A capitalist utopia in Bangladesh
I was reading about this guy Sohel Rana, who made a fortune supplying cheap clothes to cheap Americans. Turns out it’s not that hard to get rich in Bangladesh, if you pay your workers nothing and thumb your nose at the basic costs of keeping them alive. One of his factories collapsed the other day, killing more than 1,100 people. He’d been warned the day before that the building was a death trap, but decided to roll the dice. The collapse was a mixed blessing for Mr. Rana. On the one hand, there are a lot fewer people expecting to collect their 10 bucks for the week. On the other hand, pretty much everybody in Bangladesh now wants him dead. I thought of Mr. Rana when I was reading this other thing, about the Koch brothers fine-tuning their spending plans for the 2014 midterm elections. After the ass-kicking the Kochs suffered in the last election, the Pollyanna in me wanted to believe they’d go back to the traditional way of projecting political will: voting, say, or being tiresome ...