired?) Attorney-General. Fired eight Special Prosecutors possibly because they were digging too deeply into Republican white-collar crime? All proud Dubyahoos, one and all. What about Donald “Rumstud” Rumfeld? How come he’s getting a free ride on the medical scandals at Walter Reed Hospital? They happened on his watch. No personal responsibility there? Or take, General Peter Pace who was fired over the scandal. He went on record as opposed to homosexual immorality. I mean, What A Wanker!? Biologically speaking there are two genders. Female and Male. There are four divisions. Bisexual, Heterosexual, Homosexual and Neuter. The last two are a null program. No direct progeny can result. (Maybe we should thank them for not contributing to global overpopulation?) Medical research seems close to proving the existence of a “homosexuality gene” so what does that do to “In God’s Image”? Are the fundamentalists happy with “God” as a pansexual entity? Is G too busy fucking to help us out? Arguments over sexism seem as stupid as arguments over racism. Basically, it’s been whitey for a long time but this is changing. Whites are a decreasing % of the American population. They’re certainly a minority in Hong Kong. And we don’t mind being called “gwai lohs” . The term has long since lost its sting.

Is it about the words we use  Is “dusky brethren” more appropriate than “coons” and “spooks” ? Is it more politically correct to refer to our neighbours with a “melanin surplus” and “Oedipal tendencies” ? Or should we just get in their faces with “nigga’ muthafucka’s”? (American spelling). Lenny Bruce voiced some insights on this issue about 40 years ago. He spotted black activist and comedian Dick Gregory in his audience and started riffing on “niggers, gooks, wops, spics, greaseballs” etc. He made the audience deeply uneasy until he tied up his rant by saying if these words were overused, they wouldn’t mean anything and your kid wouldn’t come home from school crying because someone else called him a …(insert insult of choice). Blacks insulting other blacks isn’t racist, stupid probably. Don Imus is white and his “nappy-headed ho’s” comment cost him his job. But not all of the Rutgers Basketball team is black. At least, one is white. Is she exempt in this? There seem to be an awful lot of blacks, ranging in colour from Octaroon or cafe-au-lait up to eggplant purple jumping on this bandwagon. Look at the Reverend Al Sharpton. Doesn’t he look plump and sleek? Well fed?  Never trust a Parish priest who’s better off than his poorest parishioner? Maybe Al should go back to joyriding with OJ and stop trying to be a political player. He’s driving through Humbuggery on his way to Demagoguery. Final destination…??? Now he’s seeking police protection because his Church is receiving “death” threats. OK, I’m done for now. The floor is open for debate.

Nick the Bookman.

 

 

Amnesty: TWOT™=war on human rights

Amnesty International turned up the heat on The War On Terror™ (TWOT™) last week with the head of the organization labelling the Cheney inspired conflict was now a war on human rights.

Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty International, the London-based international human rights group, condemned the labeling of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and dozens of other clandestine sites around the world, as “enemy combatants” and holding these individuals without charging them with any specific crime or bringing a prosecution. Amnesty maintains conditions at Gitmo are actually worsening.

A new facility at Guantánamo Bay is creating even harsher conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for detainees.

Conditions at Camp 6, which opened in December 2006, are described as “cruel and inhuman”. Detainees are confined for 22 hours a day to individual, steel cells with no natural light and minimal human contact. No activities are provided, with detainees subjected to 24-hour lighting and constant observation by guards.

In all, it appears that 80 per cent of Gitmo detainees are held in isolation, Amnesty said.

Cox added that with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the United States’ Congress condoned these practices and “took bad policy and turned it into bad law.”

“With this act, the U.S. Congress officially, in the name of all of us, carried out an assault on the core idea of human rights - on the idea that there are certain rights that belong to all human beings without exception, even those we have labeled enemy combatants,” Cox said.

“When the world’s superpower and its greatest democracy openly defends its own gross violations of human rights it sends the most powerful message to dictators and killers around the world,” Cox said.

“It actively helps them justify what is unjustifiable. It encourages repressive policies by our allies and most seriously it undermines the difficult and dangerous efforts of brave men and women around the world fighting against tyranny and acts of cruelty,” he added.

 

 

Biofuel: hazardous to our health

Biofuel — it has such a nice, green connotation to the word — an energy source grown from the earth. Brilliant; what could be better? Well, actually, the more we look into it the more we prefer good ol’ fashioned petrol to most forms of biofuel — the latter’s creation is normally way more devastating than plonking an oil platform in the middle of the ocean. Even the most generous analysis means that it takes eight parts oil to make 10 parts of ethanol, not exactly a brilliant switch from fossil fuels is it? And then there’s the massive destruction of the environment to consider.

Look at southeast Asia, for instance. Malaysia, together with Indonesia, is the world’s leading producer of crude palm oil for export, at a high cost, though. According to a 2005 Friends of the Earth report, 87 per cent of recent deforestation in the country has occurred to make way for palm-oil plantations.

Not only does this practice wreak havoc on the countries’ megafauna (such as orangutans, Sumatran rhinos and tigers, Asian elephants, gibbons, and tapirs), it also causes significant pollution. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 25 to 30 percent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere each year (about 1.6 billion tons) comes from deforestation.

Wetlands International have shown that destruction of SE Asian peatlands for Palm Oil plantations, which cover 0.2% of the global land  surface, is responsible for 8% of the global CO2 emissions. However, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol currently allows for peatland areas that have been burned and cleared to create biofuel plantations to be eligible for CDM funding!

The Malaysian government is drafting a national biofuel policy to encourage production and domestic consumption of palm oil based biofuel as well as for export to Europe.

“Corporations first clear the land for its lucrative timber. Then they burn everything that’s left on the land, such as shrubs, stumps, and peat soil, which can smolder for three to four months before it’s finally extinguished”, says Michelle Desilets, director of the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, UK. Tree-felling combined with the burning creates a haze above the forest and releases tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to the same global warming that biofuels are supposed to reduce.

“When you turn a product into a world commodity, you get corporations involved,” says Tim Keating, executive director of Rainforest Relief. “Originally palm oil was collected by hand, but once you get corporations involved, you end up having forest clearing and mass plantations.”

In Latin America, soybean is the source of choice for the massively expanding biofuel industry there which has led to huge deforestation the Brazilian Amazon and in Paraguay.

Furthermore, technologies are already being developed to convert timber into ethanol (with the use of genetically modified organisms) and thus the biofuel industry will promote an even greater expansion of fast growing monoculture tree plantations both in forest areas — increasing deforestation — and in grasslands.

 Both deforestation and the change in grassland use imply releasing the carbon they store.  To this are added the emissions from growing, processing and transporting the biofuel itself, mostly done on the basis of oil and other elements releasing greenhouse effect gases: the manufacture of machinery used, the fuel used for its operation, the production and use of chemical fertilizers and agrochemicals, the trucks and ships transporting it to its destination, etc. That is to say, the net carbon balance in areas given up to the production of biofuels may even be negative, thus increasing the concentration of greenhouse effect gases in the atmosphere which is precisely what this change intended to avoid.

 

 

Google frugal with news

Kurt Nimmo is always a favoured read of ours on the web. He tends to find extraordinary stories and has cracking contacts to back them up.

Lately he has turned his attention to search engine giant, Google, which, it would seem, is staffed by myriad Mibs.

Google recently delisted the Italian web site Uruknet as a news source, thus removing it from the Google News page. According to Alexa, the web-ranking organization, Uruknet is highly rated as an Iraqi news source. The little red email would back this up — Uruknet has provided us with schniblets of Iraqi intel we can’t get anywhere else over the years.

“Uruknet is and has been the most consistent, credible, and powerful web-based source of news and information on Iraq during the last 4 years. They have incomparable lines of communication direct from inside Iraq that fly in the face of the lies of the Global Corporate Empire. When the imperialists cannot buy off or intimidate websites like Uruknet, they can always depend on their billion dollar corporations like Google to get the job done,” explains Les Blough of AxisofLogic.

“But then, of course, the idea here is not to provide both sides of a given news story, but only the politically correct, that is to say the neocon side of a given news story. In essence, Google News is not much different than the New York Times or the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post,” writes Kurt Nimmo.

“According to Robert Steele, former intelligence officer the second-ranking civilian in U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence from 1988-1992, Google takes ‘money and direction from my old colleague Dr. Rick Steinheiser in the Office of Research and Development at CIA.’ As well, according to the Google Watch web site, Google hires former spooks, for instance Matt Cutts, a former NSA employee with a ‘top-secret clearance.’”

Google and MSN et al might on the surface look as if they are opening information to the public on a scale previously unimaginable, but in reality they are the ultimate censors. Google is frugle with the truth — find another search engine that gives you both sides of the story. We’re still working on our conspiracy theory wiki.

 

 

Stuff we like

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

 

Video David Lynch on product placement
Mr Lynch is succinct, to the point and we reckon rather pithy in his take on the idea of product placement. Watch the maestro strut his stuff here.

 

Video The Death Squads
Night after night death squads rampage through Iraq’s main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they’ve been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. The majority of the killings are carried out by Shia death squads who want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran.
This shocking Channel 4 film investigates the links between the death squads and high-ranking Shia politicians. It reveals how the Shia militia that these politicians control have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. It investigates how these units are closely linked to the death squads, indeed they often are the death squads. And the killers act with impunity — there’s little investigation into their activities.

 

Video Trial Of Tony Blair
The Channel 4 drama of Tony Blair standing trial for war crimes. Absolutely brilliant.

 

Video New Rulers of the World
‘Global economy’ is a modern Orwellian term. On the surface, it is instant financial trading, mobile phones, McDonald’s, Starbucks, holidays booked on the net. Beneath this gloss, it is the globalisation of poverty, a world where most human beings never make a phone call and live on less than two dollars a day, where 6,000 children die every day from diarrhea because most have no access to clean water. Watch John Pilger's excellent documentary on globalisation.

 

Audio This Chalming Man
A radio interview with Chalmers Johnson, ex-CIA man author and professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego. In it he highlights the US’s slide into a military dictatorship.

 

Game So you want to be the Spider-man?
Well this is the game for you, swing wildly from squiggle to squiggle, firing your web wires as you go.

 

In Season
Are you prepared? September is National Velociraptor Awareness Month! The American Society for Velociraptor Attack Prevention, along with the North American Velociraptor Defense Association and the United Velociraptor Widows Fund, will be providing free velociraptor safety seminars at local Red Cross centers across the nation.

 

Dial a cliché
Looking for that special cliché? With over 3,300 clichés indexed, and a nifty search engine, Cliché Finder delivers!

 

Green house effect
The Zero Carbon House is a low energy demonstration project to show how renewable energy can create a unique living experience on a remote island in a severe climate, according to the website. Although, cynics that we at Stuff are, we did notice that it was made of wood, so it might be said to be a bit of a misnomer to call it zero carbon, especially if it should burn down.

 

Afro Samurai
Some days you just take a wrong turn on the information superhighway, and BAM! You’re in Bizarro World™ and there’s no turning back. Or as Morpheus from the Matrix would put it: “You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Join us in the red pill takers’ ward. Take care though: this is not a drill. Hell, even the producers warn you with their cautionery name, Gonzo. Oww. Cold blooded. Damn Mo’fo.

 

The ghost of future homes past
Here's some hauntingly odd houses for sale in Taiwan. Haunting being the reason they are abandoned, according to the blurb. As high-tech oddness spawned in Asia and bathed in Western 70s retro. these are most likely the ideal houses for fans of Afro Samurai.

 

Adbusts
Pixelator is a wonderful project to subvert advertising back to art. Click on the image to see a video of this metamorphosis and instructions on how to do it yourself.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report
This week, we ask: if the “there’s no global warming honest, no, really, we might be funded by big energy, but trust us” brigade are right, then then why is the Australian government set to ban farmers from irrigating their crops?