AGE

'ANTI-GLOBALISATION' PROTESTS

CHILDREN

• The Conflict in Darfur through children's eyes (photos)

• You'll learn not to cry. Child combants in Colombia (photos)

• Borderline Slavery: Child Trafficking in Togo (photos)

• Lasting wounds: consequences of genocide and war on Rwanda's children (photos)

• Cruel confinement: Abuses against detained children in Nothern Brazil (photos)

• Small change: bonded child labour in India's silk industry (photos)

• Easy targets: violence against children worldwide (photos)

• Street children in Bombay (photos)

• Forgotten children of war. Sierra Leonean Refugee children in Guinea (photos)

• Abandoned to the state. Cruelty and neglect in Russian orphanages (photos)

• Testimony before a Hearing on U.S Ratification of the optional Protocols to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (video)

• The smallest witnesses (audio)

DEBT

Cancel the Debt, Now!
The Jubilee 2000 Campaign. 2000. Approx. 20 min.

Cancel the Debt, Now! outlines the immorality of the global debt crisis. Activists from numerous countries tell about the impact of debt on the poorest people in their societies, as well as the effects on the environment. The video emphasizes the global Jubilee 2000 Campaign to cancel the debt for the poorest countries and explains why this is not "charity." Although the campaign is Biblically-grounded (in the Book of Leviticus) -- and thus the video has religious overtones -- this should not prevent its use in public schools. Its strength is in its advocacy for activism in solidarity with the world's poor, and in its scope. However, other than their dire poverty, we learn little about the lives of people affected by the debt crisis

EFFECTS OF IMF AND WORLD BANK POLICIES

Life and Debt
Stephanie Black. New Yorker Films. 2001. Approx. 90 min.

Our Friends at the Bank
by Peter Chappell 1997 (85 minutes / color ) The economic development of many countries depends on an institution now fifty years old, the World Bank. Often criticized and blamed for politically unpopular policies, and confronted with numerous setbacks, the Bank is experiencing a difficult time with regard to which strategies to adopt, in particular in Africa. Uganda, a country that emerged from the dictatorship of Idi Amin and years of civil war with relatively high rates of economic growth, is one of its "model cases." OUR FRIENDS AT THE BANK looks at the relationship between the Government of Uganda and the World Bank over a period of 18 months, filming with unprecedented access events at the highest levels of both, and their many encounters and exchanges. High-level teams set up by the Bank's new President, James Wolfensohn, and by Uganda's President, Yoweri Museweri, confront each other. The stakes are enormous. The Bank defends, as does its sister organization the International Monetary Fund, an ultra-liberal economic and financing philosophy which poorly matches the priorities, and above all, the ferocious desire for independence of the Ugandans. While Uganda feels a need to increase military spending to fight a violent insurgent movement, the Bank answers to donor countries and asks for details and explanations. In economic development policy the government favors investment in "hard infrastructure" such as roads, while the Bank argues for prioritizing education. The film also shows how the IMF can weigh in as a third voice, in bilateral discussions with the World Bank in Washington, or directly with the Government on issues such as economic projections and how they affect development financing, tax rates and policies. Finally, and contentiously, OUR FRIENDS AT THE BANK shows how accepting aid from these world agencies involves implementing the larger economic philosophy of free trade, and often reluctant and painful privatizations. But do the Ugandans have any choice, faced with enormous debt weighing heavily upon them, and the realities of the global economic system? Traveling between Washington, DC and Uganda, Peter Chappell followed the negotiations between the World Bank and Uganda in order to understand and describe the mechanisms that shape the reality of North-South relations, economic and political policy, as well as the future of millions of people.

Banking on Life and Debt
Robert Richter. Maryknoll. 1995. 30 min.
"It's easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for a banker to feel sorry for a child who is starving, dying of starvation," claims the Brazilian radical politician "Lula" in Banking on Life and Debt. The video is an overview of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies that promote poverty, starvation, and ecological ruin. Measured by its ability to engage most high school students, Banking on Life and Debt is spread too thin, covers too much history and too much political economy, and is narrated by too many talking heads. Nonetheless, through examining World Bank and IMF policies in Ghana, Brazil, and the Philippines, the video offers a convincing portrait of an international economic order that drains resources from poor countries in the name of development. And if used with other readings and activities that explore the global debt crisis, this can be an important resource. The snapshot of Brazil helps clarify the relationship between debt crisis and environmental crisis. Brazil has been ordered to turn more of its land to production for export. Increasing amounts of land are planted in soybeans. As Brazil's Cardinal Arns points out, "The food that we were supposed to eat [is] being sent to cows and pigs in other countries." Other poor countries receive the same prescription, and flooded commodity markets pull down prices of Third World raw materials. Meanwhile, poor Brazilian farmers lose their land to huge corporations and become squatters, every year hacking down more and more Amazon rainforest. The video doesn't bubble over with hope, but we do meet activists in every country visited who describe efforts to organize for alternatives to debt slavery

Showdown in Seattle: Five Days that shook the WTO

Produced December, 1999 by Independent Media Center and Big Noise Films, Changing America, Headwaters Action Video Collective, Paper Tiger TV, VideoActive and Whispered Media, working with the footage of dozens of video activists from the IMC. (150 min.)
Showdown in Seattle features an on-the-ground, non corporate perspective and in-depth analysis you won't find anywhere else, in addition to incredible footage of police repression and popular resistance. Each half hour show is made up of segments shot and edited on location in downtown Seattle by an unprecedented collaboration of video producers from around the U.S. working under the umbrella of the Independant Media Center. The programs in this series were produced daily on location in Seattle and satellitecast across the U.S on each day of the WTO ministerial. Pricing: Individuals - $50 donation + $3 shipping & handling=$53
Low-income/activist/students - $25 donation + $3 S&H = $28
Institutional Rate (universities, libraries, large corporations and non-profit organizations) - $250 donation + $3 S&H = $253 Order from any of the Co-Producers More on Corporate Globalization and this video
Images from Showdown in Seattle

ETHICS

EUROPE AND INTERNATIONAL POLICIES

GENDER

GLOBALISATION

HEALTH

HUMAN RIGHTS

• Darfur: A Human Rights Catastrophe

• The new racism: The political manipulation of ethnicity in Côte d' Ivoire

LABOUR

Behind the Labels: Garment Workers on U.S. Saipan (2001)
Lured by false promises and driven by desperation, thousands of Chinese and Filipina women pay high fees to work in garment factories on the Pacific island of Saipan - the only U.S. territory exempt from labor and immigration laws. The clothing they sew, bearing the "Made in the USA" label, is shipped duty and quota-free to the U.S for sale by major retailers. Powerful hidden camera footage, along with the garment workers' personal stories, offers a rare and unforgettable glimpse into indentured labor and the workings of the global sweatshop. Produced and directed by Tia Lessin. Contact Witness at 212-274-1664 ext. 201 or www.witness.org .

Made in Thailand (2000)
A film by Eve-Laure Moros Ortega and Linzy Emery. It shows the underside of economic globalization by concentrating on Thai women workers who are often among the invisible casualties of globalization. This film makes them visible. The women reveal how interconnected consumers and other workers in Western industrialized nations are to workers in industrializing countries in the new world economy. The film is an attempt to raise awareness and stimulate a dialogue about the need to protect workers' rights in the age of economic globalization. Contact Eve-Laure Moros Ortega, 321 Carlton Avenue 2nd Floor, Brooklyn NY 11205, 718-852-3586 or mailto:evelaure@mindspring.com.

Maquila: A tale of Two Mexicos (2000)
Saul Landau and Sonia Angulo. Cinema Guild. 2000. 55 min.
Filmed in Mexico, this documentary lays open to sight and sound the lives of contemporary Mexicans. Peasants and farmers have been forced off the land and have migrated to Juarez, Tiajuana and other northern border cities, where they work in maquilas. Others cling tenuously to their land using pre-modern agricultural modes in the post-modern age of industrial globalization. A film by Saul Landau and Sonia Angulo. Contact Cinema Guild at 800-723-5522The "two Mexicos" referred to in the title of this video are the countryside and the industrial border zones, home to numerous maquiladoras . Although the video's portrait of maquiladora-centered urban life is much fuller than its depiction of rural life, this is an important resource. As one observer points out, the maquila boom may represent economic growth, but it is certainly not genuine development. Using Ciudad Juarez -- just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas -- as a case study, the video demonstrates how maquilas cheat workers out of wages, undermine unions, pollute surrounding neighborhoods, offer miserable health and safety conditions, and abuse the largely female labor force. Interviews with workers offer glimpses into the intimate humiliations they confront. One woman maquila worker says that factory managers will fire any worker who becomes pregnant; they require women to take pregnancy tests and go so far as to demand to see their sanitary napkins to make sure they are menstruating. Another startling feature of the video is its investigation into the huge number of disappearances and murders of poor women in Juarez. A crime wave that might be portrayed as horrifying but inexplicable by the mainstream media is here given economic and social context. Be aware that there is an especially gruesome scene of a murdered young woman that could upset some students. But this segment is not unrelievedly grim. The video features a large and inspiring demonstration of hundreds of women waving white handkerchiefs, chanting "Ni una mas!" (Not one more!) Although we don't learn about conditions in the countryside in as much depth as we learn about urban life, there are effective scenes of peasants in Chiapas resisting the militarization of their lands, and interview segments with the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. Maquiladoras depend on a ready supply of desperate people willing to trade their freedom and sometimes their health for a regular, if inadequate, wage. This video begins to ask, "Why?" and to locate sweatshops in a broader process of globalization.

Global Village or Global Pillage
Jeremy Brecher. 1999. 28 min.
Global Village or Global Pillage makes two arguments: People around the world are being pitted against each other in a "race to the bottom," where "all are being driven down to the level of the poorest and most desperate;" and this process can only be reversed through global solidarity. The video opens with Westinghouse worker, Janet Pratt, who lost her job when the company decided to move production from the United States to Juarez, Mexico. To add insult to injury, Westinghouse invited Pratt to travel south to train the workers who would now being doing her job. Despite misgivings, she accepted and found Juarez workers living in miserable conditions and earning 85¢ an hour for what she had been making $13.65 an hour to do. It's the video's initial illustration of a process that is going on throughout the world as capital rushes to find the cheapest labor it can, as well as the least restrictive environmental regulations. Part two of Global Village or Global Pillage argues for what the producers call the "Lilliput Strategy" -- named for the Lilliputians tying up of Gulliver with hundreds of pieces of thread. Students might be encouraged to think about the strengths and weaknesses of this metaphor in considering the potential nature of movements for global justice. Examples in the video of this strategy include a consumer campaign to support GAP workers in El Salvador, a global campaign to aid Indian villagers combating a World Bank-supported dam, and worker solidarity struggles to force Bridgestone-Firestone to rehire U.S. workers it had fired and replaced with 2300 strikebreakers. In this campaign, Brazilian workers held one-hour stoppages and then "worked like turtles," the Brazilian expression for a slowdown. These are inspiring examples that point toward a world where people support each other not simply for moral or humane reasons, but also out of selfinterest, to create decent living and working conditions in their own societies. In a 28-minute video, the producers can be forgiven for sidestepping more detailed questions of strategy. Does the Lilliput strategy imagine a world of regulated global capitalism, with a social and environmental "floor," or are humane and environmental objectives fundamentally incompatible with a system based on private profit, and thus require a non-capitalist global order? They don't say. This is a worthwhile overview to many of the issues covered in Rethinking Globalization.

Lost Futures: The Problem of Child Labour (2000)
Produced by the American Federation of Teachers, this 16-minute video for middle school students includes a brief history of child labour in the United States, a description of child labour around the globe including the story of Iqbal Masih--a freed child labourer and martyr from Pakistan--and how American schools have joined in the fight to end child labour. The video is accompanied by a teacher's guide with background information, lesson plan suggestions, and additional resources. Contact the American Federation of Teachers at www.aft.org/international/child/video.html.

Sweating for a T-Shirt (1999)
Produced by Global Exchange. Follow the journey of a UCLA freshman through the garment industry of Honduras as she seeks to find out how her school t-shirt was made. Contact Global Exchange at 800-497-1994 or www.globalexchange.org .

Something to Hide (1999)
From the National Labor Committee (NLC) and the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). US students visit El Salvador's maquilas. A good resource for university-based campaigns. Contact NLC at 212-242-3002 or www.nlcnet.org .

Zoned for Slavery: the Child Behind the Label (1995)
National Labour Committee. 1995. 23 min.
From the National Labor Committee. On Central America's maquiladora export assembly industry. Contact NLC at 212-242-3002 or www.nlcnet.org .
United States corporations operating in Central American free trade zones "pay no corporate taxes, no income taxes, no social security or health benefits, and they treat their workers like slaves. There are no inspections, no regulations, and when workers try to organize, they are fired." As Zoned for Slavery emphasizes, these miserable conditions are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, with over $1 billion funneled to free trade zones by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Most of the workers are young women - teenagers - who work for wages that are 5 to 10% of the wages earned by U.S. apparel workers. Children are the losers, forced to choose between work and school, as employers insist on mandatory overtime. In his commentary in the video, the National Labour Committee's Charles Kernaghan insists that with their forced overtime policies, companies "are telling these young women: 'It's school or it's work - you decide. If you're going to go to school tonight, don't bother coming back tomorrow, 'cause you're fired.'" Kernaghan's indignation at the youngsters' exploitation courses through the video. A Gap shirt made in El Salvador sells in the United States for $20, but the workers receive just 12 ¢. Who gets the other $19.88? he demands. The video is relentlessly polemical, but why shouldn't it be? Kernaghan's outrage is an appropriate response to the degradation he witnesses. With Kernaghan, we sneak into a Honduran maquiladora and hear from the teenage workers about their conditions. In open garbage pits outside the factories we see discarded packets of the birth control pills that factory managers force on young women workers. Not explained, unfortunately, is the role of the Korean subcontractors who appear as the video's only on-camera bad guys. As with the NLC video Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti (reviewed here), Zoned for Slavery is marred by its failure to highlight the ongoing organizing efforts of Central Americans themselves. By almost entirely ignoring labor and human rights activities there, the producers implicitly suggest that people in the United States must shoulder sole responsibility to confront sweatshop abuse. Still, Zoned for Slavery is an excellent - some teachers think the best - introduction to issues of child labour and global sweatshops. It's an important resource, one I've found especially valuable as a follow-up to the Transnational Capital Auction

Tomorrow We'll Finish
UNICEF (distributed by Maryknoll). 1994. 26 min.

Tomorrow We'll Finish dramatizes the lives of three, Nepalese girls in a rug factory in Katmandu. Although it may feel a bit melodramatic or contrived to some students, the video is an effective introduction to child labor in the rug industry. Its attention to details -- the rigors of the girls' working conditions, their sexual harassment by their "middleman" overseer, the pressure to produce in order to pay back loans to their families -- lends the video a feeling of authenticity and invites students to look at life from the girls' points of view. Especially touching is the tenderness in the three girls' relationships and how they look out for one another. I've used the video only once, but my students -- mostly high school sophomores at the time -- enjoyed it and found it more affecting than reporter-narrated TV newsmagazine segments. Viewers get only a glimpse of how the girls' labour relates to the global economy when a Europeanlooking rug buyer enters the factory to bargain for the finished product. The failure to examine the broader global context of child labor could be considered a weakness of the video. On the other hand, it demonstrates effectively how both consumers and producers are often invisible to each other.

MIGRATION

UPROOTED: Refugees of the Global Economy
(National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights with Sasha Khokha, Ulla Nilsen, Jon Fromer, and Francisco Herrera, 28 min, 2001)

The Spectre of Hope (2001)
With Sebastião Salgado and John Berger
Directed by Paul Carlin
Produced by Paula Jalfon, Colin MacCabe and Adam Simon (52 minutes / color)

Chain of Love (2001)
A Film by Marije Meerman (50 minutes / color )

The demand for domestic help is increasing in the West, because in many families both parents must work for economic survival. One consequence is migration: escalating numbers of women in the Third World are leaving their own children to take care of kids in the West. Women from the Philippines are well regarded by prospective employers in the United States and Europe. They speak English, are Catholic, and according to many, are caring, intelligent, and compliant. Or, as Rhacel Parrenas (author of the study Global Servants) remarks, "The Filipino nanny is the Mercedes Benz amongst the international [caregivers]." The money the expatriates earn in the West is sent home to the Philippines, where local help can then be hired to look after their children. This money is the Philippines' largest source of income in foreign currency. CHAIN OF LOVE is a film about the Philippines' second largest export product - maternal love - and how this export affects the women involved, their families in the Philippines, and families in the West.

• Haitian Immigrants in the Dominican Republic

• Images from the 1995-1996 war and from the conflict that resumed in 1999

• Refugees

• Photo Essay: Montagnard Refugees in Cambodia

• Closed door policy: Afgaan Refugees in Pakistan and Iran

POVERTY

TRADE

New Democracy Project: Trade & Globalization
Presenters: Lael Brainard and Lori Wallach,
Commentators: REP. Sherrod Brown and Michael Waldman
The New Democracy Project (NDP) is a national/urban affairs institute utilizing the assets of New York City to promote democratic participation, economic fairness and social justice.

This is what free trade looks like
by activist media project Los Angelesthe NAFTA fraud in méxico, the failure of the WTO, and the case for global revolt Designed for educational and community use as a companion film to This is What Democracy Looks Like , this is one of the first activist films to carefully explain how free trade operates. It does so from the perspective of the Mexican experience with ten years of NAFTA. Activists and scholars authoritatively condemn free trade as a solution to poverty and discuss the impacts on farmers, workers, youth, and immigrants. Shot in Cancún, México on the occasion of the 5th WTO ministerial in September 2003, it contextualizes the growing international resistance to free trade policies. Music from the streets of Cancún. 2004. 60 minutes.

Trade Secrets: The Hidden Costs of the FTAA (2003)
The FTAA would extend NAFTA to the rest of the Western Hemisphere, except for Cuba, including 31 more countries and another 400 million people. Scheduled for completion by 2005, it would be the most far-reaching free trade agreement ever negotiated. The 16-minute documentary Trade Secrets examines in clear, concise language how NAFTA and FTAA impact workers' rights, the environment, and our democracy. A film by Casey Peek and Jeremy Blasi. The video comes with an accompanying curriculum guide, "Understanding the FTAA," including a set of fact sheets, background materials, and fun interactive role plays. Contact the Henning Center for International Labor Relations at (510) 642-1583 or henningcenter.berkeley.edu/projects/tradesecrets.html .