Saturday, October 18, 2008

A mindset revealed

The McCain campaign pushed back against a New York Times article about about Cindy McCain's drug use, demanding to know why, among other things they:
...have not employed your investigative assets looking into Michelle Obama. You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father. Nor have you interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them. Thus, there is a terrific lack of balance here.
So everything else aside, rescue them from what exactly? Living in Africa? Living in the countryside? Is it the Republican Party's official policy now that subsistence farming is something to be rescued from?

Organizations like the World Bank crow about what they see as one of the big successes of Globalism, the drop worldwide of people living on less than a dollar a day, but as John Ralston Saul points out in The Collapse of Globalism:
After all, people at $3 a day could be living a life of pure despair in a savage slum of Lagos, a life far worse than at $1 a day in a stable slum like Klong Toey in Bangkok, where there is a societal structure.
Or sometimes an even better life of stable subsistence farming without using money at all. Reducing poverty has alternative pathways to just moving everybody into the cities and incorporating them into the existing economic structure at the bottom rung.

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