Davison's Doodle

She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel

One of the high school seniors that participated in a study trip that the Christian Church In Oklahoma sponsored this year opened his sermon (report to his home congregation that paid for most of his trip) with these words, “I am a 21st century slave owner and so are you.”  The study topic for IAS was, “Faith and Economics: Consumption, Contentment, and Compassion.”  We didn’t learn much about human trafficking that week, but what we learned about the treatment of workers in Bangladesh and other poor countries by multinational corporations that have home town names, Walmart for example, altered the world view of the group.  The cold facts are that the gold and other minerals in my cell phone help underwrite regional wars between persons vying to control the natural resources (coltan, gold, diamonds, oil, other precious metals and gemstones) of poor countries.  What I know is that little of I was wearing back in March, or even today, was made in the United States with materials from the United States, not even my Wrangler Jeans or shirt.  Wrangler!  Can it have a more western name, but not made in the USA.

I follow Nicholas Kristof’s investigative reporting for the New York Times and recently he has been looking into the sex slave trafficking that exists, the preys on the poor by offering a few hundred dollars for their girls and their boys.  His reporting has been heart breaking, surreal, and at moments while reading I’ve thought that they should just scoop up these children in the night and put them on a plane to anywhere but where they are.  It is hard for a white westerner to grasp what it must be like to be a lower caste or sub-caste member in India, though walking in Vegas, LA or NY, any major city really, you get a sense of our own American caste system though we “class” it up.  This kind of trafficking in children and adults no doubt happens to Americans as well as people of other nationalities.  Oppression and rape happen whether there is forced sex involved of not.  How do we break the consumption cycle?

She’s 10 and May Be Sold to a Brothel
Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times | June 1, 2001

KOLKATA, India

M. is an ebullient girl, age 10, who ranks near the top of her fourth-grade class and dreams of being a doctor. Yet she, like all of India, is at a turning point, and it looks as if her family may instead sell her to a brothel.

Her mother is a prostitute here in Kolkata, the city better known to the world as Calcutta. Ruchira Gupta, who runs an organization called Apne Aap that fights human trafficking, estimates that 90 percent of the daughters of Indian prostitutes end up in the sex trade as well. And M. has the extra burden that she belongs to a subcaste whose girls are often expected to become prostitutes.

What I do know is that it is surreal that these scenes are unfolding in the 21st century. The peak of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the 1780s, when just under 80,000 slaves a year were transported from Africa to the New World.

These days, Unicef estimates that 1.8 million children a year enter the commercial sex trade.

The Good Banker

My sister works in the banking industry.  She works for a regional bank that does its best to serve its customers and its employees.   I thought of her bank when I read this article as an “old school” banker laid out his issues with the “too big to fail” banks and investment houses.  It is very interesting reading.

The Good Banker
Joe Nocera | The New York Times | May 30, 2011

For nearly 30 years, Wilmers has run the M&T Bank, based in Buffalo. When he took it over, M&T had $2 billion in assets; today, its assets exceed $68 billion, and it’s one of the most highly regarded regional bank holding companies. It has also been one of the best performing stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index; indeed, M&T was one of only two banks in the S.& P. 500 that didn’t cut its dividend during the financial crisis.

Wilmers’s report, however, was less about the company’s numbers than about the dismal state of his beloved profession. Wilmers, it turns out, is that rarest of birds: a banker willing to tell harsh truths about banking. That, for instance, much of the money the big banks earn comes from trading profits “rather than the prudent extension of credit that furthers commerce.” That derivatives had helped bring about the crisis and needed to be regulated. That bank executives were wildly overpaid. That the biggest banks — the Too Big to Fail Banks — were operating, as he put it, an “unsafe business model.”

Finally — and this is what particularly galled him — trading derivatives and other securities really had nothing to do with the underlying purpose of banking. He told me that he thought the Glass-Steagall Act — the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banks — should never have been abolished and that derivates need to be brought under government control. “It doesn’t need to be studied for two years,” he said. “I would put derivative trading in a subsidiary and tax it at a higher rate. If they fail, they fail.”