Careful there Poirot, you're starting to rant.

All this time you have resisted, & we have only suspected you may be a radical rat bag deep green feminist twit. Referring to rat bag publications can only deepen that suspicion.

Thanks, Hasbeen.

I always find it useful to be given rancorous criticism by the more odious of OLO's contributors.

It let's me know I'm on the right track.

Cheers : )

Hasben,
I don't think anyone knows how well, relative to the rest of the world,
we will do in an era of zero growth and expensive fuels.
One thing will be certain and that is all countries will be much more
reliant on their own efforts for manufacturing most products.

No longer will you buy; I was going to say furniture but that is largely local made now;
the more common items that are now imported but from the local maker in
your own town or nearest city.

Our biggest problem will be the widespread suburbs. Public transport
will need to be expanded dramatically, but we may not be able to afford it.
Look how much effort, political and financial is being required to
build just one suburban rail line in NW Sydney !

These are problems for the next say, 20 years, but in the longer term
we will be a much more agricultural society, looking more like the
end of the 19th century than the 21st century.

Just as I thought, same old same old…

So let’s see, the rest of the world tells Bangladesh that it will not buy its sweatshop goods (forgetting that similar can be found in the poorer suburbs of Oz).

I can envisage three likely scenarios :

a) Bangladeshi is unable or unwilling to comply, industries close hundreds of thousands loose their livelihood, thousands commit suicide , and thousands more are killed in the resulting civil unrest.

Up pops Poirot on a new thread telling us how bad we were to boycott Bangladeshi goods (as she does now at every opportunity with the Iraqi boycotts).

b) Bangladesh agrees to change but tells us it needs huge infusions of aid . Aid is poured in (Oz ditches Gonski, the NBN, and halves all MPs pay to meet its side of the plan), but much of it ends up lining the pockets of the Bangladeshi uppers classes --who if they are anything like their Indian counterparts, are hugely more ostentatious than the OZ upper classes and more numerous than all of Oz’s social classes combined.

Up pops Poirot on a new thread telling us how foolhardy we were to simply hand-out aid.

c) We transfer the aid to Bangladesh through a strictly controlled UN program.However, when UN inspectors are sent in to monitor compliance Bangladeshi authorities give them the run around . The UN issues an ultimatum but Bangladesh responds that it has no business interfering in Bangladeshi internal affairs . A UN lead multinational force is sent enforce compliance .

Up pops Poirot on a new thread (if Arjay doesn't beat her to it) telling us how she has read in Naomi Klein’s latest blog that the intervention is all part of a Western plot to seize the resources of Bangladesh , namely, its highly lucrative sweatshops.

We just cant win!

SPQR,

"We just can't win!"

No, the problem is that you just can't reason.

The Iraqi sanctions weren't put in place to stop corporate slavery. They were put in place to cripple a nation and its people so the US and its allies could bomb the sh!t out it with as little opposition as possible.

In fact, what the US and its allies managed to do in Iraq was to sanction and bomb an advanced middle-eastern country back into the dark ages.

(Shouldn't you be practicing those dance steps with LEGO, and not wasting your time spouting fiction on threads like this?)

Women in third world countries are majority controlled by Islamic Governments as is the United Nations, so women will always be not more than slaves in these countries.