Slavery alive and well in U.S. Ally Pakistan

[varun]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4042207.stm

Life as a modern slave in Pakistan

Around two million people in the southern Pakistan province of Sindh are tied to their employers by "bonded labour" - 12 years after the country's government outlawed the practice.
Under bonded labour, landlords - or zamindars - tie their employees to them by debt.

Often the debt is many thousands of rupees - much more than the workers actually borrow. Some workers are taken against their will.

"I was kidnapped with several others," one woman, Shanti, told BBC World Service's Slavery Today programme.

"I was confined alone in a small room. Then the landlord who kidnapped us raped me." ...

[rman]

1. lovely, same thing the West is doing

to 3rd world nations, only on a smaller scale.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251&mode=thread&tid=25

"But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. "
....
"The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you're not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.”"