The Christmas sales used to be the time when stores cleared their duff lines – the ones that had sold badly – to clear space so that they could stock the new items. But there must be a wider campaign for our government and the World Trade Organisation to legally require that all clothing sold in Britain is manufactured by free people, not chattels. We forbid the sale of goods made from endangered species such as elephants and rhino. Is the extinction of the elephant really a more important cause than the oppression of human beings?Some of the shoppers flooding the stores this week will think that beating and suppressing poor people is a price worth paying for swanky trainers and Nike boss Phil Knight’s £12bn personal fortune.My grandmother won’t be the only maniac at the sales.j.hari independent.co.uk
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As the country became freer and more democratic (and workers complained about being abused), Nike shifted production to Indonesia, where workers could not protest so freely. As Indonesia became more democratic and its workers began to complain, Nike shifted to China and Vietnam. And so it will continue.Consumer boycotts can play a role in fighting this. and are good places to start. A nation should not necessarily apply the model of another nation [like, say, democracy] Each nation has its own political system.

Nike believes completely in this.” In other words: for god’s sake don’t become democratic or allow your workers to freely organise, because they will tell us to stop abusing them. So much for Norberg’s confidence that Nike workers are overjoyed.At the moment, many of the most-loved brands that will be snapped up tomorrow by my granny and thousands like her are powerful anti-democratic forces. The academic researcher Nancy Landrum, of the University of New Mexico, has shown that: “Nike has consistently moved production to wherever wages are lowest and workers’ human rights are most brutally suppressed.” For example, in 1990 half of Nike’s trainers were made in South Korea. When a tank drove over a prominent Shiite Muslim cleric in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City three weeks ago, they claimed this was a “traffic accident”, as if driving an M1A1 Abrams tank over a car and a robed prelate is the kind of thing that can happen on any downtown street.A few days later, after a truck-bomber crashed into a car and killed 17 civilians, the occupation lads churned out the same rubbish again.

None of the wounded – presumably “insurgents” if the Americans believe their own story – had been visited in hospital by US forces who might, if they didn’t question them, at least have apologised.An even more peculiar habit has now manifest itself among spokesmen for the occupation authorities. The truth is that they killed at least eight civilians and there’s not a smidgen of evidence that they killed anyone else. But still they insist on sticking to the story of their great victory.Last week, they pushed out a similar version of the same story This time there were 11 dead “insurgents” in Samara. But when The Independent investigated, it could only find records of four dead civilians and a lot of wounded. And the greater the violence, the better we’re doing in Iraq.I wouldn’t worry about this nonsense so much if it wasn’t mirrored on the ground in Iraq. Take the US claim – now regarded as an absurdity – that they killed “54 insurgents” in Samara a month ago. Like President George Bush, Bremer has now taken to repeating the absurdity that the greater the West’s success in Iraq, the more frequent will be the attacks on American troops.”I personally feel that we’ll actually have more violence in the next six months,” he said a couple of week ago, “and the violence will be precisely because of the fact that we’re building momentum toward success.” In other words, the better things become, the worse they’re going to get.