BBC Blackout Propaganda

The BBC “World Service” took a look at factory conditions in Bangladesh to see “if things have changed” since the collapse of the Rana Plaza sweatshop a year ago, causing massive loss of life of the workers there. [1] First a three-minute piece light on facts. We're told at the end of that segment that the monthly minimum wage was raised from $40 to $68. UNMENTIONED: is it actually enforced.

Also not so much as a hint about the violent government repression of labor organizers. There aren't unions among the garment workers because labor organizers are viciously and systematically repressed by the government, including being subjected to torture and murder. For example, a prominent Bangladeshi labor organizer, Aminul Islam, was brutally tortured and murdered by the Bangladeshi “security forces” in 2012. And just to be clear which side “the West” is on, New Zealand's version of the NSA (which is intimately connected to the NSA as part of the “Five Eyes” inner clique of electronic surveillance secret police agencies of the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) aids and abets the Bangladeshi secret police, with whom it has a cooperative relationship operating inside Bangladesh. This is supposedly an “anti-terrorism” op. Which of course is what the Bangladeshi state murderers call their crimes too. Obviously the Bangladeshis expect something in return for cooperating with the New Zealand eavesdroppers, like, oh, “sharing intelligence” (passing along the communications of targeted labor organizers, in other words). [2]

After the three-minute “reporting” piece by host Ed Butler, which provided atmospherics but scant hard information, BBC and Butler served up a business-centric roundtable discussion. Workers' rights and the violent suppression of attempts to organize them, which is KEY to improving conditions and wages, went unmentioned. No garment workers or labor organizers were included in this lengthy chitchat. It was an entirely top-down discussion. (A Bangladeshi factory owner was included, who claimed he was not only paying way over minimum wage, but paying medical costs for his workers, and for schooling for worker's children- which sounds extremely dubious.) This went on for 14 minutes, then aother piece of reportage by Butler, about a Cambodian garment worker, and their decrepit living conditions, was put on. This segment was under two minutes, and featured Butler allegedly in the home of a poor Cambodian garment worker, where he comments that the house stinks (smells bad), then back to the roundtable talking.

The focus now was around the accord that Western fashion companies hammered out to avoid more bad publicity building collapses and fires.

After two minutes of that, the BBC put on a tape of their regular Irish comedian to deliver a stand-up routine. The thrust of it was materialism and discarding possessions. The upshot: what would happen to the global economy without consumerism?

Then the discussion resumed, with the comedian joining in. They all scratched their heads over the conundrum of how the poor need the richer nations to consume for the livelihood of the poor. (The idea of poor workers producing for their own needs and consumption didn't arise.) Mass production for ultimate discarding is presented as inescapable.

“Is it going to take consumer movements or is it going to take government regulation?” to change things, asks the reporter/roundtable leader Ed Butler at the end. The answer he gets from one participant is “outside pressure.” Once again, the idea of workers themselves being active agents in any of this, as opposed to objects of sympathy, is unthinkable. Twenty-five minutes in total is taken up with mostly empty blather and chin-stroking by business reps and a “consumer advocate.” No labor voices at all, even though the show was ostensibly about them.

Of course, if you have to cover up the violent repression of mere attempts to start a workers' movement, you can't start talking about unions or organized labor, because then you'll have to ask why Bangladeshi labor IS so totally unorganized, and you'll come smack up against the fact of the Bangladeshi government's policy of repression, torture, and murder in order to force their people to work cheap for Western corporations. (A policy that the U.S. and its allies enforce in numerous countries, sometimes resorting to fascist military coups to implement. Of course, without willing implementers in the target countries, the U.S. couldn't do this.)

No “consumer movement” in the West is going to meaningfully confront the murderous Bangladeshi government. And a government that is in cahoots with sweatshop owners, that allows massive construction of death-trap buildings, that tortures and murders labor organizers, shows what a sick charade it is to posit “government regulation” as a solution.

What the Western corporations and their image-advisers want is no more collapsing buildings or mass immolations by fire. The routinized hyper-exploitation of the poor for their labor, enforced by secret police torturer-murderers, is perfectly acceptable since THAT is something that can be kept out of (Western) sight and thus out of mind.

1] “In The Balance” with Ed Butler, BBC, April 18, 2015. In an almost half hour segment, no mention was made of how many people died in the building collapse of the sweatshop factory on April 24, 2013. It was 1,134, a slaughter. Hundreds of others were injured, some losing limbs and thus being maimed for life. (The Bangladeshi government treats poor cripples as human refuse, providing no benefits.)

2] See “New Zealand Spy Data Shared With Bangladeshi Human Rights Abusers,” The Intercept, April 15, 2015.