>> "whose wal-mart is it? our wal-mart!" "who's number one?! the customer always!" when we operate for less and we buy for less, we can pass those savings on to our customers through everyday low prices. welcome huuuuugh jackman! >> total revenue i believe every year: 400 billion dollars. having low prices drives traffic to our stores, and increases sales >> please welcome john legend! john legend: thank you! which then allows us to lower expenses, and lower prices again please welcome tom cruise! >> around the globe wal-mart is taking the lead in making a

difference. >> it's a continuous loop. "the american dream has become a global concept. i think it's our country's best export >> usa! usa! usa! 2012 was a good year for walmart. but it was a bad year for bangladesh. >> it experienced the deadliest factory fire in its history. walmart shorts were among the clothes found in the charred remains. but the company escaped accountability and for many western retailers whose clothes are made in bangladesh, it's business as usual. fault lines travels there to investigate why. >> anybody out there know how many zeros are in half a trillion dollars. take it from a numbers guy, they're a lot.

>> the fire at the tazreen fashions factory last november started on the ground floor and quickly spread. at least 112 people died. hundreds of others were injured. many workers were trapped inside because the doors were locked, and the building had no fire exits. the remains of the fire are still everywhere. this is where workers jumped out the burning building onto the roof of this dormitory. there's bars on all windows so workers had to kick out at the exhaust fans and jump on the roof of this building. rokeya begum's daughter, henna, died in the fire.

>> you haven't received any compensation for your daughter's death? >> many of the women who escaped the fire still live in the shadow of the factory. mukta banu is one of them. she says she was sewing the walmart shorts when the fire broke out. >> so how did you escape?

>> can you describe what you were working on? >> these were the pants you were working on. >> when word got out that we were visiting, other survivors came to share their stories. so you did the hemming along the zipper and the belt? and how about you? >> none of the women received compensation from walmart so you hanged and packed it up? - and they all vowed to never work at a garment factory again. >> do you know who these pair of shorts were for? >> walmart >> five months after the fire, yet another disaster in bangladesh captured the world's attention. rana plaza, an 8-story building housing several garment factories collapsed. more than a thousand people died.

even though the scale of the collapse eclipsed the fire, the fundamental questions raised by tazreen were the same. how could tragedies like this happen - and who, ultimately, should be held responsible? before we arrived in bangladesh, we'd received internal documents related to the walmart shorts order. the paper trail gives us an inside look into the complicated way that walmart produces its clothing. >> wal-mart is a pioneer and also the most ruthless practitioner of a sourcing model that has now come to dominate the apparel industry. >> it's a system that can shield the company from blame when disaster strikes. >> wal-mart's supply chain is defined by two critical features - the tremendous pressure wal-mart puts on its suppliers and its contract factories

overseas to slash production costs which wal-mart knows those factories will do by ignoring the rights and safety of workers. and then secondly, the utilization of multiple layers of agents and contractors so that wal-mart can distance itself from responsibility of the inevitable consequences of those sourcing practices >> simco is a mid-sized garment factory in a neighborhood crowded with them. at its height, it had 15-hundred workers. today, there are 600. simco is where the shorts were supposed to have been made. wal-mart placed the order with a new york-based supplier called success apparel. success apparel then filled it with simco, with help from a local buying agent called true colors. >> so this is from success apparel? >> yeah that's the contract and you can see, this is the price, and the quantity - 28,000 which is like

337,000 pieces. nowhere it is mentioned that this is a wal-mart product. but except if you see the label, style number, this is fg. fg is faded glory. >> faded glory is wal-mart's main, in-house clothing line. and it was that brand of shorts that was found in the ashes of the tazreen factory fire. simco says it couldn't handle the order after dozens of workers who left town during the muslim holiday of eid didn't return on time. >> so already we were overbooked, we were over our capacity and suddenly we don't have the workers to fulfill the orders on time. kevin taxin, the ceo of success apparels, he visited us and he was like going through our facilities, oh yeah the production, you know, use of four letter words, etc. and then he was like, and we told him like, you know, we're having trouble meeting the deadline. we need some extensions. we need some help. >> he was very upset. he said not a single day extension they

can give us. so he said find a subcontract, you know, somewhere. >> so the walmart supplier -the direct supplier to walmart -came here and told you to sub-contract? >> yes, yes. >> sub-contracting means paying another factory to take on some of the work. simco was already stretched thin dealing with the shorts. then, it was hit with yet another massive order. >> and then we've got this other document from public clothing company, and that's another wal-mart supplier? >> another wal-mart supplier. >> and they've sent a purchase order for almost 300,000 shorts. >> yes >> another set of shorts. >> august 17th >> august 17th, three days later >> yes. >> simco can make around 300-thousand garments a month. put together, the two wal-mart orders were more than double its capacity.

>> i guess the logic was you place the order and some other factory will fulfill it. >> somehow the factory will fulfill it? what's that code for? >> that's code for "yes, you do subcontracting." >> did wal-mart know your production capacity here? >> yes. wal-mart does third party audits. so the auditors come and they count your machines, so they know exactly how many garments you can produce on average on a line. >> given what happened in tazreen, some have asked why simco didn't simply refuse the second wal-mart order. >> factories in a place like bangladesh are engaged in cut-throat competition with competitors in bangladesh and around the world. so it's practically impossible to turn down a major order from walmart because that is the factory's livelihood. >> so to meet walmart's deadline, simco subcontracted a small part of the success apparel order to a manufacturer called tuba. tuba then sent the shorts to its tazreen factory. a few weeks

later, the factory caught fire. >> oh my god - couldn't believe. couldn't believe, you know. i couldn't believe - how can that happen? i don't know. so i called kevin, you know. i said look kevin the factory you know caught fire. he got mad, you know? he said what happened to the factory? so why didn't you send somebody to get our things out? >> success apparel accused simco of subcontracting the order without their knowledge. and wal-mart blamed their supplier: success. but simco insists that success knew about tazreen... and that wal-mart also would have known because its own database - retail link - requires suppliers to identify where orders are being filled >> retail link is supposed to have a record of every factory authorized to produce more goods, every factory engaged in the production of wal-mart goods. >> in may, wal-mart named over

240 factories it would no longer work with, saying it had a zero tolerance policy for unauthorized subcontracting. simco was one of them. >> if there were no shorts found in tazreen then business would have gone on as usual. it's like everybody knows what's going on. it's an open secret. but getting caught on camera, or i think in the act, then you have to disown everything and say i didn't know anything about it. >> that it is the practice of wal-mart to hide, you know so no direct contact. so here's the supplier who's the vendor and every factory you see in bangladesh are subcontractors. everybody. >> facing a scandal, wal-mart refused to accept the shorts or to pay the bill, even after some of the order had already been shipped. >> and this is our entirely abandoned floor. >> out 1 point 2 million

dollars, simco says it's nearly bankrupt. >> so all of these shorts were made in these production lines, and i really feel bad when i don't see our workers in these production lines. some of whom have been with us for 24, 25 years and all these machines are now empty. there's more to financial news than the ups and downs of the dow. for instance, can fracking change what you pay for water each month? have you thought about how climate change can affect your grocery bill? can rare minerals in china affect your cell phone bill? or how a hospital in texas could drive up your healthcare premium? i'll make the connections from the news to your money real. content while setting new standards in journalism. >> a new voice of journalism in the u.s., al jazeera america.

america. >> we tell the human store ri from around the block, across the country. >> if joe can't find work, his family will go from living in a hotel to living in their car. >> connected, inspired, bold. [[voiceover]] every day, events sweep across our country. and with them, a storm of views. how can you fully understand the

impact unless you've heard angles you hadn't considered? antonio mora brings you smart conversation that challenges the status quo with unexpected opinions and a fresh outlook. including yours. >> after the tazreen fire, walmart announced that it had dropped success apparel as supplier. we tried to speak to success' representative in bangladesh, but we found the company had closed down its office here. we also tried to interview the company's o, ga goodman, in new york but she refused to speak with us. kevin taxin was success' president at the time of the fire. he also refused to speak to us on camera. he now heads up another supplier called americo group. one of its clients...is

walmart. >> if walmart were really so upset about what success apparel did, one assumes they would not be keen to continue to do business with a leading executive from success apparel. >> on the phone, kevin told us that neither success nor its agent in bangladesh, true colors, knew about the subcontract to tazreen. but we managed to track down true colors' last remaining employee in dhaka. >> if there's any subcontracting, would you be aware of that? >> yeah. >> and then what do you do with that information? do you pass it up? >> yeah. we pass it up to our importer. >> so can you read this email for me and tell me who it's from? >> ok, it's saying hi kanta, i heard the shocking news about the fire last eveng. it's nov 26. >> and what's the subject line of the email? >> fire at subcon. >> subcon is industry-speak for

subcontractor. that email was sent by a manager at true colors shortly after the fire. so despite success' denials, their own agent may have been aware of the sub-contract to tazreen.

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welcome to jalz. i'm john siegenthaler. there are reports tonight that the navy has moved forces closer to syria it's in response to the chemical weapons attack on wednesday. army sergeant robert bales will spend the rest of his life in prison. he was sentenced today. bales pleaded guilty, he apologized on the stand yesterday. russia is dealing with massive floods and the situation is expected to get