Global News and Analysis

Source: In These Times

Well, isn’t that nice. A few weeks after a fabric-fueled inferno killed more than 100 locked-in garment workers at the Tazreen Fashion factory outside Dhaka, the 23rd Bangladesh Apparel and Textile Exposition gathered under a gold-colored “circular dome with dazzling lighting [like] a gala concert on a broad way [sic] theater,” the conference center’s website boasted. A minute of silence kicked off the proceedings, and then the reps and buyers turned to ensuring that Bangladesh, which has some of the world’s most poorly paid garment workers, wins the race to the bottom of low-wage countries. Last year clothing exports earned the country $19 billion, a whopping 78 percent of its total exports. read more

Source: CorpWatch

The medieval alchemists claimed they could turn ordinary metals into gold. Analysts at Standard & Poors (S&P), Wall Street’s top ratings agency, claimed that bad loans to poor people were wildly profitably. A U.S. government investigation alleges that S&P financial analysts are no different from the hucksters of yore.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice sued S&P for $5 billion for misleading the Western Federal Corporate Credit Union, the first federally chartered credit union, which collapsed in 2008.  Sixteen states have joined the lawsuit while the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission has also launched an investigation. S&P has offered to settle for $100 million instead without admitting any guilt. read more

Source: TomDispatch.com

[This piece is adapted from “Uprisings”, a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire, Noam Chomsky’s new interview book with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian’s, the answers Chomsky’s.]

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources – the main concern of US planners – have been mostly nationalised. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded. read more

Source: The Nation

American political history is usually told as the story of what political elites say and do. The twists and turns, advances and setbacks, wars, disasters and recoveries, are said to be the work of the founders, or of the presidents, or of the courts, or of the influence of a handful of great people who somehow emerge from the mass.

But this history can also be told as the story of the great protest movements that periodically well up from the bottom of American society and the impact these movements have on American institutions. There would be no founders to memorialize without the Revolutionary-era mobs who provided the foot soldiers to fight the British; no films about the quandaries of Abe Lincoln during the Civil War without the abolitionists and the thousands of runaway slaves; no Labor Day to celebrate without the sit-down strikers; no Martin Luther King to beatify without a movement of poor blacks who defied the Southern terror system. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

The duty of a state that claims to be democratic is to guarantee safety and freedom to its “weakest citizens”.

The Delhi gang-rape of Dece­m­ber 2012 bro­u­ght to the streets the deep and growing concern about violence ag­ainst women and the demand for women’s sa­fety. The movement is the voice of women re­claiming their right to safety and freedom, through resistance to all forms of patriarchal power and celebration of women’s peaceful power and energy. read more

Source: Immanuel Wallerstein

On January 11, France’s President François Hollande sent in troops to Mali, a few immediately but then 3500, a sizeable number. The stated objective was to fight against the various Islamic fundamentalists who had taken control of northern Mali. It was what the French would call a gageure – a word that derives from gage in the sense of a bet. It basically means undertaking something very difficult to achieve. I think one might best translate it as a “risky bet” and in this case, I would say it was a very risky bet. read more