Monday, January 4/2010

The Dubai chanel much taken up with the grand opening of the new Burj - tallest building in the world by far at 828 m (the exact height having been kept a secret until the final moment). The tone of the commentary is incredibly self-congratulatory and utterly untempered by any suggestion that the sands on which it is built mayhave shifted with the financial winds. Worse than the threat of fiscal bankruptcy is the moral bankruptcy that underlies the whole state. Much of Dubai's construction has been achieved at the expense of virtual slave labour provided by men from countries like Pakistan who leave their families, pay to acquire jobs, and live in work camps, often going without the pay they were promised and unable to afford the fare home without it. All this to provide an obscenely luxurious tax free haven in the midst of a region that includes the very poor. It's hard to look at the new tower as anything other than a monument to vanity - tempting the fates of fire and disaster. A tower of Babel?