Ubud kids. Source: Wikipedia
I was walking up Yonge Street in Toronto this afternoon and a very likeable and cute young woman stopped me and tried to sell me on giving money to a charity. She was great at selling so I couldn’t stop myself staying just to observe. In the end she got me to give money to provide for a specific little girl in Indonesia. Generally a great experience with a nice warm feeling, I have no problem with such charities and consider that they are doing a great thing, but by giving to them without doing anything else we get that nice warm feeling that comes with doing something good for someone else while not changing the underlying reasons why that little girl needs my money.
One of the big reasons that the fortunate few per cent of us that are the wealthier members of the richer countries enjoy such good fortune is that our governments, conspiring with the bigger corporations and the military, keep the other countries poor so that we can enjoy their cheap resources and cheap labour. If they had been allowed to industrialize in the same way that the richer countries industrialized, through the protection of infant industries and the exploitation of their (and others) resources, there would not have been the cheap labour and resources for us to benefit from.
At first this was done by outright invasion and the imposition of friendly dictators. If the local population survived in any meaningful numbers (hint: how many people were in the Americas before the Europeans invaded?), and later by the use of unfair trade (pitting the undeveloped against the developed is like having a 5 year old fight a 15 year old) together with financial and political manipulation, aided by the use of “peace keeping troops” where needed (hint: look at the real history of Haiti, the Dominican Republic etc., and you will work out pretty quickly what the real role of “peace keepers” is). The English first protected their infant textile industry from the highly competitive Indian textile industry, and then destroyed the Indian competition through taxes and export controls after it had turned India into its colony. The U.S. made sure that Guatemala, and countless other countries, was made safe for United Fruit and other large corporations. One of the major reasons for the U.S. revolution against the British was that the latter wanted the U.S. to remain an undeveloped resource colony and importer of British manufactured goods.
I was watching a documentary, “40 Years of Silence”, on the U.S. backed slaughter of communist party members in Indonesia in 1955 and 1956. That party was very popular in Indonesia at the time and conservative estimates put the dead at over 500,000. Perhaps Indonesia, like China, would have used its resources for itself and would have been able to lift that little girl out of poverty without my help? If they, and others, had done so we would have hit climate change and resource depletion a lot earlier, and at a much more equitable level of wealth. We are not rich just because they are poor, we are rich because our elites mades sure that they stayed poor.
I will not cancel my support of the little Indonesian girl, it is doing a good thing and I can easily provide the incredibly small amount of money needed. If this is all that I do though it will be like the proverbial “pissing in the wind”, overwhelmed by the negative influences of the wealthy country governments and corporations. If we also do not work to address climate change and the other ills caused by our pathological pursuit of never ending economic growth, no amount of my money can stop her life being much worse than it otherwise could be.
