If you are thinking, well, why do I even have slaves if I can’t force them to help me get into the Guinness Book of World Records, you are missing the point entirely and are also an extremely bad human being.
If you are thinking, what better way to respond to allegations of poor working conditions than to force indentured servants to run a marathon in the desert, you must be Qatar.
Qatar, for those of you who don’t know, is not the newest member of The Avengers but rather a tiny emirate in the Persian Gulf that had the foresight to park itself over a place where oil would one day be found, and it is therefore one of the absolute monarchies that we are pals with. Although most countries in that area are shining examples of progressive humanism, Qatar has been repeatedly criticized for its treatment of workers who have migrated there to build stuff for the 2022 World Cup.
An investigation by The Guardian found that many of the laborers were being forced to work long hours in 120-degree heat, without enough food and water. In the summer of 2013, a worker died almost every day, half from heart attacks. (2014 numbers were almost as bad.) They were often not paid, required to live in “filthy hostels,” and their employers took away their passports so they could not leave. The investigation concluded that the conditions amounted to “modern-day slavery.” The committee that’s running Qatar’s World Cup effort said it was “deeply concerned” about the allegations and that it had been informed that government authorities were looking into the matter.
I’m gonna speculate that no radical changes were made, based on the report that last month hundreds if not thousands of migrant workers were bused in and forced to run a half-marathon in Doha (let’s be honest: in the desert) because the organizers were trying to break the world record for most participants. A source said he had “observed hundreds of men who appeared to be laborers, wearing jeans, flip-flops or running barefoot.” Some tried to leave, said another, “but were turned back and were yelled at that they need to stay and cross the line.”
Tag: Oil
Maybe Obama’s Sanctions on Venezuela are Not Really About His “Deep Concern” Over Suppression of Political Rights
Oil. The answer is always oil.
The White House on Monday announced the imposition of new sanctions on various Venezuelan officials, pronouncing itself “deeply concerned by the Venezuelan government’s efforts to escalate intimidation of its political opponents”: deeply concerned. President Obama also, reportedly with a straight face, officially declared that Venezuela poses “an extraordinary threat to the national security” of the U.S. — a declaration necessary to legally justify the sanctions.
Today, one of the Obama administration’s closest allies on the planet, Saudi Arabia, sentenced one of that country’s few independent human rights activists, Mohammed al-Bajad, to 10 years in prison on “terrorism” charges. That is completely consistent with that regime’s systematic and extreme repression, which includes gruesome state beheadings at a record-setting rate, floggings and long prison terms for anti-regime bloggers, executions of those with minority religious views, and exploitation of terror laws to imprison even the mildest regime critics.
Absolutely nobody expects the “deeply concerned” President Obama to impose sanctions on the Saudis — nor on any of the other loyal U.S. allies from Egypt to the UAE whose repression is far worse than Venezuela’s. Perhaps those who actually believe U.S. proclamations about imposing sanctions on Venezuela in objection to suppression of political opposition might spend some time thinking about what accounts for that disparity.
That nothing is more insincere than purported U.S. concerns over political repression is too self-evident to debate. Supporting the most repressive regimes on the planet in order to suppress and control their populations is and long has been a staple of U.S. (and British) foreign policy. “Human rights” is the weapon invoked by the U.S. Government and its loyal media to cynically demonize regimes that refuse to follow U.S. dictates, while far worse tyranny is steadfastly overlooked, or expressly cheered, when undertaken by compliant regimes, such as those in Riyadh and Cairo (see this USA Today article, one of many, recently hailing the Saudis as one of the “moderate” countries in the region). This is exactly the tactic that leads neocons to feign concern for Afghan women or the plight of Iranian gays when doing so helps to gin up war-rage against those regimes, while they snuggle up to far worse but far more compliant regimes.
Any rational person who watched the entire top echelon of the U.S. government drop what they were doing to make a pilgrimage to Riyadh to pay homage to the Saudi monarchs (Obama cut short a state visit to India to do so), or who watches the mountain of arms and money flow to the regime in Cairo, would do nothing other than cackle when hearing U.S. officials announce that they are imposing sanctions to punish repression of political opposition. And indeed, that’s what most of the world outside of the U.S. and Europe do when they hear such claims. But from the perspective of U.S. officials, that’s fine, because such pretenses to noble intentions are primarily intended for domestic consumption.
As for Obama’s decree that Venezuela now poses an “extraordinary threat to the national security” of the United States, is there anyone, anywhere, that wants to defend the reasonability of that claim? Think about what it says about our discourse that Obama officials know they can issue such insultingly false tripe with no consequences.
But what’s not too obvious to point out is what the U.S is actually doing in Venezuela. It’s truly remarkable how the very same people who demand U.S. actions against the democratically elected government in Caracas are the ones who most aggressively mock Venezuelan leaders when they point out that the U.S. is working to undermine their government.
The worst media offender in this regard is The New York Times, which explicitly celebrated the 2002 U.S.-supported coup of Hugo Chavez as a victory for democracy, but which now regularly derides the notion that the U.S. would ever do something as untoward as undermine the Venezuelan government.
The real question is this: if concern over suppression of political rights is not the real reason the U.S. is imposing new sanctions on Venezuela (perish the thought!), what is? Among the most insightful commentators on U.S. policy in Latin America is Mark Weisbrot of Just Foreign Policy. Read his excellent article for Al Jazeera on the recent Obama decree on Venezuela.
In essence, Venezuela is one of the very few countries with significant oil reserves which does not submit to U.S. dictates, and this simply cannot be permitted (such countries are always at the top of the U.S. government and media list of Countries To Be Demonized). Beyond that, the popularity of Chavez and the relative improvement of Venezuela’s poor under his redistributionist policies petrifies neoliberal institutions for its ability to serve as an example; just as the Cuban economy was choked by decades of U.S. sanctions and then held up by the U.S. as a failure of Communism, subverting the Venezuelan economy is crucial to destroying this success.
If You Care About The Environment In Canada, You May Be Targeted As An ‘Anti-Petroleum Extremist’
The legislation identifies “activity that undermines the security of Canada” as anything that interferes with the economic or financial stability of Canada or with the country’s critical infrastructure, though it excludes lawful protest or dissent. And it allows the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service to take measures to reduce what it perceives to be threats to the security of Canada.
Clearly, that’s an incredibly broad definition, and would apply to just about any environmental or social movement — especially since even the most peaceful protests are often considered “illegal.” That, in its turn would allow Canada’s security agencies to collect information on these groups, and “disrupt” them. What’s also troubling about the leaked RCMP “intelligence assessment” that forms the source for the Globe and Mail story is the very clear political position it seems to be taking on fossil fuels and climate change:
The report extolls the value of the oil and gas sector to the Canadian economy, and adds that many environmentalists “claim” that climate change is the most serious global environmental threat, and “claim” it is a direct consequence of human activity and is “reportedly” linked to the use of fossil fuels.