The West subsidizes industries (f.ex. cotton) with more than they earn – in order to maintain standards of living in their respective populations – in simultaneous and total disregard of the effects of these subsidies on developing countries and the people depending on these industries.
It’s ever more “OUR culture and the culture of those NOT like us”.
The Indian journalist P. Sainath is struggling to – among many other causes – create awareness about the thousands of Indian farmers since 1995 committing suicide from desperation with their inability to provide for their families by (unsubsidized) farming, the only work for millions of illiterate people in India – while the Indian government pays the already rich millions to create jobs for the educated in the big cities.
Like HE says, WE could mime: Our western capitalism has maintained a standard in our way of life for almost 80 years, but the cost is a growing divide between us and the immobile illiterate poor. Basically we are killing them by being a bad example to our selves, because we want to live at least as well as our neighbours, if not better.
The thing is we are growing to be neighbours with everyone on this planet. The 80-year old habits may soon need to die hard – if not by voluntary action on an individual basis, then by proxy from inequality adjusting itself the way all imbalances adjust themselves in Nature. The survival-ready will be the favoured ones.
Rich people in all the countries of the world are taking steps to be those favoured ones. Not the middle-class. Not the intelligentsia. Not the creatives. Not the business builders. But the rich in money and influence. Those, who can buy you, because you have no influence.
Can you see it coming? Will you let it happen? Will you be the poor?s
