Worldview 9.27.11

Worldview 9.27.11
Barack Obama plants an olive tree with Nobel Peace laureate and environmental advocate Wangari Maathai in Nairobi, Kenya. AP/Sayyid Azim
Worldview 9.27.11
Barack Obama plants an olive tree with Nobel Peace laureate and environmental advocate Wangari Maathai in Nairobi, Kenya. AP/Sayyid Azim

Worldview 9.27.11

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At “Classic Group” factories in Jordan, scores of young women from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have been brutalized and repeatedly raped while sewing clothing for giant retailers including Wal-Mart, Hanes, Target, Sears and Land’s End. All of these sweatshop goods enter the U.S. duty-free, under the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement. We talk with Charles Kernaghan from the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights and with a group of Chicago-area high school students trying to draw attention to the atrocities. Also, we remember Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, who died Sunday. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, an effort to reforest Kenya by paying poor women to plant trees. Jerome spoke with Maathai in 2007 about her autobiography Unbowed. We play excerpts from that conversation.