Brazil upholds the traditions of capitalism, despite Lula's best efforts

mmmmmmmmm!!! Yummy!!! Slavery!! Profit margins!! This from Bloomie today:

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Cosan SA Industria & Comercio, the world’s biggest sugarcane processor, fell the most in eight months on concern that its inclusion on a list of companies whose workers operate in slave-like conditions will drive away clients and cut off access to funding.

Barra Bonita, Brazil-based Cosan was added to the list on Dec. 31, according to the Brazilian Labor Ministry’s Web site. Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s fuel distribution unit is considering “restrictions” against Cosan, according to a spokesman at BR Distribuidora who couldn’t be named because of company policy.

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The so-called “black list,” created in 2004, is updated every six months, according to the Labor Ministry. The Ministry found and “liberated” 42 Cosan workers in conditions analogous to slavery, according to the list. CONTINUES HERE

UPDATE: Another topical slavery story from the other side of the planet, kindly sent in by reader BM. Thanks man....LatAm bore that I am wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

"......how does an economically troubled country build the world's tallest building in the middle of a desert? Unfortunately, all signs point to slave labor. Saying Dubai has a problem with slavery and labor exploitation is like saying Tiger Woods has a problem with fidelity (and incidentally, he also has a problem with some labor concerns around his Dubai golf course). Dubai regularly imports poor migrant workers from continues here

Bolivia and the slaves of Santa Cruz: Anyone got an Italian phrasebook handy?

Excuse-for-a-hack and racist apologist John Enders is put to shame by this BBC report. This is exactly the same place that the dumbass working for the Miami Herald pretended to report about, but somehow totally missed the racism and feudalism of the people he held up as the shining bastion of free markets and capitalism.

Here below is the first part of the report (click through for the rest, it's only fair on the Beeb). But watch out for the name of the person the BBC interviewed to give the ranchers' side of the story, a certain Eliane Capobianco. Capo? Bianco? Whatever could it all mean? LOL!

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Outrage at 'slavery' in Bolivia

A senior UN official recently described as "unacceptable" the alleged forced labour of indigenous people by landowners in Bolivia. The BBC's Andres Schipani reports on the contentious issue of "slavery" from the eastern province of Santa Cruz.

Teresa Barrio was born on a patch of scrub on a Bolivian plantation. This is where she has lived and worked. This is where she expects to die. But she has no affection for this place.

The 65-year-old grandmother knows little of other people's lives but she knows her own has been harsh: toiling in fields for a pittance, sleeping in a mud hut, losing sight in one eye and losing five of seven children to disease.

There is no cash in the pockets of her ragged skirt, nor, she says, does she feel free to leave the vast farm where she has worked hard all her life.

"All my life I've been here and at the end of it I have nothing and have nowhere else to go," she says.

Her hamlet of 13 Guarani families - all workers on the plantations near the town of Camiri in Alto Parapeti region in the eastern province of Santa Cruz - built a school but ranchers destroyed it, she says

"They didn't want us to learn, they want things to be like they always have been," Teresa's granddaughter, Deisy, says.

Beside the ruins is the replacement school - five desks beneath a blue tarpaulin draped from an algarroba tree.

Over the past two years, Bolivia's government and several indigenous groups, have been giving a controversial name to Teresa's type of existence - slavery.

CONTINUES HERE

More Bolivia: Santa Cruz's idea of democracy

Smile! Branco, the acceptable face of slavery

Duderino is back! Abiding in Bolivia's guiding light returned from a short break tonight, and among three or four other posts (he must have been bottling them all up), he's found an absolute, total, essential must read report on the way Santa Cruz landowners treat their slave force (they call them workforce, but you'll see I'm right when you read the article). This is the link, so go there right now and get an education.

Therefore, when multimillionaire, mega-landowner, racist shit and arch troublemaker Branco Marinkovic says, as he did today, "Those who are causing the violence are from the government, who have deployed violent people against our right to express ourselves and fight for our rights and for democracy", the way he treats the people mentioned in the F24 report is this idea of 'democracy' he mentions to a lapdog press corps. To give you a taster;

"All her life, Ines has worked without being paid. "I don't know how much I should have been paid. They gave me old clothes - that was how they paid me", she says. Today, in this remote corner of southern Bolivia, an estimated 2,000 families continue to live in semi-feudal servitude and debt bondage. Year after year, many workers find themselves trapped into paying back debts to their employers, which cancel out any meagre wages they earn."

Marinkovic should consider himself lucky he lives in Bolivia; anywhere else and he'd be in jail by now.