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Original URL: World leaders abandoning human rights: Amnesty
World leaders are undermining human rights for millions of people with regressive policies and hate-filled rhetoric, but their actions have ignited global protest movements in response, a rights group said.
US President Donald Trump, Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and China's President Xi Jinping were among a number of politicians who rolled out regressive policies in 2017, according to Amnesty International's annual human rights report published on Thursday.
The human rights body also mentioned the leaders of Egypt, the Philippines and Venezuela.
"The spectres of hatred and fear now loom large in world affairs, and we have few governments standing up for human rights in these disturbing times," Salil Shetty, Amnesty's secretary-general, said.
"Instead, leaders such as el-Sisi, Duterte, Maduro, Putin, Trump and Xi are callously undermining the rights of millions."
[...] The regressive approach to human rights adopted by a number of world leaders has, however, inspired new waves of social activism and protest, Amnesty said, highlighting the example of the Women's March in January last year, which began in the US before becoming a global protest.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @01:11AM (1 child)
Throughout history, the major reason that rich countries are rich is Imperialism.
A willingness to invade a place and murder a bunch of folks and subjugate the rest is a keystone to prosperity.
These days, "regime change" via coups often accomplishes the same thing with lower costs|observability.
Blackmail via The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, US Trade Representative, The Troika, etc. can be even more cost-effective.
Since the invention of containerized shipping (and now, the internet), it's been especially easy to not only exploit the raw materials of far-away places, it's also easy to exploit the labor force there and just ship back finished goods.
...while calling your thing e.g. an "American" company.
Before that, there were centuries of enslavement of those indigenous peoples.
Nowadays, Capitalists don't even have to make sure that their workforce is adequately housed, fed, and healthy.
Just pay them a pittance and leave them to scrape by as best they can.
Workers in a Capitalist operation are easily replaceable.
...and when the Capitalist runs out of easily-exploitable labor in that place, then, once again, containerized shipping makes it easy to pack up the operation and move it to another place with easily-exploited labor.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday February 25 2018, @02:46AM
I disagree. Said "willingness" doesn't create an empire. You need to have massive infrastructure development as well (commercial, trade, legal, transportation, etc). And the present world is a demonstration that one doesn't need empires to generate that.
And such "exploitation" has been greatly beneficial for those far-away places. As I have noted [soylentnews.org] before, over the past half century, we've seen a massive improvement in the human condition with most parts of the world slowly surging to developed world status. That didn't happen because of "Imperialism".
Some highlights of that link: by a measure of extreme poverty, the total population of those living at that level of extreme poverty declined from over 2 billion in 1970 to around 700 million today. That's an absolute decline of a factor of three while population doubled over the same time period.
Another example is over the time period 1988-2008, two thirds of the entire world by income tier increased their income (adjusted for inflation) by 30% or more.
So what? The key is to make employers replaceable as well, not fuck over workers in a doomed attempt to get back at "Capitalists". And workers aren't going to work for less when they can work for more. So there's a minimum to what can be offered. My view is that the key is to encourage demand for labor. Then you get workers who aren't being paid a pittance.
There's only so much easily-exploitable labor in the world. I figure "the Capitalist" is already priced out of half the world by population, maybe more.