CHINA AND INDIA- WORLD LEADERS IN MISERY

There's lots of talk about this being the Chinese Century, and some chatter too about it becoming the Indian Century. Well, these two billion-plus population countries have been going like gangbusters the past couple of decades, revving up their economies and garnering huge shares of the global marketplace. If you're wearing it or switching it on, odds are it was made in China. If you're complaining about it or trying to figure it out, you're probably talking to a tech representative in India.

So you're thinking that these two nations have finally taken their place among the modern high tech societies of the world. Guess again, gullible consumer. China and India still lead the world, as they have for too many years, in poverty. India leads the competition here, with just over 40% of the world's poor people, while China comes in a robust second with 22% of the globe's hapless starving masses. So, of the 36,000 people who die every single day of starvation on this planet, that means that almost 15,000 of them are Indians and 8,000 are Chinese.

Those numbers may not be accurate since those nations refuse to recognize the international organizations who supply these statistics and their respective governments have entire departments dedicated to lying about this sort of thing. Perhaps India and China feed their poor just enough so that they don't drop dead, but not enough so that they can be less than horribly poverty-stricken. Hard to tell with all the flying rhetoric. Great nations don't have people who die of starvation. None, zero, nada, zilch. Great nations don't have huge illiteracy rates either, which is a determining factor on who is and stays poor, like forever.

China simply cannot educate all of their children properly, while India will not. India is too busy trying to get nuclear technology from the United States and China is a bit distracted by putting on the Summer Olympics in Beijing this year and beating Tibetan Monks like a drum. While in China, their paper communism suggests that everyone is equal, in India they suffer from no such illusions. Their Caste System is thousands of years old and just because they said it's gone doesn't make it gone. Somewhere someone in India is right now horribly crippling his small child so that he or she can be a more effective beggar. This is a cruel act of love by a parent steeped in the harsh reality of Indian life and, being unable to read, hasn't yet gotten the memo that these things don't happen anymore in modern India.

And in China the amount of workers who have been poisoned or injured amounts to a larger workforce than most nations can muster on their best day. That's the beauty of having 1.3 billion people - they're expendable and readily replaceable, especially that portion of them who are in the 22% of the world's poorest people. Given the choice of starving slowly or eating regularly but working in unsafe conditions, the stomach overrules the head every time and the Chinese government knows this from very long experience.

Maybe there will be a Chinese Century or an Indian Century, but it's just not going to be this one. Not while 63% of the world's poorest people reside in those two nations. Let them build all the factories, skyscrapers and nuclear missiles they want, they are still only service economies to the West, where exactly nobody dies of starvation or is considered expendable. When universal quality education is implemented, safe working conditions and a reasonable standard of living is spread out to all their people (India's poor, 400 million of them, live on 40 cents (!) a day), they need not apply for their own century. Or, if they really want a century named after them they can get busy and start feeding and educating their poor in an aggressive and effective way. I'd be the first to nominate them for the century designation if they did that, but nobody's holding their breath.