SP0021 – World Crisis “Forced Labor”

 

Forced Labor

By Juan Chamero, from Caece University at Buenos Aires, Argentine, July 12^th 2009

Subject: people, Crime Organized, economy, people rights, security,  geopolitics, homeless, immigrants,  people displaced, people diseases, invisible people, massacre,  people poverty,  society, social research

 Info Source 1: ILO, International Labor Organization; ILO Forced Labor Statistics; NYT Forced Labor in China, by Howard French; A forced labor Blog;

  

 

Workers rescued in May from a brick kiln in Linfen, in Shanxi Province, in northern China, in what has become an unfolding labor abuse scandal, By HOWARD W. FRENCH, Published: June 16, 2007

 

 ILO Forced Labor Report

As per 12^th May 2009

“….At least 12.3 million people around the world are trapped in forced labour. The ILO works to combat the practice and the conditions that give rise to it. Forced labour takes different forms, including debt bondage, trafficking and other forms of modern slavery. The victims are the most vulnerable – women and girls forced into prostitution, migrants trapped in debt bondage, and sweatshop or farm workers kept there by clearly illegal tactics and paid little or nothing. The ILO has worked since its inception to tackle forced labour and the conditions that give rise to it and has established a Special Action Programme on Forced Labour to intensify this effort. “

 Forced Labor Statistics

 Asia

Asia accounts for by far the biggest share of the world’s forced labourers. Many are migrants, either from elsewhere in Asia or their home country. The ILO currently views three issues with particular concern:

 • Persistence of bonded labour systems, particularly in South Asia, despite longstanding legislation to ban and punish such practices as well as efforts to identify, release and rehabilitate bonded labourers.

 • Widespread trafficking of children and adults, for both sexual and labour exploitation.

 • Continued use of forced labour by the State and official institutions, notably in Myanmar.

 Research has also shown the existence of forced labour in sectors that had escaped previous attention, including Thailand’s shrimp, fishing and seafood processing industries and shrimp production in Bangladesh.

 Some of the highest recruitment payments in the world are found in China, with research showing that workers can pay as much as 2.5 times their expected annual income in recruitment fees to obtain jobs in the U.S.

 Americas

Latin America accounts for the second largest number of forced labourers in the world after Asia, according to ILO estimates. Those most at risk are migrant workers in sweatshops, agriculture and domestic service. The main form of forced labour is through debt bondage, involving informal and unlicensed intermediaries who pay advances to entice workers and then reap profits through inflated charges.

 Forced labour in Latin America is closely linked to patterns of inequality and discrimination, especially against indigenous peoples. As a result, action to combat forced labour must be part of a broad framework of measures and programs aimed at reducing poverty by fighting discrimination and promoting the rights of indigenous peoples as well as helping poorest workers in urban areas.

In Argentina, there has been a crackdown against garment workshops following evidence that Bolivian men and their families were being trafficked for employment in the sector. Coercive practices include removal of identity documents, locking workers in factories and compelling them to work for up to 17 hours a day. After a factory fire killed several Bolivians in March 2006, a government inspection program led to the closure of more than half of the workshops visited. The drive included the establishment of a telephone hotline “Slave Labour Kills” in April 2006.

Elsewhere in Latin America, abusive practices include compulsory overtime, with allegations that in Guatemala, for example, workers were threatened with dismissal for refusing to work shifts of up to 24 hours.

 

 Info source 2: BBC of London, In Pictures: Forced Labor and Trafficking; David Kilgour Website a director of the Washington-based Council for a Community of Democracies (CCD).

Some not so awesome Forced Labor Images

 

From Russia: These are orphans. Natasha is the last one in the row, hiding from everybody. She was taken to the foster home by police who found her at a train station. Natasha didn’t know her surname or her age. Her mother is said to have sold her to people who ran a “beggar business”. “If I didn’t bring any money, they would beat me and send me back to work next morning,” she told people at the home. Natasha later disappeared from the orphanage and has not been seen since. Her mother has been located – she denies selling her daughter, saying she “rented her so she could earn some money for textbooks”.

 

  

Butterflies made by Falun Gong practitioners detained in Heizuizi Women’s Labor Camp in Changchun City, Jilin Province. The above pictures are some products and children’s jewelry made by Falun Gong practitioners under duress in the Masanjia Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province. In addition to persecuting practitioners using brutal torture, murder, and sexual abuse, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also uses forced labor and organ harvesting to make huge profits. Falun Gong practitioners are illegally arrested and sent to prisons, labor camps, and brainwashing centers just for remaining steadfast in their belief in Falun Dafa and the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion and Forbearance. While they are subjected to physical mistreatment, they also have to do hard labor for over 10 hours a day in very poor working conditions to make products. These products are exported to the United States, Japan, Australia, Europe, and have brought in a huge amount of foreign currency for the CCP. The economic exploitation of practitioners is an important part of the persecution of Falun Dafa by the CCP.

 

 Comments: These two pills show us the remaining of an almost chronic social disease: slavery. Take into account that ILO statistics talk of about 13 millions of people suffering the cruelest forms of forced labor. However this is only the visible part of the people exploitation iceberg: people who are enforced to work more than 16 hours a day six days a week and living like animals. People working in Latin American “maquilas” and sweatshops working from 11 hours a day up whole weeks all over the world should be accounted for hundreds of millions. 

Tags: ILO, International Labor Organization, forced labor, forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking, modern slavery, slavery, sweatshops, sweatshop, Howard French, forced labor in China, garment workshops, slave labor kills, Myanmar slavery, Thailand shrimp, Bangladesh slavery, migrant workers, indigenous people slavery, Argentina garment shops, Argentina garment factories, bolivian urban slavery, slave labor kills, slave labour kills, compulsory overtime, continuous shifts, Davod Kilgour, beggar business, russian beggar business, Falun Gong, Falun Gong slavery, Masanjia Forced Labor Camp, Masanjia, Shenyang City, organ harvesting, Chinese organ harvesting,

SP0020 – World Crisis “War on Drugs”

 

War on Drugs

By Juan Chamero, from Caece University at Buenos Aires, Argentine, June 16^th 2009

Subject: Crime, Drugs, Addictions, Human Health, Crime organized,

Info Source 1: Drugs Won the War, by Nicholas D. Kristoff, NYT, Published June 13, 2009

This year marks the 40^th  anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

 “We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

 Main Consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

 Note 1: Take into consideration that these entries are “semantic pills”, tiny pieces of meaning to be eventually connected by Knowledge Creation algorithms.

Note 2: The War on Drugs is a prohibition campaign undertaken by the United States government with the assistance of participating countries, intended to reduce the illegal drug trade – to curb supply and diminish demand for specific psychoactive substances deemed immoral, harmful, dangerous, or undesirable. This initiative includes a set of laws and policies that are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of targeted substances. The term was first used by President Richard Nixon in 1969,[1] and his choice of words was probably based on the War on Poverty, announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Complementary sources

• Info source 2: War on Drugs, and Drug Cartels, from Wikipedia;
• Info source 3: Drugs Portal from Interpol, Office on Drugs, from United Nations,
• Info source 3: Drug Statistics, from drug-rehabs.org, More statistics, from Worldmeter.info;
• Info source 4: “The Argentine” Paco, from Wikipedia

 

Something about the use of the word “war”:

 The phrase “War on Drugs” has been condemned as being propaganda to justify military or paramilitary operations under the guise of a noble cause.

This form of language was previously used in Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty”, and later by George W. Bush’s “War on Terrorism”. The word “war” is used to invoke a state of emergency, although the target and methods of the campaign is largely unlike that of a regular war.

Like the War on Terrorism, the War on Drugs is a true war, waged by the US government against its own people.

 

 Note 3: This pill is a warning-advise to be as objective as possible when pieces are connected.

 

Major drugs:

•  Alcohol
• Caffeine
• Cannabis
• Cocaine
• Ecstasy
• Heroin
• LSD
• Meth
• Mushrooms
• Tobacco

  

Alcohol Consumption Map, from WHO

 Note 4: Taking a glance to credible major drugs mappings we may acquaint that Alcohol is a dominant factor and addictions pattern generation.

 

 Some alcohol statistics

• Alcohol is involved in 50% of all driving fatalities.
• Over 15 million Americans are dependent on alcohol. 500,000 are between the age of 9 and 12.
• Americans spend over $90 billion dollars total on alcohol each year.
• An average American may consume over 25 gallons of beer, 2 gallons of wine, and 1.5 gallons of distilled spirits each year.
• Pregnant women who drink are feeding alcohol to their babies. Unfortunately the underdeveloped liver of the baby can only burn alcohol at half the rate of its mother, so the alcohol stays in the baby’s system twice as long.
• Each year students spend $5.5 billion on alcohol, more then they spend on soft drinks, tea, milk, juice, coffee, or books combined.
• 6.6% of employees in full time jobs report heavy drinking, defined as drinking five or more drinks per occasion on five or more days in the past 30 days.
• The highest percentage of heavy drinkers (12.2%) is found among unemployed adults between the age of 26 to 34
• Up to 40% of all industrial fatalities and 47% of industrial injuries can be linked to alcohol consumption and alcoholism.
• In 2000, almost 7 million persons age 12 to 20 was a binge drinker; that is about one in five persons under the legal drinking age was a binge drinker.
• The 2001 survey shows 25 million (one in ten) Americans surveyed reported driving under the influence of alcohol. This report is nearly three million more than the previous year. Among young adults age 18 to 25 years, almost 23% drove under the influence of alcohol.
• Drunk driving is proving to be even deadlier then what we previously know. The latest death statistics released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), using a new method of calculation show that 17,488 people were killed in alcohol related traffic accidents last year. This report represents nearly 800 more people where killed than the previous year.
• Alcohol is the number 1 drug problem in America.
• 43% of Americans have been exposed to alcoholism in their families.
• Nearly one out of 4 Americans admitted to general hospitals have alcohol problems or are undiagnosed alcoholics being diagnosed for alcohol related consequences.
• Four in ten criminal offenders report alcohol as a factor in violence.
• Among spouse violence victims, three out of four incidents were reported to have involved alcohol use by the offender.

Drug Cartels

—— “Included in the list of government officials and officers on the Cali Cartel payroll were a reported 5,000 taxi drivers. The taxi drivers would allow the cartel to know who was arriving in the city and when, as well as where they were staying. By having numerous taxi drivers on the payroll, the cartel was able to monitor the movements of officials and dignitaries. It is reported by Time Magazine, in 1991, DEA and U.S. Customs Service (now ICE) agents were monitoring a shipment being offloaded in Miami, only to find out later that the DEA agents were the target of Cali surveillance at the same time” . …..

                    

Mexico Cartels Map, from Stratfor.com

 

 

Border transparency from people promoting the “Big Fence”

 

Note 5: This textual-graphic semantic pill shows us that illegal drug activities pervade our daily life all over the world.  

 

Paco: The drug for the very poor people

 It is a low cost street drug elaborated on the residual chemical cocaine process –until recent considered as waste- treated with kerosene and sulphuric acid and occasionally chlorophorm, ether or potassium carbonate. It is extremely toxic and additive transforming people, most of them young and children, in “dead alive” because their external aspect. The smaller dose costs less than 35 cents of a dollar.

 It appeared as an underground criminal business in the Emergency Villages that surrounded Buenos Aires city when the 2001 Financial Collapse that suddenly impoverish this rich South American nation. Now it is estimated that only in Argentine are 500,000 children addict to it!.    

Its cycle from euphoria to “disphoria” is too fast – one to 6 minutes- and its feedback accelerate the harm effects on health and dependence.

 The Province of Buenos Aires, the largest Argentine State recently warns about its consumption because it may cause brain dead in less than 6 months. Economically and only in Argentina it moves 400 million dollars annually and its use is spreading all over the South American Region.

 

Comment: These pills are knowledge ingredients that trigger our mind about something “bad” within us as a whole because its reach, volume, harm, danger, diversity, and expansion. No doubt it may destroy us because it is evenly distributed no matter the variables used to potentially discriminate our intents of focusing somewhere. Could we tame it in a near future?. Could we restrict its expansion keeping it within very specific and agreed limits?. Will be enforced to engage in war against it -at large people like us!- in order to beat it starting a “Zero Tolerance” era?. Is this social syndrome a fatal consequence of our somehow intrinsic growing limitations?. Has it a close correlation with poverty and injustice?. There are too much questions without clear and consensual answers. However in the meantime somehow and both ethically and compassionately will be enforced to limit its destructive expansion?.   .

SP0013 – World Crisis “IMF Report”

SP0013

What the IMF says about the World Crisis

By Juan Chamero, from Caece University at Buenos Aires, Argentine, April 15th 2009

 

Source: WEO, World Economic Outlook, IMF

Subject: Economy, finance, global finance

Info Source: Global bank losses likely to reach $4.1 trillion, says IMF, by Larry Elliott , The Guardian, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 April 2009.

The global financial sector faces write-downs of $4.1tn (£2.8tn) from the toxic assets that have crashed in value since the start of the credit crunch 20 months ago, the International Monetary Fund said today .

In its first comprehensive study of the impact of the crisis on banks and other financial institutions, the Fund said that it had increased its estimate of the potential losses in the US from $2.2tn to $2.7tn as a result of the deepening economic slump over the past three months.

Europe and Japan between them account for $1.3tn of the write-downs, with UK banks facing losses of up to $316bn (£216bn). The Treasury last night disputed the UK figure, saying the IMF had offered a range of costs between 6% and 13% of GDP, and that £216bn was at the highest end of this range

………..

The key challenge was to break the “downward spiral” between a weakened financial system and the global economy. The Fund set out a detailed program of reforms, including curbs on credit growth during booms, tougher regulation of a limited number of institutions ­considered “too big to fail” and better cross-border supervision.

In its breakdown of the losses on toxic assets, the IMF said two-thirds of the write-downs affected banks. But the FSR warned that pension funds had seen the value of their assets

Comment: This report could be interpreted as the first formal evaluation of the worldwide Crisis deepness and reach. However in despite of its dramatic tone it could be considered too optimistic. See our next entry SP0014 about the effect of “politically correct” measures in times of crisis. From a “systems” point of view the recovery trajectory towards the next future looks highly improbable. The history tells us that society inertia is so “high” that recoveries, whether occurred, take decades.

We mean that the failure is so big and extreme that a new system should be buildup and it takes time.

 

Tags: IFM, GDP, WEO, the guardian, guardia.co.uk, Larry Elliot, global bank losses, politically correct, credit crunch, society inertia, global economy, global finance, FSR,