I agree with all of this. A few comments within.
jrs
On Feb 17, 2012, at 7:33 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:
>
> If one is serious about eliminating global poverty one can begin to
> implement the numerous recommendations of the countless global poverty
> alleviation conferences which have seen some very good broad based
> government led ideas to end poverty. Not NGO-led but government led -
> governments are not optional in poverty alleviation.
>
The rich West (where I reside & was born & raised) prefers, or plays lip
service to, NGO & "market-based" solutions to poverty eradication and social
justice precisely because government solutions are necessarily systemic, not
piecemeal, and the Western elite does not want systemic change which threatens
the status quo. They don't want people to even *conceive* of systemic solutions
to widespread poverty & social injustice.
The most glaring recent example of this philosophy in action was the
"Transitional Government Authority" (or whatever it was called) put in place in
Iraq by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal right after the 2003 invasion and headed
by the American Viceroy Paul Bremmer. Under the Rumsfeld/Bremmer plan, what
little remained of the Iraqi state was forcibly dissolved on the theory that
everything was going to be run by NGOs and private companies and the magic
fairy dust of the free market was going to magically fix all problems. It was,
of course, a miserable failure that resulted the death of a hundred thousand
innocent civilians, including tens of thousands of children. However, although
things didn't turned out as advertised -- in particular, the oil hasn't been
transferred to American ownership--the Iraq invasion was still a success from
the point of view of the American moneyed elite, who are heavily invested in
the military-industrial complex and make vast sums of money whenever the US
goes to war.
Even within the West, the ruling elite does everything it can to prevent its
own people from thinking in terms of systems. Ronald Reagan, running for
President, said the most terrifying sentence in the English language was "I'm
from the government, and I'm here to help you." It's my belief that
"individualism" is so celebrated because it makes people blind to how rigged
the system itself is. Of course, this is hardly an original thought; Karl Marx
said pretty much the same thing, more rigorously.
[. . .]
> But naturally, there is no money to be found among the member states,
> even if the monetary outlay is over a couple of decades - on the other
> hand three times that number was found to bail out the banks in as
> many weeks by only a tiny fraction of the member states.
Precisely. Yet even here in America there is hardly any discussion of what
systemic conditions led to the crash of 2007-2008, and the enormity of the
wealth transfer to the very people who run the system (as much as anybody can
be said to run it) that followed. In virtually all popular media ("news"), the
focus is all on the actions of individual actors.
> The question to ask is - who benefits from eradicating poverty? Not
> the existing powerful who enjoy the status quo, and would be loathe to
> see any change to the power balances. So why would they help?
> [. . .]
I just tonight watched a very cheesy science fiction movie called "In Time",
starring Justin Timberlake. It has some pretty terrible acting & dialogue, and
a couple of gaping plot holes. Definitely a "grade B" movie. But its
fundamental premise -- the currency of exchange for everything is the time you
are allotted to continue living -- provides for a very thought-provoking little
movie. In the movie, people in the ghetto pay fifteen minutes for a cup of
coffee and make two days of pay (literally, they are allotted two more days of
life) for one day of hard labor. Most people live in poor zones and have only a
week or two on their built-in time-banks, while other people who live in
distant, guarded, impossibly wealthy gated cities think nothing of paying a
decade or two for a dinner at a nice restaurant. People in the ghetto police
themselves; the police don't care about what violence the poor may do to each
other. Instead of police there are "Time Keepers" who monitor time flows and
make sure that most of the time stays in the rich areas, where people live for
centuries or millennia. The plot of the movie is driven by what happens when
somebody from the ghetto figures out a way to transfer mass quantities of
"unauthorized" time from the rich areas to the poor areas.
Despite the cheesy acting and fake-looking sets, etc, I kept thinking what a
remarkably true portrayal the movie was of how the world actually is set up in
2012.
> Still these skills are not very capital intensive to acquire - the
> BRIC countries have shown this by grabbing a lion's share of the lower
> to middle tiers of the IT and manufacturing industries.
I think the days of America's dominance are going to end pretty soon, and at
very fast rate -- like a bursting bubble. And that is because our education
system has been engineered to keep people stupid; in particular, to keep them
from systems-thinking. That's why the USA, for all its so-called
sophistication, ranks 48th among nations in percentage of people who understand
and believe in evolution, and has a similar ranking on the scale of
understanding of climate change. For many Americans, any theory that does not
place America first among nations, and the individual American first among all
God's creatures is literally unthinkable. But the solutions to the problems
that confront America will require, I believe, precisely those modes of thought
that we avoid at all costs. The one area where the USA still dominates other
nations is in war-making, with its vast military. But it's an open question how
long that military will be relevant. If the US continues to hollow itself out
and bankrupt itself merely to keep the war machine fed, it will may become the
next Soviet Union, gone in a heartbeat.
>
> Does the world want much of Africa to also enter the fray?
Not bloody likely. It will be fascinating to see if Africa can finally
transcend its heartbreaking history of tribalism. I'm not betting on it, but I
would love to see it happen.
>
> Cheeni
>
