The truth about how your sportswear is made

Here is a visual depiction along with excerpts from The Independent report:



Alternative link

Blood, sweat and tears: the truth about how your sportswear is made
By Martin Hickman
Factories used by biggest brands abuse staff, employ children and pay pitiful wages - while stars earn a fortune

"Inspections by Nike, Puma and Adidas, identified 281 rogue factories, whose failings ranged from the unsatisfactory to the abysmal."

"A decade after some shoppers boycotted Nike over the issue, the leading players in the £134bn-a-year global sportswear industry seek to protect their reputations against allegations they profit from sweated labour by inspecting factories and blacklisting the worst. However their own reports show they have had only partial success in cleaning up the industry, and that they continue to outsource production to countries where trade unions are banned or restricted."

"Of 479 factories checked last year, on average 168 failed to meet Nike's standards, meaning they had "serious system failures" or a "general disregard" for codes of conduct. One in five failed to provide contracts, honour collective bargaining, occasionally used children or worked staff seven days a week without a break."

"Of 362 factories that supply Puma, one in five – 75 – failed audits two years ago. About half of those flouted rules on hours and pay, and most endangered workers' health. Three-quarters failed to follow rules on the handling of chemicals. Puma says it is committed to trade union-rights, but it outsources to China and Vietnam, which restrict those rights. In its Team Talk report, Puma admitted: "Considering these limitations, the social standard on freedom of association and collective bargaining is admittedly difficult to enforce at many of our supplier factories."

"Adidas, which was praised by the campaign group Playfair in 2008 for introducing complaints processes and for ending short-term contracts, gives little information about life inside its factories. Last year it ranked 60 per cent of 1,200 suppliers in the bottom three "compliance" ratings, but since it declines to explain the criteria, it is unclear how many failed audits. Last year the German firm warned 38 suppliers that they were so bad they could lose contracts."

"Conditions may be worse than publicly stated because factories falsify wage and time records to pass audits. Puma acknowledged "many factories" covered up excessive working hours with two sets of time records – one genuine and one for inspections. The firm said: "It is common knowledge in our industry that software programs have been developed specifically for this purpose, with workers being coached on how to answer questions." "

Creative Strategies of Resistance: Bilin weekly demonstration reenacts the Avatar film

"The village of Bilin reenacted James Cameron's new film Avatar during todays weekly demonstration. Five Palestinian, Israeli and international activists were painted blue, with pointy ears and tales, resembling the Avatar characters. Like Palestinians, the Avatars fight imperialism, although the colonizers have different origins. The Avatars presence in Bilin today symbolizes the united resistance to imperialism of all kinds."

If you consider the audience that is intended here and the message and framework that this video can convey, I think it is a positive effort overall and does not necessarily trivialize the Palestinian resistance.

On creative strategies, see a previous post: "Culture Jamming for the Right Cause"

On the history of Palestinian plight and possible solutions, see Gaza Awareness.

Professor Hamid Algar on Obama's Iran Policies - English

This lecture took place on 11 February 2009 at UC Berkeley on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Hamid Algar has been a member of the University of California-Berkeley faculty since 1965. He is the biographer of Ayatollah Khomeini and ranks among world's leading historians of Islam. He teaches courses on Persian literature the history of Islam and Shiism and Sufism. He has written books and articles on each of these subjects including more than 100 articles in the Encyclopaedia Iranica.

The Battle of Algiers - Movie

"I hadn't looked at The Battle of Algiers, that classic 1965 film about urban guerrilla warfare, for at least twenty years, but once seen it tends to linger undiminished in the mind's eye. Made by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, the film deals with the bitter struggle in the 1950s between French colonials and settlers and the Algerians they had colonized. The film has the grainy look of a documentary, but as the opening trailer proudly proclaims, not a foot of newsreel was actually used. Back in the 1960s, when it first came out, it was watched with romantic fascination by young American radicals, eager to absorb the experiences, a million miles distant from their own lives, of Third World revolutionaries. In the 1980s my husband used to show it in a political science class he taught about revolution. And now the Pentagon has recently shown it to its functionaries, even as our own troops are deeply mired in urban guerrilla warfare. I wondered what tips and instruction they were intended to glean from it, and so I slipped our copy into the VCR and watched it again..."

Full text: The Battle of Algiers and Its Lessons by Sheila Johnson
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0907-07.htm

Reconsider Columbus Day

Excerpts from Eqbal Ahmad's quite insightful article on this subject:

"The expansions which followed Christopher Columbus' s voyage to the Americas resulted in the destruction of great civilizations the Aztec, Inca, and Maya. The Indians of North America suffered a similar fate. Nearly all of God's creation including land and labour were turned into commodities in the capitalist sense of the word. People were kidnapped, bought, transported and sold. The demographic colour of continents changed with white settlers and black slaves displacing the brown natives in the Americas and the Caribbean.

A world system of unparalleled political, economic and cultural dimension, was created and continually reinforced by new technology. In the industrial age, the expansionist drive moved on to Asia and Africa most of which was colonized. At the start of the 20th century, nearly all of the world's non-Western peoples were under some form of Western domination, and remain hopelessly trapped in structures of extreme inequality which is not merely economic...

"While the menace of miscegenation haunted imperial cultures and barriers of policy and social sanctions were erected to prevent it, complex mechanisms emerged to break the barriers to conquest and domination. There was the notion of mystery, as in the mysterious East, an invitation to exploration. Mysteries, after all, demand solution by enlightened, knowledgeable men. Or the idea of darkness, as in the dark continent to which one should bring light. Or the notion of empty lands which of course needed filling up. Or the veritable literature on identifiable, collective mind the Arab mind, Hindu mind, etc. that is still prevalent. All led to a set of common conclusions: they are not like us. They are different. Hence they can be treated differently, according to standards other than those that apply in civilized places. The outlook was so embedded in civilization that it traversed centuries. One finds strange bedfellows, separated in time and space. 'We must save Chile from the irresponsibility of its people', Henry Kissinger was reported to have said while proceeding to destabilize the elected government of Salvadore Allende. A century earlier Karl Marx had written: "They cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented. " Third World dictators give precisely this argument to justify their tyranny. This culture is pervasive, it cuts across continents and penetrates our outlook by a variety of mediums. As I outline this talk in the flight from Islamabad to New York, Pakistan International Airlines shows Star Trek: First Contact. I snip at what looks like a high-tech, outer-space replay of an earlier voyage into an 'undiscovered' world. Commander Jean-Luc Picard plays a modern-day Cortes, leading the crew of the newly commissioned Enterprise E to war against the Borg "an insidious race", informs the PIA flier.

Those "half organic aliens" appear like Indians in the early Westerns mysteriously, ubiquitously and sometimes seductively. Violence flows freely as 'contact' is made. Fallen aliens are shot even as they beg for mercy. Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew commit quite a holocaust with an insouciance we are expected to appreciate only because they have vanquished an alien race mysterious, dangerous, seductive and, ultimately, vulnerable. The Borgs have no individual identity, only a collective one. Their defeat is deemed final only when their roots are destroyed, when their head which assures life's motion to the entire race is cut off. An idea redeems this "mission"; once contact has been made the world will change. Promises Captain Picard: "Poverty, disease, and war will end."

Star Trek is but a crude, popular expression of the culture of imperialism. This culture is not Western any more. Rather, it enjoys hegemony, it has become global. Note an irony: Pakistan International Airlines, which will not serve wine to passengers, happily serves up Captain Picard on its flights. "

Full Text: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Library/9803/eqbal_ahmad/imperial.html

I should point that the use of the word "great" in the above article is probably relative, stressing that there were people and civilizations already inhabiting this place before Columbus - a lost sailor - came and "discovered" this land.

On a related note, see the following story:

Columbus Status Toppled in Venezuela, October 12, 2004
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/734