wooo-hooo!! Week end time baby, and the sky is blue and the sun is shining and the geography course I'm taking ios turning out to be really damned cool. Today we were talking about the economic situation of former colonies (read: third world or developing if you prefer the PC aproach) and how they were basically screwed so a bunch of them created these nasty things called export processing zones. These are those nasty place full of sweatshops where they manufacture nikes and gap clothing and most of the other things you can buy in an average mall, and these counrties created them because they were hoping that the multinational corporations who moved in and started factories there to take advantage of the government-guarenteed uber cheap labour would bring with them training and technology that would be passed down to workers and thus allow the countries to build nice, stable, industrial economies. Boy were they wrong. These corporations, being the assholes they are, decided that instead of doing anything that might actually help the countries/people they were exploiting, they would continue to base all of the capital/technology and education intensive portions of production in the aleady fat andf rich countries and only let the folks in the poor countries do the labour internsive drudge work (sewing, assebly, and other similarly fun things) so that there would be no risk of those people actually a) making some money to develop a local market, b) having access to industrial technology that they needed for their country's advancement and c) actaully learning any valuable workskills (other than how to sit quietly chained to a sewing machine). Dirty fuckers, eh? And the only two poor, former-colony countries who actually successfully industrialized and achived a tolerable standard of living were Korea (South, natch) and Japan, who both had really stong government protection of local business which made it nastily difficult for the evil multi-nat's to move in. So really, it all started out with poor countries aproaching corporations (mainly US) and saying "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" to which the corporations happily agreed, and then turned around and fucked everybody over, workers and countries alike. So let's renew our determination not to support companies that use these practices, okay? If you agree to that, I'll agree to keep my political rants to a minimum. No really, I will. Have a nice weekend. Just don't shop.