Issue date: 2/13/02 Section: Undefined Section

If you read my column last week, you would know about the World Economic Forum, and the protests sponsored by The Students for Global Justice are the hot topics right now in world news. I’m sure that a few of you heard of the protests, the massive police force, and that some people wearing black got arrested in New York. Ho hum, nothing new right?

Yet 15,000 people protested in front of the Waldorf Astoria hotel. That’s enough for me to wonder why these people stood in the cold streets not for a party (although much of it was celebratory) or a concert (and there was plenty of music) or even an all–American sporting event. A lot of these folks were students, so my curiosity piqued even further when thousands gathered of their own will. I also checked out reports on the World Social Forum, where 40,000 activists from most nations and cultures arrived to discuss, and protest, the same issues as the WEF participants. What’s the big deal about the WEF you ask? Well, the WEF is a consortium of 180 of the most powerful corporations in the world. It is a "global chamber of commerce," where an annual income of a billion allows membership. This year’s meeting hosted 18 presidents and 9 prime ministers. The agenda calls for discussions on trade, agriculture, poverty and other multinational corporate interests.

When the members arrive, they receive a nametag with a computer chip in it, a compact palm pilot that alerts others with your location within the hotel, and a cashmere scarf, that reads "Davos Global Village." Basically, you’ve got 180 old, white, male (with the exception of one woman admitted last year) representatives deciding the economic outcome for seven billon people. At the WSF in Puerto Allegre, you have 40,000 multinational individuals coming together to discuss the same topics with a broader worldview (not exclusively based on corporate sovereignty) and a better representation of global demographics.

What does this mean for the Sacramento State student? Globalization is a little like the word billionaire. We can grasp onto the concept, but as far as a tangible knowledge of real life experiences, we don’t have the frame of reference for it. What it does mean is that the jeans I am wearing are made in Honduras with cotton from say, Georgia, packed in Mexico and shipped from a distribution center in Los Angeles. I paid $24 for them, Probably $1 went to the person who stitched them, $1 to the cotton grower, another buck to the distribution center, and the $21 to JC Penneys, or it’s parent company.

My point being, that we as American students don’t have any real way of knowing what globalization is doing to people and environments in other countries. I do know how 200 of the worlds wealthiest doubled their wealth in the last five years, while 19,000 children die everyday from undernourishment. It means that it will become harder to buy something without knowing that others have suffered from below living wage pay and less than humane working conditions. It means that we have less control over our economic destiny as more of the world economic, political and natural resources become concentrated in the hands of a few. It means that as we allow the "multinational chamber of commerce," the WEF, decide our future, we are securing their wealth and our decline. Unless we, American students, decide our own way.

Disagree? Tell Samantha Hinrichs why or why not.

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