The Challenge of Globalization

I have seen many villagers who used to have many buffalos, cows, and chickens living on five acres of land. They were once satisfied with life and were named successful. And then there were motorcycles, pickup trucks, mobile phones, and processed food in the market. Then they were told what they really needed in life in order to be happy. Things they needed to have. Processed food was better than their chickens and vegetable in their backyards. Their buffalos were not as good as the pickup trucks and their village ways of communication had to be replaced by cellular phones. And they became less satisfied. And they started to think of themselves as the outsiders. And they felt poor and oppressed. They were once again told that to move into the inner circle, to feel better about who they are, they needed to exchange buffalos for trucks, cows for motorcycles, and chickens plus cabbages for processed food. And they started to feel better about themselves owning trucks, riding motorcycles, speaking through cellular phones, and eating hamburgers. They thought life must be better even though they have sold their animals and lost their farms. From self-employed they have become employees. From owning farms, they are employed to work on their very own farms.

When globalization is driven by market capitalism, the world becomes a poorer place to live in because big corporations will always control the market making it impossible for independent farmers to compete.  Soon we will be faced with the world controlled by few major corporations dictating policies for their self-preservation.

We were told that we live in a global village. And interdependency is a necessity. We have to learn to live with one another, depending on one another, selling and buying products from one another. I think interdependency is a great idea. However there is also that false dependency where mutuality is not the basis for ethical conducts. The more we depend, the less free we become. The less we depend on others for our sustenance, the more free we become. The more we need, the less we have. It seems to me the simpler we live, the more space we have.

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Barefoot College

This is awesome as it challenges our understanding of what education is all about. It seems that ultimately life is about living and things pertaining to living. And living deals with the every day thing of sustenance. However we have transformed this world through global economy into a world of dependency that takes advantages of our earth and all the resources in order to feed a reality that we build for ourselves. Local economy through local resources seems an option that we have not quite explored enough. This TED talk on an innovative form of education is something to ponder.

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Globalization and Labor

Globalization has not resulted in global prosperity that it has promised. According to the 2006 World Development Report, the gap in income per person between the thirty riches countries and the thirty poorest countries grew from 17 to 1 in 1980 to 27 to 1 in 2002.  People at the top 20% benefit from liberal free-trade policy and the higher they are up the ladder, the higher the profit. However, the lower they are the lower they will lose out in proportion. According to United Nations Development Program, in 1960 the gap between the richest 20 and the poorest 20% was 30 to 1. By 1991 it has grown to 61 to 1 and by 1994, 74 to 1. In 2004 the gap between the top 10% and the lowest 10% was 103.

What is the effect of globalization on labor? Here are some examples:

Globalization and Agriculture

Globalization and Factory Workers

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Hunger in Our World

I do not recall the last time I felt hungry and if I did it was not because I did not have access to food. It was because my work kept me busy or I was busy doing other things. I could not imagine what it is like to feel the hunger and not knowing when the next meal may arrive or to live with hunger over extended period of time. I used to make it a requirement for my class for students to fast a meal and give that amout of money to a needy person. And while the students were all so willing to give, they would complain of how hard it was to go without a meal, to be hungry. My complaint has only been overeating. And we are spending our time trying to loose weight. Yet there is another reality out there. Check out this link. Hunger

 

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Another Encouraging Story

Last night I met with two of the students that received scholarship from our program. These two sisters came from a Hmong village way up on the hill with no public transportation and no electricity.  Actually this scholarship program sponsored three of the sisters.  The first graduated three years ago and is now working with an insurance company doing well. The second sister will graduate with a bachelor degree in tourism and the youngest will graduate with this February as well. These sisters are really hard working and are performing well academically. While in Chiang Rai they used to work at times till 5 in the morning, came home, and got ready to go to school again in the morning. I asked how many young people in the village get to go to college. Their response was, about 5%.  Not only are they hard working and determined to help support their families, they are concern for their village as well. I had a long conversation about the struggle of the villagers and learned that most villagers do not have sufficient connection. They grow crops yearly and make approximately 500 to 1,000 dollars a year if they were able to sell their crops. They do not have knowledge in terms of outlet for their products. When the price is bad, they suffer. Some years, their entire year labor reaps nothing due to external circumstances and the cycle of debt continues. Their are young people with dreams and vision and courage. They are the minority but through determination, they make a difference for themselves and for their families and hopefully for their village as well.

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Gospel According to Skid Row: Benefit Concert

Gospel According to Skid Row: Benefit Concert

Chen Fong Auditorium, Fourth Floor, Centennial Complex, Loma Linda University

April 16, 2011  from 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Poster

This benefit concert will be performed by members of Skid Row, Los Angeles. We invite you to come and be a witness to lives touched by the gospel and expressed through gospel music. Enjoy narrations of existential struggles, of hope in the midst of lost and grace at the center of life’s predicament. The funds raised during this concert will be used to support the ministry of LA Central City Community Church in providing care and services to the homeless residing in Skid Row.

Some Facts

“According to this recent study, the number of homeless on any given night in Los Angeles County has reached 90,000, up 8.4 percent from 83,000 in 2003. Ito noted that “the County of Los Angeles is now the homeless capital of the United States,” surpassing by far New York City’s 40,000, Chicago’s 9,600 and San Francisco’s 9,600 homeless populations. “To put it in perspective,” noted Ito, “the homeless population of Los Angeles County is larger than the entire population of the city of Santa Monica [a beach community that abuts Los Angeles]. It is truly an appalling situation.”

The bulk of the LA county homeless—82,291 out of the 90,000—are found in the City of Los Angeles—South Central (which includes Watts, Downtown, Pico Union, Boyle Heights, Hollywood—and in the City of Compton and in some of the smaller cities within the county. The industrial city of Long Beach, to the south (California’s sixth largest), Pasadena and Glendale to the north conduct their own count and provide their own services. They have 6,000, 1,200, and 400 homeless, respectively.

Out of the city’s 82,291 homeless, 34,518 (42 percent) are considered chronically homeless; that is, they have been “on the streets for more a year or more, or have had four episodes of homelessness in the last three years” and “have one or more disabilities, including mental illness, substance abuse and health conditions.” Approximately 55 percent of this population suffers from three or more disabilities.

–Ramón Valle, 17 October 2005, wsws.org

According to official U.S. government statistics issued in November of 2007, more than 1 in 10 people in the United States go hungry. More than 35 million people went hungry in 2006 according to the same report; almost 13 million of them were children and many of the rest were impoverished senior citizens.

www.freedomtracks.com/statistics

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Psychoanalyzing Thai Politics (Red and Yellow Shirts)

It is depressing watching news every day about what ‘s happening in Thailand. What’s worse is when you learn that news are not accurately portrayed especially among foreign news agencies.  We hear reports of military using life ammunitions.  What we do not hear is that there are all types of weapons within the protesters camps, that there are among protesters hardliners who will go to any extend to pursue their agenda.  But that’s not really what I’m planning to write here.  So here’s what I think.

If we were to look at Thailand as a collective body with a collective psyche, we will be able to recognize that this collective self has, through dominant discourse, defines its self identity and its worth through philosophical capitalism.  By philosophical capitalism I mean a place where people are measured by their productivity which, often the case, is determined through material outcomes.  There’s really nothing wrong with this definition except when it becomes the ultimate channel for self-definition that in an indirect manner imposes itself on the collective body.  I do not think that it is consciously intentional but it gets transmitted in a more subtle ways and through these subtle means those who are not within these categories feel marginalized.  Jung tells us that that which is suppressed will never remain suppressed.  It will have to emerge somewhere.  So the primal force that has been suppressed for decades bombarded through mass media has to have an outlet.  Again, when they are not well acknowledged or process, these forces can be brutal and very primal.  And it is the natural process of the collective unconscious.  It shows itself in unpleasant means.  In Jungian psychology, it is not the question of ridding the self of these forces.  It is about recognizing and embracing.  The dark side is not an element to be surgically removed.  The dark side is to be recognized.  The question is how does recognition work?  Perhaps the question can be changed to what is perpetuating these dark side?  I like to think that in different ways, what perpetuates this primal political forces is how our society has come to define for itself what success is and how people are valued as people, how worth is quantified.  And so we have the term the ‘elite’ that belongs to this category.  I think the problem is not that there’s the economically elitist group within our society as much as the lack of other variable for self-definition. It is through this definition of the economic elite that we have the poor and the underpriviledge and the uneducated and the unsophisticated.   This may remain true if and only if it is the only definition.  What is sad to me is that in many ways Buddhism has offered a very different perspective on self-definition that counters this common understanding.  In Buddhism the worth of a person is not determined by wealth nor sophistication.  In Buddhism, a person’s worth is his or her act of compassion and the ability to make merits.  This religion has given Thais other alternatives for self-definition.  If we were to take this definition and apply to Jungian context, it implies natural distribution of human value through expanding definition of self and what it is worth.  In this definition there’s the dark side is no longer dark, the marginalized find themselves within the margin, the force is tamed and absorbed into the collective conscious of the unconscious self.  Taking this analysis further, what needs to change may not be political system that we see through those striving on the streets in Bangkok.  It is the dominant discourse that may have to be redefined.  Wealth or the lack thereof does not determine a person’s worth.  This worth needs to be rooted in something that transcends itself.  Just a thought.

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I was in Venus and from there Mars Looks Very Pleasant

A friend wrote and asked if I had read Men are from Mars.  I told her I actually listened to John Gray when he came to Loma Linda to present.  She asked if I had learned the phrase “Yes Dear.”  I said “Yes” and went on to describe its complexity. Thinking about “Yes Dear,” makes me wonder about Venus.  I recall the lyrics:

The goddess on the mountain top,
Was burning like a silver flame.
The summit of beauty and love,
And Venus was her name.

What is it about Venus that is so mesmerizing, so tempting and appealing to men?  During my visit to Rome I was aware of the strong patriarchal environment of the institution and the country in general.  It was masculine…the obelisk, the Colosseum, the patriarchal system of the church.  What was fascinating was the presence of Mary.  As I entered the Vatican, the first sculpture to my right was Michael Angelo’s Pieta portraying Mary’s grief over the body of Christ.  I began to sense more of her presence in this country and wondered why Mary in the midst of Patriarchy?  I was reminded again of Jung’s archetype of gender, of how masculinity is never complete in itself, that in every man lies the need for femininity. Initial confession on my part will have to be the acknowledgement that I’m not a feminist in the traditional sense of the word.  Although, what is traditional anyway? But I’m intrigued by the symbolism that feminine carries and particularly at the archetypal level.  The Chinese’s yin represents shadow, curve, water, empty space while the masculine yang is portrayed as strong, linear, bright, solid, and filled.  The beauty of the feminine lies in what it can accommodate and its ability to transcend that which is normative. In a sense it is gentleness and grace. It is compassion.  It is care that grants permission.  It is safety and sacred.

I live most of my life in a masculine world in my career and the arena of public discourse. The world where we constantly have to prove ourselves, the world we have to compete with, the world where  we have to fight to have our self definition be aligned within the realm of the normative, the world that has little rooms for pathologies, the world where life has solidly been defined for us.  While it is fun and challenging to pursue this linear agenda in order to pad ourselves in the back, it is also very tiring.  So every man has to fight his demons and slay his dragons so as to affirm his masculinity not realizing in many different ways that perhaps most of the time these dragons are digitally generated by our social imagination.  It is the matrix.  It is sad as well when our social agenda have caused women to be caught up in the masculine world.  What we often do not realize perhaps is that what completes masculinity is the feminine.  That’s what I really like about Da Vinci Code.  Not the historical critique of the institution but the portrayal of the feminine aspect of God, the compassionate finiteness and the humanity of Jesus.  The place of grace and space, compassion and care that complete masculinity.  It does not matter how many dragons we have slayed, if the presence of the feminine does not exist, we will keep pursuing demons and dragons and the 1,000 dragons can never bring satisfaction because the linear logic has blinded us from recognizing the curvy dimension, the much needed feminine qualities.

So recently I was in Venus. Of course I have been here before in different ways and forms through different people in my life. But this time there is an added dimension of quality that generates different texture to the experience of femininity.  I met an old friend whose presence and hospitality offered a glimpse of a different dimension of the feminine (perhaps every person’s context may require different configuration of the feminine).  It is one of those moments that creates new experiences, experiences that mirror parts of me I am not aware of.  The presence that carries the symbol of the feminine has inherently a subtle quality to generate its own influences because it is transcultural.  I suppose all that one is able to do is to hold on to such memories and allow them to unfold themselves within one’s journey.   Where it leads, one can never tell except that it births a path that will unfold itself.  It is what it is and where it ends, one can only know what it was like to be in those moments.  Here the dragons are tamed and the demons have no tricks.  There is no battle to be won and the castle is just around the corner.  And yes wandering in Venus, the sight of Mars looks very pleasant indeed.

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A Closer Look at the Problem of Human Trafficking

When one starts exploring social issues, one becomes more aware of their complexity.  This was true for me when I started out looking and researching the topic of human trafficking.  The dark side of human trafficking is more complicated than just mere black and white dichotomy.  There are many shades of gray in between.  The public discourse on the topic some time has over dramatized the issue.  Not that it isn’t bad but dramatizing distorts the actual picture and may cause greater harm to victims than not.  So here are some points that I believe need some clarification.  

1. According to the 2005 report by the International Labor Organization, of the 9.5 million in forced labor, only 10% of these were victims of sex trafficking. The overemphasis on sex trafficking can generate its own problems. David Feingold (2005) offers an example:

The focus on the sex industry may galvanize action through moral outrage, but it can also cloud reason. A recent example is the unsubstantiated press reports that tsunami orphans in Indonesia’s Aceh province were being abducted by organized gangs of traffickers. How such gangs could operate in an area bereft of roads and airstrips remains unclear, but that did not stop some U.S. organizations from appealing for funds to send “trained investigators” to track down the criminals. Although the devastation wrought by the tsunami certainly rendered people vulnerable—mostly through economic disruption—investigations by the United Nations have yet to identify a single confirmed case of sex trafficking.

2. Sometimes traffickers just transport recruiters to their destinations and do not know what happen at the final destinations.  Sometimes they do care about the people they smuggle into another country.

3.  Sometime the definition of trafficking itself becomes problematic. 

 The concepts of smuggling and trafficking are often confused.  Particularly for the situation of girls who cross the borders from Burma, Laos, Cambodia and

China into Thailand, it has been said that girls are not trafficked, but they become trafficked.6  Technically in many cases, the girls and women agree to be transported across a border (smuggled) to work as prostitutes, domestic servants and factory workers, but become “trafficked” when there are elements of force, fraud or coercion in the transaction. This includes girls and women who may know that they will be prostitutes in Thailand, but when they arrive, they find themselves in conditions they did not expect. This is the problematic nature of the concept of trafficking, which must be taken into account if anti-trafficking policies made are to be effective.  The problem in the Mekong sub-region, as in many other places,s is that it appears that, in the vast majority of cases, the actual movement across borders, by and large, is “voluntary” in the sense that the person has made the decision to travel for work, within the often limited range of choices available. It is the end outcomes—the nature, the terms and conditions, of work at the destination point, which defines most cases as trafficking.[1]

 4. Then there is the issue of statistics: Under the heading FACTS in LibertadLatina.org:

 Brazil is considered to have the worst child sex trafficking record after Thailand. According to the recently released Protection Project report, various official sources agree that from 250,000 to 500,000 child live as child prostitutes. Other sources in Brazil put the number at up to 2,000,000 children.[i]

 And in Wikipedia, it states, “Thailand and Brazil are considered to have the worst child sex trafficking records.”[ii] If you look at the citation, you will find reference to LibertadLatina.org. Pasuk Pongpaijit, professor of economic in Thailand, pointed out that various studies on prostitution in Thailand cited numbers ranges from 65,000 to 2.8 million prostitutes.[iii] According to 1990 population census in Thailand, 8.3 million women were in the fifteen to twenty-nine age range, which is the most common age range among sex workers.[iv]  Further, prostitution is an urban phenomenon.  If there are really 2.8 million prostitutes, it implies that 24 percent to 34 percent are sex workers or every women in urban areas of Thailand.  Jenny Godley, in 1991, estimated the number of sex workers at 700,000 in this age range or roughly 24 percent of urban women.[v] Sittirai Veerasit and Tim Brown’s ethnographic studies in 1991 estimated the number to be between 150,000 to 200,000, or 1.8 to 2.4 percent of the women in this age range and 6.3 to 8.3 percent of urban women.[vi]  When it comes to child prostitution, approximately 17 percent of prostitutes visit health clinics.  Based on this figure, Phasuk Phongpaichit estimated the number of child prostitution to be at 25,500 to 34,000.[vii]  If the estimation of child prostitution cited by Wikipedia is correct in stating that Thailand has the worst child sex trafficking record (250,000 to 500,000) and factoring in the fact that of the 2.8 million women within the age range of fifteen to twenty-nine live in the urban areas, we are looking at an unrealistically high percentage of children in prostitution.  If we were to hypothesize that one-third of the 2.8 million are below the age of 18, we are looking at one in every two or one in every four children from the age of 15 to 18 in urban areas. 

 Last year while I was interviewing various NGOs and GOs on the issue of human trafficking, the first two things I became aware of were: sex trafficking is only a small part of the problem of human trafficking in Thailand and that no one really wants to talk about numbers. 

 

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[1] Christina Arnold and Andrea M. Bertone, “Addressing the Sex Trade in Thailand:

Some Lessons Learned from NGOs, Part I,” Gender Issues, Winter 2002, 32.

[i] http://www.libertadlatina.org/LA_Brazils_Child_Prostitution_Crisis.htm.  Access Jan 12, 2010.

 [ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking.  Access January 12, 2010.

 [iii] Phasuk Phongpaijit, Sungsidh Piriyarangsan, and Nualnoi Treerat, Guns, Girls, Gambling, and Ganja: Thailand’s Illegal Economy and Public Policy (Chiangmai, Silkworm Book, 1998), 200.

 [iv] Wathinee Boonchalaksi and Philip Guest, Prostitution in Thailand (Bangkok: Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, 1994), 29-33.

 [v] Jenny Godley, “Prostitution in Thailand,” in NIC: Freezone of Prostitution (Bangkok: Institute for Population and Social Research, Mahidol University, 1994), 148.

[vi] Veerasit Sittirai and Tim Brown, Female Commercial Sex Workers in Thailand: A Preliminary Report (Bangkok: Thai Royal Red Cross, 1991).

[vii] Phongpaijit et al., 200.

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World Hunger

I noticed numerous inquiries through my search engine on the issue of hunger.  As I was browsing through various websites I came across some very helpful information from the UN World Food Program.  Here are some facts that you may find beneficial as you seek to understand the issue of hunger in the world.  

1. Malnutrition prevents children from reaching their full development and cognitive potential.

2. Almost one billion people regularly suffer from hunger; most are women and children.

3. One child dies every six seconds from hunger-related causes.

4. More people die of hunger every year than from AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. 

I gathered information from this website:  http://documents.wfp.org/stellent/groups/public/documents/liaison_offices/wfp185786.jpg

You can find more helpful information from WFP website.

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