The American Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act 2006 (UIGEA) has been controversial since its inception, when the Bush administration hastily tacked it onto the end of the unrelated ‘SAFE’ Port Act of 2006. Now, following a US Department of Justice opinion released at the end of December [http://www.justice.gov/olc/2011/state-lotteries-opinion.pdf], the future of the UIGEA is more than a little uncertain.

(Photo by www.horseracingphoto.co.uk/)

Beloved, our people drink up the filthy water

Heroines and heroes take deep breaths of killing air

Our guts and lungs are filled with bitter chemistry,

Poison, pain and cancers we lock inside our bodies,

Accumulating toxic wealth, letting no one share it.

Law, progress, justice, these are the names of our diseases. 

                                                               (Prem Nizar Hameed)

The legal proceedings that have followed the mass killings and environmental destruction, UCC (Union Carbide) and Warren Andersen’s status as absconders from justice, and the re-opening of the out-of-court settlement, are all clear indicators of illegality in the production and wake of the events of December 1984. In our earlier articles, we have demonstrated that, sociologically at least, we can re-cast these events as criminal. Moreover, the enduring harms to which Prem Nizar Hameed points, above, are indications that UCC, UCIL and Dow should all be objects of moral condemnation – while Dow’s efforts to ingratiate themselves with the international community as sponsors of the 2012 London Olympics must continue to be resisted.

When is a crime not a crime? This is a question that CrimeTalk will ask in 2012 as part of the current global interrogation of the ethics of capitalism, and whether the apparent absence of any ethics is inevitable or typical. As the global critique, and the legal problems raised by globalization continue, it raises issues about why politicians allow something to be done in their country that would be a crime in most other countries. One of the sadder answers is that a crime is not a crime in practice when the perpetrator commits the act abroad in a developing country with the collusion of local rulers in complete disrespect for the local population.

During the colonial period of British imperialism, for example, our rulers exported the theory of the rule of law in democracy but were often extremely slow or entirely forgetful in actually applying it to the sins of our own colonial military, miners, entrepreneurs, police and administrators. A local worker could be beaten to death by a mine supervisor in sub-Saharan Africa and receive only a small fine or even be found innocent if the poor victim had an ‘enlarged spleen’. In this article, Andrew Wright will outline another answer to our question: multinational companies today look for countries with lax regulatory regimes to expand their business, in what is known as jurisdiction shopping: as I type this on an Apple iMac made affordable to me by the low wages of South-East Asian workers in this age of neo- or economic colonialism. [Ed.]

Christmas 2011 is almost upon us, with the ethos of capitalism under fire the world over. Let us remind ourselves why this is so, and why so many now want a much more socially responsible form of economy, by paying a visit to an iconic capitalist city... In Hong Kong today some people still live in cages. They are not prisoners. They are simply persons rendered invisible in a world city where belonging and citizenship are instilled through financial capital and personal connections. In this article I describe this social problem within the context of rising levels of inequality in Hong Kong. I also present the Hong Kong government’s response to the problem and underscore the inadequacy of this response.

The social fact remains: in contemporary world cities, those with social capital (not only money but the right connections and associated knowledge) are valued much more than those without. Those outside don’t count; they are the outcasts and “human waste” of modernity and globalization (Bauman, 2004). What ‘everybody knows’ is that there is an ever-widening gap between the rich and poor. Hong Kong is no exception. Though Hong Kong is known to be a fast-paced international city that values luck, entrepreneurialism and wealth, its transition into a global city during the 1990s was accompanied by occupational polarisation and widening income inequality (Chiu and Lui, 2004). Those at the bottom of the social class ladder experience great challenges in simply getting by on a daily basis.