The ruts have been worn deep and the predators have heavy vehicles that make it seemingly impossible to get out of those ruts. Instead they dig themselves in forever more deeply. It is the flight forward (in French: "la fuite en avant' = digging oneself in deeper), when the world should instead be turning back, looking for new solutions for the earth to continue to be the home to plants, animals and human beings. Just close your eyes and go on digging for that black gold under the surface of the earth until the whole earth crumbles and you yourself are caught inside the earthquake!
The one percent of the people on earth who lives in almost unimaginable luxury -- do they know what fate the poor in the world are subjected to? Of course they know. They know just as well as you and I know. They just couldn't care less. They consider this way of things perfectly normal. It is, to them, the just way of the division of wealth -- and poverty. It's just that justice is a non-word in the world of today. The obscenely wealthy are dancing cold-bloodedly at the top of the world while poor children live in almost unbelievable squalor all over the five continents, children who are weeping when they have to go to bed hungry. Thousands and thousands of children are dying every day from malnutrition [1] . Who cares? Certainly not the people who are ruining the earth at their expense.
Also, hideous diseases like Noma affect malnourished children and adults in many parts of the world -- in Africa more than elsewhere, but also in Asia and South America. [2] Estimates claim that 80 - 90% of noma cases die from the disease. In a world as flush with money as ours, such a disease should not be allowed to exist, since it has been proved to be directly linked to malnutrition. And don't even mention the words "economic crisis'. We should all know by now that this crisis along with the rise in food prices [3] were brought about by speculation in order to further enrich the already super-rich. It was MEANT TO HAPPEN! Don't be a fool! We know perfectly well where the money is.
So let's go back to the 1% of the super-rich. What purpose does their enormous wealth serve? There is heavy-handed, non-stop propaganda going that is trying to make us believe that concentrating the wealth in a tidy group of obscenely wealthy people is necessary to keep the global economy going, to keep the corporations healthy so that more jobs can be created. Oh yes, the trickle-down theory! Of course -- how could I forget? But jobs? What jobs? Where are they, those jobs? In India, China, Taiwan, Korea. (Come work in Singapore, says an ad.)
Behind this curtain of make-believe trickle-down of wealth, there is the greed that pushes the corporations into ever-increasing plunder of Third-World nations. Anything goes, not in order to save the poor in the world but to increase the profits of the Corporations.
We live in a finite world
Profit equals Progress in the minds of the Corpocrats. But the resources of the planet are finite and the time has come -- in fact it is long past -- for progress to become obsolete. It's simply not progress we need. We need to go into reverse.
Monster agribusiness is making family farming an economic dead-end. Farmers just don't make both ends meet and the days of sustainable small farming are gone.
Small businesses are being squeezed out because of giant businesses like Walmart, Carrefour, MacDonald, and others, that are devouring the market. These international retail giants and fast food monsters will, for instance, very likely soon make their way into the Indian market, a country that, more than most other countries I have ever known, thrives on small businesses with very little overhead costs [4] . The result will be more unemployment, further flight into the already huge slums surrounding the big cities.
It's not only the economic effects of the monstrous spreading of these giants that are causing enormous damage to cultures all over the world. It's also the complete remake of civilizations, and a centuries-old image of a country is now being sacrificed on the altar of greed. Nothing can possibly be expected to stand still, but this artificial and destructive invasion of Western huge businesses (and along with them consumerism and the rest of their gamut of Western and "civilized' values) into the Third World, almost overnight, is as shocking to a sane mind as any other world-wide destructive change the Corporatocracy has wrought. It's the modern-day plague that will do away with the only natural way of life on earth, which is the conservation of different cultures that fit into the mold of the regions where they have their roots.
The bio-tech industry, Monsanto, Cargill, Syngenta, Bunge, et al. are all set on owning the world's food supply, destroying organic agriculture and millennia-old biodiversity. Their patented genetically engineered seeds are ruining the natural farming for foods and cotton that have been grown with great success for millennia. This invasion of bio-tech products into farming is having the most disastrous effects on the Indian way of life. Thousands of Indian farmers have committed suicide because of debts to the seed and pesticide manufacturers that had driven them to bankruptcy. [5]
In an article entitled " Corporate Agriculture Is to Blame for the Hundreds of Thousands of Farmer Suicides in India' Tara Lohan writes in an interview with Alternet: "Vandana Shiva [6] says industrial agriculture has left Indian farmers indebted and destitute, and explains how to stem the tide of suicides . [7]
"Rapid increase in indebtedness is at the root of farmers' taking their lives," she wrote recently. "Debt is a reflection of a negative economy. Two factors have transformed agriculture from a positive economy into a negative economy for peasants: the rising of costs of production and the falling prices of farm commodities. Both these factors are rooted in the policies of trade liberalization and corporate globalization ."
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