Gavin Sheridan does a great job challenging a post of mine on an ‘over the top’ tennis match on top of an exotic building in Dubai.
He rightly accuses me of over-reacting to a tennis match and over-reaching by using this as a metaphor of some of the problems in the Middle East.
But he makes the points I was trying to make much better than I:
Perhaps a better example would be the two artificial islands currently under construction, almost all sold to Western investors, or maybe the World, a network of islands, again almost all sold to Western investors. Or maybe the Burj Dubai, set to be the tallest building in the world – Dubai Marina, thousands of apartments, massive yachts, and yes you guessed it, almost all owned by the “haves”
Yes the imported Pakistani and Indian construction workers earn about $120 per month for 288 hours work, in temperatures reaching 50 degrees Celsius, but a tennis match on top of the Burj is nothing compared to the Burj itself, where a room can cost up to $10,000 per night, and where Agassi had the pleasure to stay.
Thanks Gavin.
— Steve Clemons
