$188 in New Dehli, $1,020 Here

Harken back to my recent post Third World Wages, First World Prices in which I wrote:

My competitors for writing jobs are in places where the cost of living is a whole lot cheaper than it is here. I can't imagine, for example, that a small, poorly maintained one-bedroom apartment in a town in Bangladesh or a village in Mali rents for $1,020/month. For someone in these circumstances, writing 20 articles for less than $500 is no doubt a boondoggle.

My suspicions were confirmed when the next day, I spoke with a Dell technical rep when my laptop's desktop was upside down and right side left. The icons were turned on their heads, and those that had been on the lower right were now on the upper left and vice versa. In addition, the cursor went up when I moved it down and right when I moved it left and vice versa. What a mess! The ever-polite, young man from New Dehli and I chitchatted during down times when diagnostics were running on my slow PC. He told me about his sweetheart and his studies to improve his lot in life, and I told him about my dog (which he could see, through screen sharing, on my desktop), my line of work, and the cost of living here.

I asked him what would a one-bedroom apartment in New Dehli go for in a decent, working person's neighborhood. Not a fancy neigborhood, but not one where you could expect to have a gun pointed at your head either. He said 8,000-9,000 rupees. I looked that up on a currency converter. On that day, it meant that my $1,020 apartment would rent for $188 in New Dehli. I pay 5 1/2 times what he pays for a place to lie his head. How is an American writer supposed to compete with Indian writers who are paying so much less for their necessities?

This makes me believe what I've so often heard and read: The main reason behind globalization is not to improve the lot of poor countries but to bring developed countries' standards of living down to those of developing countries. In other words, to make everyone poor and only a tiny, tiny few exceedingly wealthy.

America, long seen as the land of opportunity and of freedom, had to be brought to its knees by the globalists. That has been their aim for the last 30 years, duing which time there has been

* a major redistribution of wealth from the already poor and the middle class to the super-rich;
* the offshoring of good-paying manufacturing and service jobs;
* an at-first slowly encroaching and now rapidly expanding police state with all its surveillance apparatus and unconstitutional manuevers;
* the government- and corporate-engineered decline of the dollar against other currencies;
* the orchestrated boons and busts of the dot com, stocks, housing, and commodities markets;
* the uncontrolled federal, state, and personal credit debts;
* the destruction of unions that once helped to keep tariffs intact and wages high;
* the wholesale sellout of the corporate mainstream media, as well as much of public media, to their corporate and government masters;
* the robbing of Social Security, which was designed to be self-supporting and separate from the federal budget;
* the ungodly amount of money American taxpayers have been saddled with because of savings and loans, bank, and other bailouts, and corporation-serving, otherwise-meaningless wars; and

* the destruction of personal wealth at one time held in home equity, savings, pension contributions, 401(k)s, and stock holdings.

In the New World Order of all countries under the overarching iron fist of corporatism, America was seen as a threat, and so the global elite have done all in their power to make the American public stupid, lazy, disenfranchised, disheartened, fearful, confused, and misinformed. The final blow has not yet been delivered.

There still is time, and people are finally beginning to wake up to things I saw 44 years ago, when, as an 8-year-old girl, I had a vision that someday, America would become a dictatorship. There is still a little bit of time left before the final death knell is sounded to the Constitution. Wake up, folks, and start looking for the truth yourself and not listening to the government or its corporate sponsors.