Elusive ethics
Re: The Big Story (NI 553). My last employment before I retired was for one of the Big 5 global IT consulting firms. The last big contract I heard about before I was retrenched was a $600-million job. It was to provide IT tech services as part of a defence contract worth $25 billion to Saudi Arabia.
As I recall, the main contract was to provide the latest air weaponry, basically to bomb Yemen into the stone age.
I remember that within the company, they were very conscious about ethical behaviour. So we did ethical refreshers every year. The company was ‘totally above board and honest’, as we just provided benign IT infrastructure services. We did not bomb anyone.
But the client list, over the 12 years I worked there, pretty much read like the corporate boycott list of everyone who would subscribe to the ideas promoted by New Internationalist.
The arms trade is not just the companies that make the weapons.
Reconnecting
I read with interest the article in NI 552 regarding Sebastião Salgado and the re-release of Workers. I actually picked up a copy of the original in Brazil back in 2008, while working as a youth and community worker in a favela in Rio. This book – with its overarching theme of social justice – certainly helped to contextualise for me why I was there and informed my work.
It’s also interesting that the book is subtitled as an ‘archaeology’, which suggests a non-linear view of history in which ideas/images from the past are rediscovered (or uncovered) and evaluated from the perspective of the observer, or in the contexts in which they are assessed rather than where they fit into some grand historical schema. It lends relevancy at a time that we often think of in the West as ‘post-industrial’. These brilliant photographs therefore help reconnect the past with the present (and the future).
Politics of sickness
I am a regular reader of your magazine for many years, and admire the quality of journalism.
However I was very disappointed at the total laziness of approach in your recent Hall of Infamy article on RFK Jr (NI 554). Focusing on his early life and addiction, following the death of his father, I think is mean, pointless and irrelevant.
The article states he has no experience in health. I would contest this is a very narrow view of what is health. Working to clean up the Hudson river, and fighting companies that pollute the environment and make people sick is very much about health.
Medicine has a long history of getting things right, and also very wrong – think for example of thalidomide, Vioxx painkillers and the infected blood scandal.
Looking at history, it’s clear that disasters happen, especially when secrecy, lies and profit are the motivation.
I think your magazine should maybe investigate more the politics of sickness and inequality. I’m a Manchester-based nurse, and have learnt a great deal about inequality and sickness.
Why don’t you try get an interview with Robert F Kennedy?
System change
Conrad Landin, in his article ‘Independents’ Day’, contradicts himself (NI 551). First he writes, ‘…reforming the voting system…can create…more democratic political systems’. But then he writes that electoral reform can ‘still fuel – and in fact accelerate – a system in which politics becomes divorced from people’. Which is right? You, the reader, can be the judge of that. Reforming the voting (electoral) system by basing it on proportional representation gives people the proportion of party representation (seats) that they voted for. Does that ‘divorce politics from people’ more than other voting systems where people don’t get the proportion of representation that they voted for?
We did it – a huge thank you!
Thanks to the incredible support of our readers and supporters we smashed our fundraising target of £50,000! More than 900 of you donated to our Rewire the World campaign in February and March, powering NI’s journalism to expose and resist the global far right.
With the politics of hate and division gaining ground around the world, it’s clear that there’s never been more at stake. As campaign supporter Peter writes, the Rewire the World campaign has come ‘at a time when those of us on the progressive side of politics are feeling horrified and powerless in the face of the rise of the far right’.
That’s why, thanks to your help, we can now publish a magazine that not only exposes the powerful actors trying to wind back progress on climate action and human rights – but also tells the stories of social movements pushing back.
We’re so grateful to have your support.
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