Alternatives to Globalization: Class Updates
TESC, Spring 2005
Class meets Tuesdays, 6–10 pm

Thursday, May 17

Good morning

Syllabus

Class Covenant

Bibliography

Class notes

Bibliography

Alternative Resources

May 17
We will talk about sweatshops and the movements to assist workers. These will include student movements, labor struggles, citizen pressure upon corporations, movements to have government jurisdictions to purchase their goods ethically. Here are a couple of sites you might look at for some more background. www.sweatshopwatch.org and specifically www.sweatshopwatch.org/index.php?s=59&PHPSESSID=c2ed15f60b6ba695e1c8e62f4fddaefb
Another excellent group is the Maquila Solidarity Network and you can look at their site at www.maquilasolidarity.org. I will provide much more information as to the work of Sweatfree Communities and the recent conference I attended.

Most of all, keep working on your projects. E-mail me with questions or requests for assistance.

May 10
Class will be in our Evergreen classroom and we will have Denise Attwood of Ganesh Himal and 20 years working in Nepal to talk about her experiences as well as to offer some thoughts about historical cultural conflict around the issues raised by the book The Chalice and the Blade. For some background about the current situation in Nepal here is an article from Amnesty International for you to read:
www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=80256DD400782B8480256FF70032137B

Also, we talked a bit in the last class about media coverage in respect to protest. Here is a brief article about the U.N.'s annual list of the most unreported stories. The page you will go to also includes some interesting links in the sidebar.
ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28551

For those who have not, e-mail me or bring to class the description of your project with the summary of how you are going to produce an effective oral presentation.

We will start class with some discussion from news reports all of us find this week on any of the issues we have been entertaining. This is to help us all get in the habit of expanding our awareness, knowledge, and critical analytical abilities to what we become initially sensitized.

May 3
We will hold class at Traditions this week. Everyone should be working upon their topic for oral class presentation at the end of quarter. Each student needs to bring a written statement of what they are working on, the progress they are making, the challenges they are encountering, the questions they need answered to successfully make an effective presentation.

We will spend class time focusing upon agricultural issues in terms of land reform and initiatives for localities, regions, and nationalities to develop food self-sufficiency. We will also spend time looking at broad-based civil society initiatives such as the World Social Forum which solicits widespread involvement to create new societal and economic paradigms.

April 26
This class will be held at Traditions. Traditions is at 300 5th Ave SW (corner of 5th and Water Street, across the street from Capitol Lake park). I will be there at 5:00 for anyone who wants to come and talk about the end of quarter project.

The assignment for next class is to look up a Fair Trade site (Fair Trade craft or farmer group, wholesale organization, or advocacy group) and bring in information and a question or comment from what you researched.

In addition, find information about micro-enterprise lending. The Grameen Bank is an obvious choice so try to find other examples.

April 19
In this week’s class we will spend time talking about the four groupings for end of quarter presentations. How you might choose a topic and group is part of this discussion because you can begin to make that decision tonight as you will have to no later than by next week.

We will also begin discussion about fair trade and how it has developed over the last half century as well as debating some issues about its impact and its future. The attachment below is a short article that will elaborate upon this.

Also, come prepared to class with a news item that relates to the issues we have been discussing in the first 3 classes. You can search through mass media for this but you also will readily find relevant news by going to the Alternative Resources attachment above and then looking at alternative media sites.

Download article

April 12
We will especially focus this class upon the issue of world debt. The lecture notes attached below provide you with background to understand something of the importance of this issue. In addition, there is a website for the U.S. site for the worldwide “Jubilee 2000,” a campaign to forgive world debt in the undeveloped world. There are some good articles and discussion on that site. You should have finished reading the John Perkins book by this class. We will discuss all the above as time allows in order to leave sufficient time to view the movie “Argentina, Hope in Hard Times” about the response of some of the Argentinian people to the economic collapse of their country in 2002. Questions and discussion will follow the showing of the film.

Website: www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee.cgi
Download lecture notes

April 5
The lecture notes give you an overview of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Please read these before class.

The Alternative Resources have been updated with a considerable number of alternative and media resources. You can click on that to get this new version.

Class will include discussions of the John Perkins book you are reading.

There is also an attachment below that provides you a glimmer of hope in the midst of some overwhelming realities. We talked of Free Trade Zones (over 1000 of them and over 130 million workers). Here is the first “Fair Trade” Free Trade Zone. They make T-shirts with their own label and items for Maggie’s Organics and have a women built, worker owned factory in Nicaragua.

Download Fair Trade Zone
Download lecture notes

March 29

Welcome to the first class. We will introduce ourselves to each other and in elaborating the goals of this class discuss what we hope to accomplish individually and collectively. There are lecture notes attached here that if you access this page before class, you can read prior to class. If not, this will be part of the assignment for the next class.

In the first 2 weeks we will read John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and use that as relevant information as we try to more fully understand globalization macroeconomics. To provide some immediate stimulus for questions and discussion we will watch several stories about Women and Globalization in a Bill Moyers program from the fall of 2003.

Download lecture notes