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Archive for the ‘global economics’ Category

Make the connections: Debt, action, and the “free” market

Posted in activism, debt, global, global economics, haiti, make the connections, natural disasters, policy on February 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

(image by Chris Coady)
There’s real hope for Haiti, and it’s not what you’d expect
From Johann Hari and The Independent/UK:
When people live so close to the edge, even small price increases can break them.
In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it [...]

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Before the quake: The roots of Haiti’s destruction

Posted in americas, global economics, haiti, natural disasters, policy, refugees, video on January 19, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

While earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade,
Tracy Kidder wrote in The New York Times, referring to last week’s cataclysmic quake in Haiti.  Kidder, who has written about the work of the legendary Dr. Paul Farmer in rural Haiti, explains in his article what many others have also voiced about the [...]

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Going Native: Modern sex tourism and the post-colonial gaze

Posted in global, global economics, sex, sex tourism on November 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Deep in our psyches, men harbor a vision of beautiful, tropical island women, adoring and submissive.  Could this paradise still exist?
-Henry Makow, A Long Way to Go for a Date
(This is the first post in a series on international sex tourism)
In recent years, there has been increased visibility of Western tourists embarking on sex tours [...]

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Sweet Dreams: The battle for the chocolate trade

Posted in africa, awareness, children, corporate responsibility, cote d'ivoire, families, food, global economics, labor, policy, prevention, production chains, video on October 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Democracy Now! interviewed Free the Slaves founder Kevin Bales, a lifelong abolitionist and author of several pivotal works in the corpus of today’s anti-slavery literature, including Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, and the recent The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America. He defined slavery for interviewer Amy Goodman as,
“One [...]

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Rare gems, cheap lives: Tanzanite’s disposable child miners

Posted in africa, children, consumption, corporate responsibility, families, global economics, labor, production chains, tanzania, video on October 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

“I’m looking at a piece right now, and it’s flashing red.  It is very exotic,”
London jewelry designer Stephen Webster told Time’s Sarah Larenaudie in 2007.  “In top-end jewelry now, the client is way over branded luxury goods.  They are looking for limited availability or one of a kind.”
But when it comes to mining Tanzanite, the [...]

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Light up: Malawi’s child laborers poisoned by export tobacco fields

Posted in africa, children, consumption, corporate responsibility, fair trade, global economics, labor, malawi, production chains on September 20, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Multinational tobacco giants have been long-vilified for marketing cancer-causing cigarettes for consumption by children in Europe and the United States, and increasingly in the developing world. But even as public outrage has slightly softened the aggressive marketing agendas in the West (or at least rendered them less overt), less attention has been paid to the [...]

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All that glitters: Child labor and Pakistani bangle-making

Posted in asia, awareness, children, consumption, global economics, labor, pakistan, production chains on October 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

IRIN recently reported on the International Labor Organization’s study of child labor in Pakistan’s bangle industry.  According to the study, children must hunch over hot stoves for average 12-hour days in order to produce glass bangles.
Pakistan’s Federal Bureau of Statistics claims 3.3 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are currently involved in [...]

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The shadow of globalization: Slavery, smuggling, and sex

Posted in global, global economics, labor, refugees, sex, video on October 9, 2008 | 1 Comment »

(Photo source:  Wide Angle)
For anyone wanting to understand how globalization and new migration trends are affecting the illegal trafficking and smuggling of humans, it’s worth watching PBS’s Wide Angle episode, “Dying to Leave.”
Although produced in 2003, the short but excellent documentary, which can be viewed on their website, provides a wide angle indeed on how [...]

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Sexpatriotism: ‘The last place you can be a white man’

Posted in asia, global economics, sex, sex tourism on September 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

After the Christmas 2004 tsunami, Hannah Lobel, in a 2005 article from the Utne Reader, described “slimy ’sexpatriates’ who’ve set up shop as purveyors of women free from the influence of ‘feminazis’” that took advantage of young women and girls struck by the disaster. She’s referring to an article by Alex Renton describing the tendency [...]

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Calling it slavery: John Miller reflects on Wilberforce

Posted in awareness, global economics, labor, policy, prevention, prosecution, sex on September 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »

“Victims of slavery tend to be isolated, relatively poor, and badly educated,” former U.S. ambassador at large on modern-day slavery John Miller writes in the current Wilson Quarterly.  “They don’t hold press conferences.”

Miller gives an outline of the nuanced topography of today’s fight against slavery founded in both global policy and personal experience.  He [...]

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