29807

Real Sports is one of the best produced and consistently interesting shows. It's simply journalism at its best. I say this in regard to a recent episode that dealt with the child labor being exploited in India in the manufacturing of soccer balls. It was of course, appalling.

What was so disturbing though was the complicity and utter throw your hands up by all parties involved, including Walmart and Mitre, the ball manufacturer that is soccer's Nike. But the representative from the US Trade Commission, our oversight, also said that it's just too hard to track. But HBO, with a camera crew, tracked the kids working like dogs down and made this point.

Like I've said before, we can talk about racial, gender and any other kind of equality til we're blue in the face, but kids are never included. This is one of the ugliest faces of global capital of which outsourcing is a partner in. These poor little Asian kids are like wounded birds, yet the empiric march of global capital continues unabated.

And what is "29807"? It's the sequence of the assigned UPC Code designating the United States as a destination for these Mitre balls. Real Sports found the balls at Walmart, despite the mega-corporation's explicitly stated "by-law" that it will not sell products that are made by child labor.