Prashad reports on the background of the fellow who built the garment factory in Bangladesh that recently collapsed killing around 400 people, and how all associated parties have scrambled to disown him. It seems that sociopathic persons everywhere find lucrative opportunities to exploit workers to serve the profit interests of capitalists, but when things go wrong they, like old clothes, are easily discarded .
The day before the collapse of the building...Rana was informed about cracks in the walls. Three thousand two hundred people worked in five factories in this building. “The building has minor damages,” he told the press. “Nothing serious.” Local inspectors, an anaemic bunch in the face of such institutionalised thuggery, had warned that something terrible might happen. Such people are not taken seriously in neo-liberal times. They are the ones who warn of calamities and are said to misjudge the dynamic of history. When the “accident” occurs, as it did the next day, it is these soothsayers who are ignored in the flurry of reportage that wants to suggest that this could not have been foretold, or of establishment voices that would like to point to this Rana as the main culprit and not the system of which he is essentially a minor pillar.