Cyber Slaves in Asia

When I formed a question I thought AI (Copilot) would give me, I got this:

 "Response stopped
Sent by Copilot:
I apologize, but I won’t be able to continue discussing this topic. If you have any other questions or need assistance, feel free to ask. Thank you! "

It was about slave computer scammers. The computers weren't "slaves," but the educated, unfortunate men working the scam were. Governments across a vast swathe of Asia - including Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan - have sounded the alarm reports BBC. I'd seen the story in the WSJ but with a pay wall so I wasn't able to read the whole story--thus I was looking at other sources.

 
We in the U.S. are so blinded by the slavery of the 17-19th centuries which corroded our own history, that we ignore modern day slavery that surpasses by many millions the transatlantic era. This kind of "investment" doesn't get used up--it's renewable. There's labor slavery and sex slavery, and there's child slavery in mines to pull from the earth the minerals we need to run the smart phones and equipment that enslaves minds. The WSJ story is almost too bizarre to comprehend--cyber slavery.

This is from BBC: 

""I was forced to make 15 friends every day and entice them to join online gambling and lottery websites… of these, I had to convince five people to deposit money into their gaming accounts," he said.

"The manager told me to work obediently, not to try to escape or resist or I will be taken to the torture room… Many others told me if they did not meet the target, they would be starved and beaten."
The abuse often results in lasting trauma. Two Vietnamese victims, who declined to be named, told the BBC they were beaten, electrocuted, and repeatedly sold to scam centres."

When I kept looking, there were numerous articles, some documentaries, and perhaps sourced from the same report. In this case the cybercriminals are themselves victims of the crime.

Trans-Pacific Partnership

“There are many important lessons from ObamaCare that we should apply to another huge project that could have a similarly devastating impact on our nation. In November 2009, President Obama announced his intention to have the United States participate in a so-called trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I say so-called trade agreement because 80 percent of the proposed agreement deals with a great many issues besides trade.”

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/17175-trans-pacific-partnership-tpp-bigger-and-more-dangerous-than-obamacare

Rich women help kill babies of the poor

In Kuala Lumpur this week for Women Deliver, a global conference on women’s health, a billionaire (Melinda Gates) and a princess (Mary of Denmark) graced the stage to tell nurses and clean water advocates that any effort to help poor women is secondary to giving them contraception and abortion.
Note, the advocates of killing black and brown babies are white Americans and Europeans. Why teach midwives how to save the lives of the mothers, when you can offer them abortions?

 http://c-fam.org/en/issues/global-health/2079-2077-women-deliver-conference-rich-women-vs-poor

A Women Deliver participant noted $8 billion a year goes to family planning and advocates are demanding more. Yet “they don’t want to share it” with other causes. “And they don’t want to give any other group a platform that will distract from expanding abortion.”

China losing luster says Business Week

"A new survey finds rising worries about product quality and intellectual-property theft. More U.S. companies are looking to Mexico and their own backyard." Not fast enough. Especially food items. I picked up a box of holiday decorated Kellogg's Rice Krispie squares--an unfamiliar product. These days I'm looking for details. If it is not made or grown in the USA or Canada and is a food or health and beauty item, I put it back on the shelf. This one had only the decorated candies "made in China." No thanks. There is no reason for the USA to be importing food items, and I don't care what the trade agreements are, when we don't have the will to hire enough inspectors. Link. "Distributed by" tells you nothing. . . except that it probably wasn't grown or made in the USA.

Obama's marxism a bit dated

It's no wonder I recognized it from my college courses--he's apparently stuck back in the 1960s and 1970s with Bill Ayers and friends, while Europe and Asia struggle to release themselves from his type of chains. Here's a summary about marxism in Asia at the Irish Left Review.

From Marx to the Market
Not so long ago, there seemed to be a very different light shining from the East. It’s barely thirty years since the final defeat of the South Vietnamese regime set the seal on the most humiliating defeat the USA has suffered since appointing itself as the world’s policeman after 1945. The victory of the Vietnamese Communists was one by-product of a curious fact: the Communist International, founded by the Bolsheviks with the primary goal of spreading revolution in Western Europe, had its greatest impact in East Asia. Nobody would have found that more surprising than the Bolsheviks themselves.

Communist parties were able to take power under their own steam in China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The Korean Communists had the benefit of support from the Red Army but still had a strong domestic base when they took over the north of their country. There were also long-running Communist insurgencies in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, while Indonesia was once home to the largest non-ruling Communist party in the world.

A quick glance at the regional scene will tell you that the challenge once posed by Asian Communism to the capitalist order has been almost entirely eclipsed. The Indonesia CP was smashed by Suharto’s bloody coup in the 1960s, while the Communist guerrillas in Thailand and Malaysia have long since been defeated. The Filipino CPP/NPA survives, but is a much diminished force. The turnaround is most striking, though, in the states where Communist parties or their descendents are still in power.

China’s great leap forward has grounded itself on the embrace of private enterprise (although not, it should be said, the dogma of the Washington Consensus). . . and much more."

The author neglects to mention the millions of deaths of our South Vietnamese allies caused by the shameful exit of the U.S. at the end of the war; or the millions and millions of Chinese who met their early deaths on the road to restoring the economy of China before it scambled on their bodies to capitalism. Oh well.