Uzbekistan - Central Asian Hell, a Toilet on the Silk Road

Okay, I've done some research.

"Instead of using machines to harvest cotton, as is done in other major cotton exporting countries, Uzbekistan's government uses children. Every autumn state officials shut down schools, and send students, together with their teachers, to the cotton fields. Tens of thousands of children, some as young as seven, are forced to undertake weeks of arduous labour for little or no financial reward. Headmasters are issued with cotton quotas and made to ensure that students pick the required daily amount. Children who fail to pick their target of cotton are reportedly punished with detentions and told that their grades will suffer. Those who refuse to take part can face academic expulsion." Environmental Justice Foundation

Uzbekistan is totally fucked up. The only hope is to extirpate everyone under the age of twenty-one and let the rest wallow in the man-made hell they choose to perpetuate.

The USSR dissolved with a speech by Gorbachev on Christmas Day, 1991, and and the Bush (41) Administration, with nothing much else to do, recognized the Nation of Uzbekistan that same day. With, oh, I don't know, a few days' consideration, they would wisely have chosen to bomb the "nation" into talc and looked for diplomatic success elsewhere.

Had we had done that, know that the large majority of the 200,000 children toiling, getting sick without medical attention, dependent on polluted water and choked with the dust, dust, dust, and lint of cotton harvesting, and dying, eight documented in 2008, would not have been born into this state required servitude, this very real state required slavery.

Uzbekistan, at 800,000 metric tons, is the Number Two producer of cotton in the world. There is very little local demand, so that a minimum of three-quarters of these tons are exported. The crop is worth big money in Central Asia, but there is little Reagan trickle-down: the government takes a minimum of 60% off the top.

Doesn't leave much for ten-year-old boys and girls. And they are the victims of the old Coal Company Store economy, and actually pay for the prison-bus rides to the fields.

Some sick stuff:

http://www.ejfoundation.org/page142.html

Some more sickening stuff:

http://www.ejfoundation.org/pdf/white_gold_the_true_cost_of_cotton.pdf

I'm sure you all caught this, but the Uzbek government uses children instead of mechanical cotton pickers to save (make) money. Work didn't begin on mechanical pickers in the American South until they lost a hideous war, and free human labor.

There is a major problem here, as one might guess. His name is President Islam Karimov. Uzbekistan is a totalitarian dictatorship led by this former Soviet official, in rigid and unassailable control.

If only Bush (43) had pulled his coke-fried head out of his oil-moneyed ass for a few cogent moments, perhaps he could have done a bit of good (an iota would be any, a little, some) by removing this unholy turd, on the cheap, instead of the $Trillions we have poured onto Saddam's grave.
Sorry. I'm amazed we survived Bush, and even more amazed he abdicated.
Now, if we can get the the World's most ignorant, self-serving, owned, political body, our own Republicans (gratuitous capitalization) to take a few cogent moments and realize Medicare/Medicaid are government funded medical assurance programs for seniors, maybe President Obama can stop spending days on something so obviously necessary and devote some time to the hellhole that is Uzbekistan.

Tomorrow: some birds!