In my continuing quest to find stories of how China is increasing becoming Americanized and “capitalism-ized,” I ran across this recent New York Times that describes how thousands of Chinese villagers rioted against a hospital for allegedly failing to treat a three year old boy who eventually died because his family couldn’t pay his medical bills:

The unrest erupted after a 3-year-old boy died in the hospital, where he had been taken for emergency treatment after ingesting pesticides. Reports conflicted about how much medical care he had received. The human rights group said in a faxed statement that essential medical care had been denied the boy until his grandfather, who was taking care of him, could pay. The boy died after the grandfather left to raise money, the group said.

The New China News Agency confirmed that a dispute over medical fees had occurred at the hospital, but also said that doctors there had treated the boy even though the grandfather had not been able to pay the $82 bill. Local residents who heard about the incident staged a demonstration at the hospital that quickly turned violent. People smashed windows and destroyed equipment at the six-story building. . . .

Medical costs are a major issue for tens of millions of people in Chinese cities and hundreds of millions in the countryside who have no medical insurance and no public safety net to cover the soaring cost of care. The government once offered rudimentary medical care for nominal prices in the countryside. But hospitals were left largely to fend for themselves in the expanding market economy of the 1990s. Many ceased providing even emergency care for people who could not pay hospital fees in cash before treatment.

At first glance, we might be tempted to say that this kind of riot against a hospital couldn’t possibly occur in the U.S. However, if we look closely, we will see that many of the same issues that these Chinese villagers face are the same ones faced by millions of poor and working class Americans -- unable to afford health insurance or meet the soaring costs of medical care and increasingly, relying on overtaxed emergency rooms who get little help from the government to cover their soaring costs.

In other words, the ingredients for a popular citizen’s revolt against health care costs exists here the U.S., just as it did in China. Just like how the government ignored the effects of poverty, injustice, and alienation among Blacks that contributed to the LA riots of 1992, this growing concern about the affordability of health care is a very real issue for many Americans.

The question is, just like 1992, is the government only going to do something about the problem only after people are so fed up and enraged with the problem that civil unrest occurs?

One of the most visible forms of the outsourcing is how many customer or technical service calls directed to U.S. companies are now handled by workers in India. This also happens to be one of the examples of outsourcing that produces the most aggravation and frustration on the part of many Americans, due to -- at least on the surface -- how many Indian call center workers speak English with heavy Indian accents. IBM now has a plan to improve that situation:

IBM Corp.’s India Research Lab says it has a way to help operators fix the harsh consonants, local idioms and occasionally different grammar of Indian English, often a source of frustration of those who call in search of tech support and other information. . . . The program evaluates grammar, pronunciation, comprehension and other spoken-language skills, and provides detailed scores for each category.

It uses specially adapted speech-recognition software to score the pronunciation of passages and the stressing of syllables for individual words. The technology also consists of voice-enabled grammar evaluation tests, which identify areas for improvement by highlighting shortcomings and providing examples of correct pronunciation and grammar. . . .

[Previously,] companies tried to ease Western fears of jobs moving offshore by training workers to use American and British accents. Many of them often used fake Western names. However, with resentment in the West waning, most companies are now discouraging their employees from faking accents or names. Instead, they are being asked to speak clearly and avoid accents.

I personally find it a little sad that in order for Indian workers to feel that their work is being appreciated that they have to disguise their true identity as much as possible. It’s certainly true that many Indian call center workers are hard to understand but I have always felt that the depper, more fundamental reason why many Americans resent talking to Indian call center workers has less to do with their accents and more to do with American fears towards their jobs being outsourced.

That is, I think that Americans are more resentful that their jobs may be the next one to be outsourced and because of this implicit threat to their economic security, they are more quick to lash out at the group they perceive as being the “cause” of that threat -- Indian workers. Meanwhile, such Americans unfortunately can’t recognize that the real reason why their jobs might be outsourced is not due to Indian workers, but instead due to the fact that they live in a capitalist society.

In other words, one of the basic principles of capitalism is to maximize profit by minimizing labor costs. Further, for various historical and institutional reasons, citizens in most other countries around the world do not enjoy the same standard of living that Americans take for granted. Therefore, it is inevitable that given capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for profit that labor will be given to workers who can be paid less.

Ultimately, outsourcing -- or more specifically, American resentment towards outsourcing -- has little to do with India. Instead, it has everything to do with capitalism. If Americans want to rebel against outsourcing, they need to attack the source -- the American capitalist system, instead of fixating on the most obvious symptom of the issue.

As the young kids say these days, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

We should know by now that the U.S. government (present one included) is notorious for keeping certain documents secret from the public. But as the New York Times reports, more than sixty years after the fact, new photographs taken by Dorothy Lange of life in some of the prison camps that held some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II portray life in much harsher terms than what many of us thought -- or were led to believe:

The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams. . . . Adams portrayed the internees in the now-infamous camp at Manzanar, Calif., in heroic poses, lighted against the backdrop of the majestic Sierras mountains. Lange’s images — nearly a hundred of which are being published for the first time — tell a starkly different story. . . .

“They tell us that conditions in the camps were much worse than most people think,” said Linda Gordon, a historian at New York University who edited the book with Gary Y. Okihiro, a historian at Columbia University. Lange’s work unflinchingly illustrates the reality of life during this extraordinary moment in American history when about 110,000 people were moved with their families, sometimes at gunpoint, into horse stalls and tar-paper shacks where they endured brutal heat and bitter cold, filth, dust and open sewers. . . .

The War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the internments, possibly to demonstrate that the detainees were not being mistreated and international law was not being violated. But at nearly all of the 21 locations Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. Upon arrival at the assembly centers, the internees passed through two lines of soldiers with bayonets trained on them.

Lange was not allowed to photograph the soldiers, but she did manage some stark images of the horse stalls where the families lived, pictures that are included in the book. Lange photographed hospital patients in outdoor beds beside latrines, exposed to the elements; children neatly dressed for school, kneeling on the hard floor as they wrote in exercise books, because there were no benches or chairs.

I thank the organizers of this project for working to make these forgotten photographs public. It is indeed a sad chapter of American society, but one that we need to be constantly reminded of, in order to fight against the same kinds of events happening again. Sadly, the fact is that despite our best efforts, these kinds of injustices continue to take place, targeting innocent Americans who are singled out as the enemy based solely on their ethnicity.

Does this mean that our efforts at education and awareness through history and photographs such as these are in vain? Not at all. If anything, the injustices would be many times worse if we could not bring evidence like this against them. Thank you Ms. Lange, and Professors Gordon and Okihiro for reminding us of that fact.

On the heels of an Iranian American student at UCLA being tazered by police for not showing his student ID, as CBS News reports, the latest incident of racial profiling against Muslims and Arab Americans involves six Muslims Imams recently being removed from a US Airways flight and detained, all because a passenger and the flight crew became suspicious when they prayed aloud as part of their daily routine as Muslims:

A passenger initially raised concerns about the group through a note passed to a flight attendant, according to Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways. She said police were called after the captain and airport security workers asked the men to leave the plane and the men refused. . . . Three of them stood and said their normal evening prayers together on the plane, as 1.7 billion Muslims around the world do every day, Shahin said. He attributed any concerns by passengers or crew to ignorance about Islam. . . .

“The [Council on American-Islamic Relations] will be filing a complaint with relevant authorities in the morning over the treatment of the imams to determine whether the incident was caused by anti-Muslim hysteria by the passengers and/or the airline crew,” Hooper said. “Because, unfortunately, this is a growing problem of singling out Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims at airports, and it’s one that we’ve been addressing for some time.”

Whenever I hear of incidents like this, on the one hand, I am not shocked to see that Muslims and Arab Americans are still being targeted for suspicion and unequal treatment. On the other hand, even though I know things like this keep occurring, it still makes my blood boil to see just how ignorant and intolerant Americans can be towards people who are different from the White majority norm.

This kind of ignorance is also reflected in the comments to the CBS News article left by “average” readers who defend the treatment towards the Imams and actually blame them for being Muslim and apparently bringing on this treatment onto themselves by merely practicing their religion. I really don’t have the time or energy to point out all the fallacies and prejudices in their arguments, but suffice it to say that judging by the recent election results, their extremist, ignorant, and intolerant opinions are thankfully in the minority of Americans.

You may have heard that last week, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23 year old Iranian American student at UCLA was tazered by campus police after refusing to show his student ID card while in a campus library. A fellow student recorded video of some of the incident and although you can’t really see much in terms of the actual incident, the audio clearly conveys what happened:

As the Associated Press reports, Tabatabainejad feels that he was initially targeted and subsequently tazered because of his Middle Eastern appearance and that he is planning on filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the officers responsible:

A student who was shocked by a campus police officer’s Taser gun after he refused to show ID at a UCLA library thought he was being singled out by the officer because of his Middle Eastern appearance, his lawyer said. Attorney Stephen Yagman said he plans to file a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the U.S.-born student.

Tabatabainejad, 23, was shocked Tuesday night after arguing with a campus police officer who was conducting a routine check of student IDs at the University of California, Los Angeles Powell Library computer lab. Yagman said his client declined to show his school ID because he thought he was being targeted for his appearance. His family is of Iranian descent. . . .

UCLA’s interim chancellor, Norman Abrams, urged the public to withhold judgment while the campus police department investigates. Several civil rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have called for an independent review.

Obviously I wasn’t there to know the exact details of how the incident unfolded. But what I do know is that racial profiling against anybody perceived to be Arab, Middle Eastern, and/or Muslim is a very real fact in American society these days. Even if Tabatabainejad refused to show his student ID, I have to ask why was it necessary to tazer him. Was he brandishing a weapon? Was he threatening the police officer’s life? Usually, those are the only reasons why someone would be tazered, correct?

It seems to me that Tabatabainejad clearly has a case of racial profiling and excessive force on his hands. I hope he prevails and receives justice.

As you might have heard, President Bush is in Hanoi right now as Viet Nam hosts the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. It’s not every day that the President of the United States comes to visit Viet Nam. In fact, the only other time was President Clinton’s visit in 2000. So are the Vietnamese excited to have Bush in town? According to the Associated Press, apparently the answer is, not really:

“I don’t care about Bush’s visit,” Lac said in an alleyway parallel to the hotel, where the president’s greeting party was limited to a lone flag-waving American who works for the American Chamber of Commerce. “It doesn’t do me any good. It doesn’t do me any harm.” Lac’s indifference, which appeared to be shared by many Vietnamese, was a sharp contrast to the reception that Bill Clinton received in 2000, when he became the first American president to visit since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Unlike the joyous crowds that stayed up late for Clinton’s unannounced midnight flight into Hanoi’s international airport -- a half-hour drive from downtown -- Bush’s late-morning arrival drew mostly the curious rather than the devoted, other than the police maintaining a security perimeter around the hotel. . . . Ton Nu Thi Ninh, deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Vietnam’s National Assembly, said many Vietnamese, especially veterans who fought the Americans, find the Iraq war unforgivable.

People on the street -- even those born since the Vietnam war ended 31 years ago -- also dislike the Iraq invasion. “I don’t hate Bush personally, but I strongly opposed his invasion of Iraq,” said Nguyen Thi Tu Oanh, a fourth-year university student from Hanoi. “Vietnamese people have been through so many years of war and they don’t want to see the Iraqis, most of them civilians, to bear the losses and suffering of the war there.”

There you have it. It is certainly understandable that much of Viet Nam is rather turned off by the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq, perceived by many Vietnamese to be another misguided attempt to forcefully impose American-style ideals upon a foreign power. Actually, it’s quite ironic that Bush is visiting the country that many critics are comparing his war in Iraq to. Will being in Viet Nam lead to any sort of spontaneous revelation about history repeating itself for Bush?

I’m not holding my breath . . .

As Vietnamese Americans have been increasing integrating themselves into the American mainstream, their political power has also increased. In fact, many politicians actively court Vietnamese American voters as a reflection of their potential as a strong voting bloc constituency. However, in light of the recent scandal involving Tan Nguyen’s campaign trying to scare Latino immigrants to stay away from the polls, how did Vietnamese American candidates fare in the recent 2006 elections? In most cases, the answer is, not good:

Eighteen Vietnamese-American candidates ran for office in California this election season, and only three won. All three winners were incumbents. What happened to the growing political clout of the state’s Vietnamese community? . . .

Many Vietnamese-Americans suspect the stunning defeat this year of so many candidates has much to do with the scandal surrounding Vietnamese-American congressional candidate Tan Nguyen. . . . Duc Ha, editor of Oneviet.com, says the friendly relationship that Little Saigon worked hard to build with Hispanic communities in California “is now shattered.” Some Hispanic voters quoted by the Los Angeles Times said they were furious about the flier, and that they were motivated in part to go vote because of it. . . .

De Tran, longtime publisher of the now-defunct Viet Merc, in San Jose, says that he’s not disappointed with the election results. . . . “I don’t think this is a setback. You keep having to have more candidates every electoral season. Maybe the new groups will be better prepared next time around, more savvy with coalition building,” Tran says. “The Vietnamese community sees the Cuban community in Florida as a model, one with growing political and economic influences and lobbying power. Eventually there’ll be many Vietnamese-American candidates out of Florida, Texas and California.”

Maybe someday, Vietnamese-Americans will even be present in Capitol Hill, Tran says. What about closer to home? “Not in the next four years,” according to Tran. “We haven’t arrived yet. We are only beginning to discover the electoral process. But beyond that, it’s quite possible that we’ll have a Vietnamese mayor in San Jose. Why not?”

I can only hope that Tan Nguyen’s bonehead goof won’t permanently damage the political power of Vietnamese Americans around the country. As seasoned politicians know, politics is full of ups and downs (among other things), and things are always changing. So if you fall off your horse, all you can do is get back on and keep trying.

As China continues to becoming more Americanized and “capitalism-ized,” as the Christian Science Monitor reports, the latest status symbol among China’s emerging middle and upper classes is having a dog as a pet. However, with this new trend comes age-old challenges as well:

A generation raised in one-child families is eager to bond with household pets. In Beijing, the number of registered dogs is up 16 percent this year, to 530,000, but the true dog population is likely far higher, as many animals are unregistered. The reason is not only to avoid paying a $75 to $125 registration fee. . . . But regulations being what they are, some dog owners were prepared to flout them, betting that law enforcers had bigger fish to fry.

All that changed in September, when Beijing declared it was stepping up the fight against rabies, a disease that officials say killed more than 2,500 people last year in China. In July, officials in a rural county in Yunnan Province slaughtered 50,000 dogs to contain an outbreak of rabies. Pet dogs were snatched off the street and clubbed to death or hung. Jining City in Shandong Province followed suit after reported deaths from rabies. . . .

But even registered dogs that have had rabies shots are said to be at risk, as police stations need to fill their weekly quotas for dog exterminations. . . .But buyers continue to visit the sprawling outdoor market, especially on weekends when thousands of dogs, big and small, pedigreed and mongrel, are paraded for sale in cages or on leashes. Not all are destined to become household pets, however. . . The dog is leashed and led to a waiting car to be taken to a restaurant and slaughtered for its meat, a common practice in parts of China.

Looks like the clash between old traditional practices and modern Americanized trends continues to rage in China.