Since I’ve decided to switch from the US version of the NY Times to its global version, I’ve found a lot of items I wouldn’t have normally been aware of. It was actually this display of Time magazine covers comparing the US to the rest of the world that really galvanized me to make the change.

With that said I came across this NY Times story today on how the lower caste in India’s caste system have been able to rise above their untouchable status due to the wonders of the market economy. While I applaud their economic achievements  and the breaking free of the caste system, I wonder about embracing the class system without the proper safeguards and reforms in place.

From the article:

“This is a golden period for Dalits,” said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit activist and researcher who has championed capitalism among the untouchables. “Because of the new market economy, material markers are replacing social markers. Dalits can buy rank in the market economy. India is moving from a caste-based to a class-based society, where if you have all the goodies in life and your bank account is booming, you are acceptable.”

I disdain both the caste system and the class system as it now stands. In the class system inequality roams free. That’s why people in the United States are upset about the wealth concentrated in the 1% percent vs. the 99%.  Now I don’t mean that we must ensure that no one is wealthier than another, but if we are to accept the class system, then there should be an effort to end poverty and strengthen the middle class all over the world.

This is really pathetic.

Redefining the possibilities of the word “offshore,” IBM has invited its recently laid-off U.S. workers to find work with the storied company in developing countries like India – where salaries are a fraction of what Americans are used to.

While the invitation is likely more than most U.S. companies have offered the 2.6 million Americans laid off in 2008, the company’s standing offer is probably cold comfort to most newly minted ex-IBM employees.

An internal document circulating the company says that a program called “Project Match” will “help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand,” according to InformationWeek.

I wonder how many other corporations will start doing this?

I could not help but blog about this article over at Mother Jones.

India’s waste-pickers-often women and children-join free-ranging cows and other less sacred animals in a daily forage through the garbage of the streets. They’ve been recycling trash for decades, since long before recycling became fashionable in the West, and in Delhi, a 13-million-person metropolis, the waste-pickers number in the tens of thousands. For slum-dwellers, such recycling of plastic, paper, and metals-anything that can be turned into cash-is often the only source of income.

Bharati Chaturvedi, the director and cofounder of Chintan, a small Indian NGO that provides education to waste-pickers, claims that more than 1 percent of Delhi’s population sifts through garbage, recycling as much as 59 percent of the city’s waste. “These waste-pickers are providing a public service-for free,” she says.

That may soon change. A new waste incinerator that turns trash into electricity is slated to be built in Timarpur, a suburb of Delhi. Because it will reduce the amount of methane off-gassed by landfills, it will generate carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol. But the incinerator will also emit cancer-causing dioxins, mercury, heavy metals, and fly ash. Are the carbon credits available under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism worth putting thousands of impoverished waste-pickers out of business?

It really doesn’t make sense. It’s sort of ironic that the Kyoto accord would allow a cancer-causing incinerator to be in operation.

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