Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Via Lucy Siegle in the Guardian … the lady is running out of patience:

“I am unmoved by Primark’s plight. So, the retailer was badly ‘let down’ by three Indian factories that contravened the company’s ’strict ethical standards’ by outsourcing the embroidery of 20,000 on-trend pieces to small children. Retailers and brands have been offering excuses for years now, ever since the Chicago Tribune rumbled a major sportswear manufacturer using child labour in 1996. Similarly there’s a wide selection of pleas to cover the times a brand gets caught running up this season’s collection in a sweatshop – varying from downright denial or rebuttal to Gap’s surprising, ‘listen guys, we have a problem and we will fix it’ (circa 2005). (…)

The company points out that this unfortunate use of child labour was not in any way connected to the low price of the fashion it sells – apparently achieved by low mark-ups and big volumes.

I still feel uneasy. While there is no doubt that value retailers shift a lot of product, there is plenty of evidence and testimonies from garment workers to show that the pressure and speed of orders directly adds to the misery of working conditions. In the latest edition of Clothingsource, a tool for the mainstream garment trade, sourcing expert Mike Flanagan worries that, as China runs short of workers, there will be a slide back into the use of child labour.”

It is a familiar story for anyone involved in global labor issues. The big brand usually hide behind several layers of sub-contractors which provide them with plausible deniability along with the big profits. That story has been told over and over by activist groups such as the National Labor Committee (the group that made Kathy Lee Gifford cry on national TV because her kids might learn that her company used sweatshops and child labor… those labor rights bastards! It will be all their fault if KLG’s kids are traumatized).

And as Lucy Siegle states, these companies have become very creative when it comes to making excuses for their labor practices. So, they may not be the ones actively recruiting children and cuffing women to their sewing machines, but they either exercise willful ignorance or just turn a blind eye because it is highly profitable and the industry of giant retailers (with Wal-mart at its head) is highly competitive.

At the same time, in the global context, peripheral and semi-peripheral countries are full of desperate people for whom factory work actually represents economic opportunity and where the governments compete with each other to provide the greatest incentives for factories and capital to land within their borders: hence the maquiladoras and free trade zones cropping up all over Central and South America as well as all over South and South East Asia.

And the very fact that it takes daring and persistent journalists and activists to get to the bottom of labor practices in the semi-periphery and the periphery is quite revealing when it comes to the standards of the industry.

“In an industry of scant transparency, you can imagine how difficult it is for the handful of journalists who operate in this area to get solid evidence of exploitation. And yet they unearth horror stories with alarming regularity. This leads me to the depressing conclusion that the stories we see represent the tip of the iceberg rather than the exceptions.

If these ‘abuses’ are just a reality of today’s outsourced, mass-market rag trade, then it’s time retailers told us. How about a label in the must-have sun dress that reads: ‘We have absolutely no idea who made this garment because all production was outsourced to low-cost suppliers in Asia.’ Then, consumers could make a real decision about what they put in their wardrobes and whether to take the risk that a child embroidered the hem.

That way we wouldn’t have to listen to retailers competing with each other on the basis of how many ‘audits’ they do. These are famously unreliable. We are constantly told cheap-as-chips fashion is a democratiser of style and many retailers now like to add a rail of organic cotton T-shirts to show how ethical they are. Do I buy this? No, but neither can I bring myself to buy their clothes.”

And just in case we are not clear on what we are talking about here, let’s review:

The Hidden Face of Globalization

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The above 3 bedroom, 2.5 bath home boasting a two car garage, located at 737 Castro Street (cross is 20th Street so just above the heart of the Castro), built in 1900 and I assumed re-modeled is listed at $1,895,000 USD. Granted that price tag is slightly more than twice the $800,000 USD median price of a home in San Francisco, but it’s also not that big of a house. And so it is with not much surprise that this week-end, the San Francisco Chronicle hightlighted a growing problem in this fair city, there’s an exodus, more like a shove really, of the middle class.

It’s urban flight flipped on its head: The number of low- and middle-income residents in San Francisco is shrinking as the wealthy population swells, a trend most experts attribute to the city’s exorbitant housing costs.

Many worry it’s increasingly turning San Francisco into an enclave of the rich, where nurses, firefighters, cops, teachers and other professionals aspiring toward homeownership or in need of cheaper rent can no longer afford to stay.

“A kind of derogatory term for the city would be Disneyland for yuppies,” said Hans Johnson, demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California. “There is a legitimate public policy concern when a city that many people have lived in for many years and regard as their homes becomes so expensive they can’t afford to live there anymore.”

The Disneyland for Yuppies tag is quite familiar to me. A good friend quiped about a year ago that twenty dollar bills here in the City are like E-tickets at Disneyland, you need five of them for a decent ride and that’s if you take public transit. Add a cab there and back, that’s one more E-ticket.

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Spain had not beaten Italy in a match that mattered in 88 years. Even today’s match goes down as a draw but Spain advances while Italy goes home and that’s all that matters. After a 0-0 tie at the end of extra time, Spain ousted Italy in the penalty shoot-out 4-2 to set up a rematch with Russia. Before tonight Spain had lost three quarter-final penalty shoot-outs in previous UEFA European championships. This time around, goalkeeper Iker Casillas stopped two penalty kicks to send Spain through.

One Very Happy, Iker Casillas, the Spanish Keeper

For more on the matches and the tourney, please visit Euro2008. The other semi-final match is Germany v. Turkey.

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Heinz has released this commercial for its Heinz Deli Mayonnaise for the UK market. The TV ad is the first by Heinz’s new ad agency AMV BBDO since it won the £10m a year UK business last year. BBDO Worldwide is the world’s second largest ad agency and is owed by Omnicon, a US based holding company that owns other ad agencies and public relations firms. Over the years, BBDO has created commercials such as Wisk’s “Ring Around the Collar” and Burger King’s “Have It Your Way” ads.

AMV BBDO said that the concept behind the campaign is that the product tastes so good “It’s as if you have your own New York deli man in your kitchen”.

Personally, I like my deli man to look less like Robert DeNiro and more like Brad Pitt. Still, kudos to Heinz for portraying gay men as loving fathers in a committed relationship. Needless to say, this ad could never run in the United States.

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A round up of comments in Obamaland (Talking Points Memo and Crooks and Liars, I dare not tread the threads on the DailyKos, not enough disinfectant in California to delouse me later) on Senator Obama and FISA:

105 Democratic representatives voted for the bill. Obama doesn’t have the political capital to win this battle. It’s silly for him to make his last stand here when he’s fighting for the presidency–the larger war.

Because the Constitution is just a scrap of paper.

Let’s keep in mind that Senator Obama is a Constitutional lawyer, and calm down until we know exactly what we are talking about.

More like he lectured on Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago, I don’t think he ever practised in the field and he certainly isn’t practising in it now but hope springs eternal.

People have to remember. Obama is the Junior Senator from Illinois who is getting a lot of press. Three weeks ago he wasn’t even the Party’s Nominee. He’s expressed his concern regarding the retroactive immunity (a poison pill the R’s have thrown into this) but as of right now he is NOT THE PRESIDENT. Maybe some people thought the election is already won but to be honest the guy doesn’t have the kind of political capital we’re ascribing to him here in the netroots. He’s got a WAR to win and I can see already that driving himself into a buzzsaw with his own party over this one issue will not win him the election. He needs to keep his eye on the prize and as others have stated not look weak grandstanding over something he can’t change anyway.

Apparently, an election matters more than the Constitution.

The O! is our shepherd.

Well, he certainly pulled the wool over your eyes.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Two good pieces on Al Qaeda landed in my Newsreader this week and they both point in the same direction, albeit in different terms. The first one is from Tony Karon who questions the current relevance of Al Qaeda as the big post-9/11 bogeyman. For Karon, Al Qaeda is irrelevant and always was. In this respect, Al Qaeda is comparable to Trotsky… Huh? How does the comparison apply?

“Al-Qaeda is irrelevant, and yet U.S. hegemony in the Middle East is facing an unprecedented challenge from Islamist-nationalist groups. To understand the link between al-Qaeda’s weakness and the greatly expanded strength of groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, the Muslim Brotherhood and, of course, Iran, over the past seven years, it’s worth turning to the 20th century precedent: Leon Trotsky and his followers vs. the larger, nationally-focused parties of the left in the mid 20th century.

Trotsky rejected pragmatism and compromise by nationally-based leftist movements and insisted, instead, that they subordinate their specific national interests and objectives to the fantasy of “world revolution.” And as a result, long before his murder by Stalin, he found himself holed up in Mexico City, manically firing off communiques denouncing all compromise, and being largely ignored by the more substantial parties of the left world-wide. He had become an irrelevant chatterbox, caught up in a frenzy of his own rhetoric while world events simply passed him by. The same can be said of Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri — it is not al-Qaeda, but the likes of Iran, Hamas, Hizballah, and the Muslim Brotherhood that represent the future of the nationalist-Islamist challenge to Western power in the Middle East.”

What makes Al Qaeda seemingly powerful are two factors: the one mentioned by Karon, that is, the fact that the United States treats Al Qaeda as this omnipresent threat of global proportion and reacts to every action as if it were the beginnings of a terrorist apocalypse. The second one, which I think is relevant here and contributes to the first, is that fact that Al Qaeda, being a non-state group, articulates itself opportunistically to nation-based movements (Algeria, Philippines, Indonesia, or Iraq).
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Here is the Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 edition of interesting reads and news from around the world.

Australia Most Obese
Australia has overtaken the US as the world’s most obese nation, according to a study published in Melbourne yesterday. The Baker Heart Institute’s study, entitled Australia’s Future Fat Bomb, found that 26% of adult Australians, or close to 4m people, were obese. Twenty-five percent of Americans are obese. More from the Financial Times.

Most Britons Doubt Humans Cause Climate Change
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans – and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.

Tehran Backing Taliban
The UK Guardian reports that British special forces operating on the border between Afghanistan and Iran have uncovered fresh evidence that Tehran is actively backing insurgents fighting UK troops. The likelihood of an attack on Iran is growing.

Protests in Turkey Ahead of Court Decision on Islamic Party
On Saturday evening, a diverse crowd of several thousand people marched in central Istanbul, blowing whistles, banging drums and carrying round, pink signs that read, “Make Noise Against Coups.” More from the New York Times.

Timor-Leste’s Police Not Ready
Asia Sentinel reports that the United Nations, called in two years ago in the wake of a breakdown of East Timor’s security forces that led to dozens of deaths, appears set to end its training of local police, many of whom are still unfit to be in uniform, leading to fears that carnage will begin again in a country ill-prepared for it.

Flooding in India
Major flooding is devastating large areas of Orissa, Assam and West Bengal in eastern India. More from The Hindu.

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