Socio-Political Rants
One more day until the WTO meeting in Hong Kong. 140 something countries, 2000+ delegates, 10000+ foreign protesters and who knows how many press descending into the Wan Chai area in about 24 hours. The city is tense I think or at least resigned to what might happen. Barriers filled with water has been put up, meters on the streets removed, wire mesh surrounding buildings, covering flyovers, and giant containers protecting the car park of the delegates cars.
I don’t know enough about the WTO or Fair Trade. It’s on the list of "things I must learn about more before I make a really informed opinion." But my gut feeling is that globalization is a good thing because long ago I realized that Miguel in Guatemala has just as much right to ruin the environment, become obese, and waste his life away in front of the PS2 as everyone else I know. Miguel being my "little Brother," who is the same age as mine in the family I stayed with in 1997. I know there is no romance or nobility in poverty, the idea that those in undeveloped countries have simpler lives and better lives then us in industrial societies because their communities has not been destroyed by materialism and individualism is just a follow on from the 18th century ideal of the "Noble Savage," which at it’s core is racist and excuses poverty for dark skinned people around the world.
I think it’s a good thing that a company in Korea can bid for an architectural project in Milan the same way cheap plastic goods from Asia should be able to flood the US market place replacing the more expensive stuff from the country. If that wasn’t a good thing then Hong Kong would never have existed, and we would still be poor. The Asian Tigers would never have hap penned and the development we’ve seen in this part of the world in the last 20-40 years would not have been.
However, America and Europe do not have the right to subsidize farmers making them grow food and able to sell their goods below costs to poor countries putting them out of a lively hood. At the same token, it isn’t fair for the people in Australia to lose all their jobs because some corporations can pay someone 5 cents a day to live below the poverty line all the while dumping toxic chemicals into the water supply either. Sunkist oranges sell cheaper to those in China because the US tax payers help the company buy up all the land in Honduras leaving subsistence farmers drunk and unemployed while export it around the world. I saw that with my own eyes and I can just say as innocent and naive as I was of the world politics and economic trade pacts at the time and probably now, I know it’s not fair and just because life is not fair is not as excuse for people to be malnutrition, children not having an education, and being displaced everyday while some dude can have five houses, jet skis, and champagne that cost $10,000 every day. Is making the economy efficient good enough to forget the human factors of life?
I know only one fact which is that there has got to be better way.
To what that is, I have no idea. I am not sure the delegates at the WTO knows, and the radicals who want to dismantle the capitalistic system know either. In fact, I am pretty sure no one does.
What I also know is that we need to have such diverse and differing opinions all happening at once until through time everyone comes to a compromise, changes need to be made, paradigms shifted and that maybe the generations to come will see us as backwards as we see those from the dark ages.
The WTO I reserve judgment, the violence that may happen I am not too keen on, but police hassling protesters or the way the world press makes those against the WTO to be dangerous without listening to what they have to say does everyone a disservice. What I do know is the Korean farmers shaving their hair off in Central of the domestic helpers dressed up in colorful native clothing and beating drums have something important to say to all of us about our buying habits, and should make us think what it all means when we buy a cup off coffee in the morning.
I didn’t drink coffee for about five years after visiting Guatemala. The poverty I witness broke my heart, and I thought maybe I didn’t want to participate in the process of making these people poorer, but at the same time I honestly was grateful for the ability to drink a coke once a day. Afterwards I was in Sri Lanka and India, and I found myself not really wanting to drink tea as well. But really, through the years of thinking about how my purchases can help sustainable economy, I have come to know that in this globalized world, every decision I make has some sort of impact and the truth is I can never know what I am doing by living day to day.
I don’t think i have ever come to any kind of peace with the schism of my privilege living and growing up in the first world, along with all the privilege I have over everything else, and the realities of the lives of people I have seen. It wasn’t okay for me to have to step over the corpse of a 15 year old boy hours before the millennium because there is no cure for Malaria when the cost of saving him was 0.0000000000000001 percent of what the first world was going to spent on parties alone. It isn’t okay that children don’t get to read, and people die of AIDs because nowhere in their lives has anyone been able to teach them about safe sex. I studied all these things while in college with all the objectivity and passion as any other anthropological student from UCSC, but all I was taught was to know it was not okay and we had to do something about it, but exactly how remains unknown. I don’t think I would ever be able to make peace with those knowledge, and my own selfish desires to have a good life. Which is something I want, something I seek, and something I would really refuse to do away with. I am not going to give up running water, and electricity again having lived without both, although it’s possible it’s not always pleasant and it’s not pleasent for those who have to live without it everyday.
So sometimes I think it’s totally fine to trash the environment, make some people poor, kill a few communities in order for progress to be made, just because even if the children of those people don’t get to live a first world life maybe their grandchildren will just by default it’s the only way we know how right now. But there must be another way right? And we must believe in a better world than what we have now in order to seek it.
I admire the passion of those who will fly around the world to have their say for the sake of those who will never get to leave their villages, and I admire the people who know all about the global economy and how it works because it seems to much complicated. Sometimes I think, hopefully when I have enough time to learn more or live long enough to see real changes I will know the answers to those questions one day.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 
Globalization is a big complex thing. On the one hand, it’s bad that the peasants are being oppressed and all. But on the other hand, it’s pretty awesome that I can order LEDs straight from the manufacturer in Hong Kong and get them delivered in two weeks. I think the real problem is the attitude of the Western countries, the “we know what’s best for your economy” attitude that so often leads to disaster for the economy, like Argentina, or for the country as a whole, like Russia with its average life expectancy shortened by a decade since Soviet times, and all just to try to prove the point that the Harvard economists know best. There’s also the problem of globalization not being applied evenly to everyone, and the attitude that “globalization is something we do to the third world”. If the US is so in favor of free trade, why not get rid of agricultural subsidies?
And a big issue with the WTO is that it impinges on a country’s sovereignty. It’s allowed to make binding orders, so even if a country says that it doesn’t want to buy stuff from somewhere that oppresses its peasants or destroys the environment, the WTO can force them to do it, and this process is completely not transparent and not accountable to anyone. So the real problem isn’t even globalization, it’s really the WTO and its attitude.
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