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I was listening to Friedman describe how well-educated Indians are willing to do jobs for 1/5th the salary Americans expect and I was thinking about how this is a problem that is running the lives of middle and working class Americans today and that it's pretty much 100% caused by imperialism of the last two centuries.
What happened to India was basically that they were progressing along in a pretty nice arc, albeit an arc on a lower trajectory than what was happening in Europe at the same time. The mughal emperorors were making huge achievments in art, architecture, science and math, and a lot of wealth was spreading down to average citizens -- noot an ideal amount of wealth and power, but the arc was on the right trajectory.
The British stepped in and stole a ton of wealth and shipped it off to London. Had they behaved lawfully, they would have had to deal with with Indians in a way that paid them fairly for wealth the British extracted. That wealth would surely have trickled down in a more efficient manner, and would have built up a wealthy, politically powerful middle class. The people in london who got rich off of imperialism wouldn't have gotten as rich, but they would have gotten rich. And certainly many other kinds of people (not at the top of British society, but regular middle class Brits and Indians) would have gotten wealthy off of a stronger Indian middle class.
That didn't happen. Imperialism created this class of people who can now undercut Americans left and right on everything. There isn't even a real indian middle class middle building up, encompassing enough people -- and this is why the BJP lost the last election.
How does this hurt Americans? In the US, you don't see prices going down because of all this work shifted off to places where costs ar lower. In this process of post-imperialism and neoliberalism, there is a huge profit margin. It's for the modern equivalent of the people who benefitted from imperialism in the first half of the 20th century. And that wealth transfer to the top is going to continue to buy the inequitable economy that will continue to punish people who work for a living, whether they're former computer programmers and accountants in the US or underpaid white collar Indians, or whatever.
Like I said, if the imperialists had been forced to play by the same rules in India that they applied to Brits in civil and criminal courts at home, they never would have been able to extract all that wealth with so little compensation which (1) created and economic and political power imbalance at home, and (2) created an irrational economy in which people on one side of the globe could steal the job of someone similarly situated on the other side of the globe with both of them losing -- ie, with neither of them having the political and economic power to compete against the corporations in whose hands all the power is flowing as a result of globalization.
It's so obvious that this cycle is going to go on until either the entire house of cards comes crumbling down or until the neoliberals lose power. It's so important, I think, for people to really get a focus on what's happening all over the world right now. Political and economic power is going straight to the top, and it's ruining the lives of people who work for a living. If a politcian isn't talking about reversing that flow of power, he or she should step aside and we should be voting for politicians who are willing to address this issue.
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