CHINA'S NEW SLAVE EMPIRE

Here's a bit from a very interesting Peter Hitchens article:

I think I am probably going to die any minute now. An inflamed, deceived mob of about 50 desperate men are crowding round the car, some trying to turn it over, others beating at it with large rocks, all yelling insults and curses.

They have just started to smash the windows. Next, they will pull us out and, well, let's not think about that ...

Why did they want to kill us? What was the reason for their fury? They thought that if I reported on their way of life they might lose their livings.

Livings? Dyings, more likely.

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

I can give you no better explanation in miniature of the wicked thing that I believe is now happening in Africa.

Out of desperation, much of the continent is selling itself into a new era of corruption and virtual slavery as China seeks to buy up all the metals, minerals and oil she can lay her hands on: copper for electric and telephone cables, cobalt for mobile phones and jet engines - the basic raw materials of modern life.

It is crude rapacity, but to Africans and many of their leaders it is better than the alternative, which is slow starvation.

It is my view - and not just because I was so nearly killed - that China's cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise.

China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation.

This is a must read, So read it here.

HIDDEN CAMERA REVEALS RUSSIAN SEX SLAVES

For millions, Russia's new economic prosperity has been a blessing. But for those caught up in the sex trade, it's a curse.

THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE AND ISLAM

Every once in a while we learn something here...

RUSSIANS EARNING SLAVE WAGES

Yeah...How's that Putin and a return to communism working out for ya?

At the current dollar-ruble exchange rate of 23.5:1, the sum of 7,000 Russian rubles amounts to $297.87.

That's the average monthly wage of a petrochemical worker in Russia's Sverdlovsk region, just west of the Urals on the border of Siberia. The major metropolis of Yekaterinburg is located there.

For four 40-hour work weeks, that translates into a shocking average hourly wage of only $1.86. So much for the notion of economic recovery in Vladimir Putin's Russia. These are the real wages earned by the vast majority of real Russians across the country, offset by a tiny clan of super rich who exploit the unwashed masses as has always been the case in Russia.

So, despite the absurd propaganda being churned out by the Kremlin, Russia is rather far from being a resurgent dynamo on its way to paradise. To the contrary, Russians are starving themselves in the vain hope of clemency from the malignant trolls who prowl the Kremlin's parapets, begging for legal and economic justice and laying their lives on the line to do it. Meanwhile, as has always been the case in Russia, a tiny clan of oligarchs hoards the nation's wealth for their own obscene and secret purposes.

Yeah...But they put on one helluva military parade.

CHILD SLAVE LABOR RING BUSTED IN CHINA

Nearly 200 children were found to be part of a child labor ring in China. But hey, as long as you can still get lots of cheap plastic stuff, do you really care?

Chinese police have rescued 167 children sold into labour in factories after an undercover newspaper investigation alleged that more than 1,000 had been sold "like cabbages", reports said today.

The state media said authorities in Dongguan, in the southern province of Guangdong, had launched a drive to rescue them.

The report claimed that children as young as seven, from the ethnic Yi minority, had been sold at a street market in the south-western province of Sichuan before being driven in trucks over 600 miles to the Pearl river delta.

Yeah. Child Labor. What? You thought the Chinese economy was rising because of hard work?
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