P. Sainath spoke yesterday at the Labor Center regarding the growing inequality of the rich and the poor in India. Not about you, you say? Sainath discussed the rate of inequality being faster in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty, and being "so carefully constructed." He argues that the rich have seceded from the nation, that mass media is in cahoots with big corporations, and the intelligentsia is skilled at disassociating ourselves from the ugly downside of neoliberal capitalism.
He detailed the negative realities of the effects of global restructuring which are systematically diverting government resources from the poor and working classes (which, I clarify, includes much of the so-called middle class) to the wealthiest class. Explaining in precise language with poignant examples exactly how free trade creates certain market conditions which systematically deprive small landowners of sustainable use of their own property, resulting in an appalling suicide rate and the slow transfer of private land to corporate ownership. [NOTE: Bernie Sanders describes a crucial difference between free trade and fair trade.]
Proceeds of his book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, go to a fund for the support of families who have lost their primary wage earner to suicide.
We should not be so surprised, Sainath suggests, at the level, depth, and extent of atrocities committed by humans against one another. It has been the case throughout history that the elite pleasure themselves at the expense of the poor. Sainath cited the example of "Empress" Victoria who, in 1877, held a huge public feast in her own honor from which the starving poor were brutally banned. Then he discussed Nero, who had much earlier promoted a huge feast to distract people from the devastation of the Burning of Rome. At this feast, according to an entry made by the historian Tacitus, people were burned at the stake to provide light for the festivities. No one protested.
