Good point. As long as we're ahead of Dubai, we should quit worrying about the ethical ramifications of our policies.
Originally posted by: cubby1223
And progressives still want us here in the U.S. to feel like we're the greatest evil in the world :roll:
Originally posted by: SickBeast
TBH bankruptcy is theft (from the banks) and if that's how they handle it in Dubai, so be it. I'll bet they don't have the foreclosure problem that exists in the US.
If you owe the bank $40,000 and then declare bankruptcy, you have essentially stolen that from the bank and contributed to the destabilization of our economy.
IMO bankruptcy is too easy and too beneficial here in North America. They need to find more deterrents for it. Jail time seems harsh. Perhaps they should have to work for the bank and have their wages garnished.
Really, when you think about it, why should you go to jail for stealing a chocolate bar from a convenience store, when you can pretty much get off scott free when you declare bankruptcy over $100,000+? It's not right.
Originally posted by: SickBeast
TBH bankruptcy is theft (from the banks) and if that's how they handle it in Dubai, so be it. I'll bet they don't have the foreclosure problem that exists in the US.
If you owe the bank $40,000 and then declare bankruptcy, you have essentially stolen that from the bank and contributed to the destabilization of our economy.
IMO bankruptcy is too easy and too beneficial here in North America. They need to find more deterrents for it. Jail time seems harsh. Perhaps they should have to work for the bank and have their wages garnished.
Really, when you think about it, why should you go to jail for stealing a chocolate bar from a convenience store, when you can pretty much get off scott free when you declare bankruptcy over $100,000+? It's not right.
Originally posted by: SickBeast
TBH bankruptcy is theft (from the banks) and if that's how they handle it in Dubai, so be it. I'll bet they don't have the foreclosure problem that exists in the US.
If you owe the bank $40,000 and then declare bankruptcy, you have essentially stolen that from the bank and contributed to the destabilization of our economy.
IMO bankruptcy is too easy and too beneficial here in North America. They need to find more deterrents for it. Jail time seems harsh. Perhaps they should have to work for the bank and have their wages garnished.
Really, when you think about it, why should you go to jail for stealing a chocolate bar from a convenience store, when you can pretty much get off scott free when you declare bankruptcy over $100,000+? It's not right.
Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Great irony... at the bottom of the page there is an ad for a Dubai hotel.
Ads by Google
Want to Move to Dubai?
Help Finding a Home and Work Info on Banking, Health, Schools
www.mymovedubai.com
Originally posted by: CanOWorms
Originally posted by: Mardeth
Originally posted by: RabidMongoose
You should read the article. Their passports are taken away at the moment of employment.
Dubai is quite possibly one of the most filthy countries on the planet. No wonder Europeans are flocking there. They can live out their colonialistic dreams.
CanOWorms is that you? Besides if you caucasian your as much of a colonialist as any european... Im sure that no american or australian (nevermind that one her maid) did anything wrong.
No, most people in the world believe stuff like this. It's just that you're isolated from them because of fear.
However, I take it that you believe in some racially-based reincarnation though? Your post shows the typical example of European race-based beliefs that continues to proliferate. You are disgusting.
Originally posted by: Mardeth
Originally posted by: CanOWorms
Originally posted by: Mardeth
Originally posted by: RabidMongoose
You should read the article. Their passports are taken away at the moment of employment.
Dubai is quite possibly one of the most filthy countries on the planet. No wonder Europeans are flocking there. They can live out their colonialistic dreams.
CanOWorms is that you? Besides if you caucasian your as much of a colonialist as any european... Im sure that no american or australian (nevermind that one her maid) did anything wrong.
No, most people in the world believe stuff like this. It's just that you're isolated from them because of fear.
However, I take it that you believe in some racially-based reincarnation though? Your post shows the typical example of European race-based beliefs that continues to proliferate. You are disgusting.
Dont fully understand what your saying. I meant that any caucasian in america has as much to do with the colonialist europeans as any caucasian in europe today. Same ancestors.
I find it ironic that you judge every european based on their race and where they live and have the nerve to call us/me racist. I think the two biggest racist here are you and RabidMongoose. Your judging us based based on not on our actions but generalizations, history etc. Seems to fill the definition of racism pretty well. But oh well, Im white so I cant be a victim of racism, Ill just have to live with the double standard.
Im half finnish and half dutch. I feel mostly finnish since I lived all but one year in Finland. Im sure you know nothing of our history but that doesnt stop you from judging me or any Finn Im sure. In short thought we were "coloniasized" (sp?) by Sweden and Russia until 1918 but yet since Im european (and nevermind that Im 23) Im a colonialist.
Btw, there is a 4-year-old racist girl in Atlanta since someone did a hatecrime in Texas in 1794. Shes an american, after all. C wut I did thar?
Dunno about murdering, but my brother pulled a long stint in Dubai and although he had positive things to say, he also said it's basically full of fat, drunk expats who never go outside.Originally posted by: RabidMongoose
Originally posted by: CanOWorms
That article actually makes the ex-pats look the worst. I have a co-worker from Dubai who has tons of stories of primarily European ex-pats abusing & even murdering people in Dubai.
As I said, it's like a colonialist wonderland for Europeans.
Because it's the law and both parties understand the rules going in, so it's not theft at all.Really, when you think about it, why should you go to jail for stealing a chocolate bar from a convenience store, when you can pretty much get off scott free when you declare bankruptcy over $100,000+? It's not right.
Originally posted by: Aimster
Crap like this happens all over the world.
Apparently nobody has ever watched the t.v show captive abroad.
BTW their economy is still growing. GDP growth is 5% for the UAE.
III Hidden in plain view
There are three very different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang - but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?
Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Dubai are bussed from their shining sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Until a few years ago they were delivered back and forth on cattle trucks, but the expats complained this was unsightly, so now they are shunted on small metal buses that function like microwaves in the desert heat. You see them sweating like sponges being slowly wrung out.
Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings that look like multi-storey car-parks. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means 'City of Gold.' In the first camp I stop at - rivven with the smell of sewage and sweat - the men huddle around, eager to tell someone, anyone, what is happening to them.
Sahinal Monir, a slim 24 year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realize it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation and food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2300) for the work visa - a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise.
As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working fourteen hour days in the desert-heat - where Western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees - for 500 durhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.
Sahinal was in a panic. His family back home - his son, daughter, wife and parents - were waiting for money, excited that their boy had finally made it. But he was going to have to work for more than two years just to pay for the cost of getting here - and all to earn less than he did in Bangladesh.
He shows me his room. It is a tiny poky concrete cell with triple-decker bunk-beds where he lives with eleven other men. All his belongings are piled onto his bunk: three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, and a cell-phone. The room stinks of shit because the toilets in the corner of the camp - holes in the ground - are backed up with excrement and clouds of black flies. There is no air conditioning or fans, so the heat is "unbearable. You cannot sleep. All you do is sweat and scratch all night." At the height of summer, people sleep on the floor, on the roof, anywhere where they can pray for a moment of breeze.
The water delivered to the camp in huge white containers isn't properly desalinated: it tastes of salt. "It makes us sick, but we have nothing else to drink," he says.
The work is "the worst in the world," he says. "You have to carry 50kg bricks and blocks of cement in the worst heat imaginable ... This heat - it is like nothing else. You sweat so much you can't pee, not for days or weeks. It's like all the liquid comes out through your skin and you stink. You become dizzy and sick but you aren't allowed to stop, except for an hour in the afternoon. You know if you drop anything or slip, you could die. If you take time off sick, your wages are docked, and you are trapped here even longer."
He is currently working on the 67th floor of a building, where he builds upwards, into the sky, into the heat. He doesn't know its name. In his four years here, he has never seen the Dubai of tourist-fame, except as he constructs it floor-by-floor.
Is he angry? He is quiet for a long time. "Here, nobody shows your anger. You can't. You get put in jail, then deported." Last year, some workers went on strike after they were not given their wages for four months. The Dubai police surrounded their camps with razor-wire and water-canons and blasted them out and back to work. The "ring-leaders" were imprisoned. I try a different question: does Sohinal regret coming? All the men look down, awkwardly. "How can we think about that? We are trapped. If we start to think about regrets..." He lets the sentence trail off. Eventually, another worker breaks the silence by adding: "I miss my country, my family and my land. We can grow food in Bangladesh. Here, nothing grows. Just oil and buildings."
Since the credit crunch, they say, the electricity has been cut off in dozens of the camps, and the men have not been paid for months. Their companies have disappeared with their passports and their pay. "We have been robbed of everything. Even if somehow we get back to Bangladesh, the loan sharks will demand we repay our loans immediately, and when we can't, we'll be sent to prison."
This is all supposed to be illegal. Employers are supposed to pay on time, never take your passport, give you breaks in the heat - but I met nobody who said it happens. Not one.
Sahinal could well die out here. A British man who used to work on construction projects told me: "There's a huge number of suicides in the camps and on the construction sites, but they're not reported. They're described as 'accidents'." Even then, their families aren't free: they simply inherit the debts. A Human Rights Watch study found there is a "cover up of the true extent" of deaths from heat exhaustion, overwork and suicide, but the Indian consulate registered 971 deaths of their nationals in 2005 alone. After this figure was leaked, the consulates were told to stop counting.
At night, in the dusk, I sit in the camp with Sohinal and his friends as they scrape together what they have left to buy a cheap bottle of spirits. They down it in one ferocious gulp. "It helps you to feel numb", Sohinal says through a stinging throat. In the distance, the glistening Dubai skyline he built stares down, oblivious.
Originally posted by: Aimster
Nobody is forcing them to work.
The article says "they won't give me back my passport" and it also says "I don't have money to get a ticket home".
Show me an instance where someone who had zero debt and had a plane ticket in his hands was refused to get out of the country.
Many people work in Dubai. The business people from America go in there W/O a contract and are free to leave whenever they want given they have no Debt. You can't go to a foreign nation rank up a huge bill and leave never to pay it again.
The workers in Dubai are promised salaries ranging from $100-400 a month. That is way more than what they are earning back at home. However, they failed to realize that $100-400 a month in DUBAI is crap. That sounds like a LOAD of money to them. They jump on the train and head to Dubai failing to realize that their entire monthly salary will not be enough to sustain their living life-style.
Who is to blame? Should the UAE inform the workers that $400 is crap or let them believe that they will be wealthy when they enter the country?
If I could live off $100-400 a month in Dubai where do I sign up? I can live the life of a king there and retire tomorrow.
Originally posted by: AreaCode707
This method of: "fees to come over, you work them off, we keep adding fees, we don't pay you as promised, you're doing different/worse work than you were told you would do" is how illegal sex trade workers are recruited and entrapped in the US, btw. Same process.
Originally posted by: Aimster
Nobody is forcing them to work.
The article says "they won't give me back my passport" and it also says "I don't have money to get a ticket home".
Show me an instance where someone who had zero debt and had a plane ticket in his hands was refused to get out of the country.
Many people work in Dubai. The business people from America go in there W/O a contract and are free to leave whenever they want given they have no Debt. You can't go to a foreign nation rank up a huge bill and leave never to pay it again.
The workers in Dubai are promised salaries ranging from $100-400 a month. That is way more than what they are earning back at home. However, they failed to realize that $100-400 a month in DUBAI is crap. That sounds like a LOAD of money to them. They jump on the train and head to Dubai failing to realize that their entire monthly salary will not be enough to sustain their living life-style.
Who is to blame? Should the UAE inform the workers that $400 is crap or let them believe that they will be wealthy when they enter the country?
If I could live off $100-400 a month in Dubai where do I sign up? I can live the life of a king there and retire tomorrow.
Originally posted by: Ns1
Originally posted by: AreaCode707
This method of: "fees to come over, you work them off, we keep adding fees, we don't pay you as promised, you're doing different/worse work than you were told you would do" is how illegal sex trade workers are recruited and entrapped in the US, btw. Same process.
Nobody is forcing them to work. That said, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Originally posted by: Zebo
Victim of of her own PC MC thinking we are all alike and want peace.
Some basics are in order here:
Don't walk down Imperial between Normandy and Vermont in Compton if you want to live.
Don't venture into Waristan to cover a story or get terrorists side if you enjoy head attached to body.
Don't move to a Muslim country thinking you can live like a westerner, study the Qu'ran & hadiths which dictates all, thats how you will live.
Originally posted by: CLite
Originally posted by: Zebo
Victim of of her own PC MC thinking we are all alike and want peace.
Some basics are in order here:
Don't walk down Imperial between Normandy and Vermont in Compton if you want to live.
Don't venture into Waristan to cover a story or get terrorists side if you enjoy head attached to body.
Don't move to a Muslim country thinking you can live like a westerner, study the Qu'ran & hadiths which dictates all, thats how you will live.
Do you realize the bulk of the article has nothing to do with the dumb Canadian lady. The past 3 or so pages have been discussing what more or less amounts to the enslavement of the low-wage working class in Dubai and really the surrounding middle eastern countries.
Originally posted by: Zebo
Originally posted by: CLite
Originally posted by: Zebo
Victim of of her own PC MC thinking we are all alike and want peace.
Some basics are in order here:
Don't walk down Imperial between Normandy and Vermont in Compton if you want to live.
Don't venture into Waristan to cover a story or get terrorists side if you enjoy head attached to body.
Don't move to a Muslim country thinking you can live like a westerner, study the Qu'ran & hadiths which dictates all, thats how you will live.
Do you realize the bulk of the article has nothing to do with the dumb Canadian lady. The past 3 or so pages have been discussing what more or less amounts to the enslavement of the low-wage working class in Dubai and really the surrounding middle eastern countries.
I read whole article. Slavery is Allowed in Qu'ran, 'her' applies to all these fools taking the trip.
Originally posted by: CLite
Originally posted by: Zebo
Originally posted by: CLite
Originally posted by: Zebo
Victim of of her own PC MC thinking we are all alike and want peace.
Some basics are in order here:
Don't walk down Imperial between Normandy and Vermont in Compton if you want to live.
Don't venture into Waristan to cover a story or get terrorists side if you enjoy head attached to body.
Don't move to a Muslim country thinking you can live like a westerner, study the Qu'ran & hadiths which dictates all, thats how you will live.
Do you realize the bulk of the article has nothing to do with the dumb Canadian lady. The past 3 or so pages have been discussing what more or less amounts to the enslavement of the low-wage working class in Dubai and really the surrounding middle eastern countries.
I read whole article. Slavery is Allowed in Qu'ran, 'her' applies to all these fools taking the trip.
Oh yeah those crazy fools. Illiterate people looking to progress and make better lives for their family so they are willing to go to a foreign country to be seperated from their loved ones for years at a time. Unfortunately they are told lies which they can't very well investigate because they are not properly educated. Once they land in said country they can't do anything about changing their situation because they are indebt from the voyage and have their passports removed.
It's easy to be an arrogant jackass on the internet, but if you had to face these people in person you would sing a different tune.