Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by RGA (R) on August 30, 2010 at 19:12:18

In Reply to: RE: When five years is not enough... The Constant Gardener posted by Victor Khomenko on August 29, 2010 at 16:12:17

You clearly don't get it. People are selfish - where have you been? Pretty much every model that follows capitalistic goals is me and me only. The only thing that cleans up a community is something called "community" which puts the overall society need over that of the individual (and that is the opposite of capitalism where society matters zilch unless it nets a profit). The individual (with money) will choose to live in a palace and wall up inside and the rest of the city can be a garbage dump. Just so long as he doesn't have to pay tax to clean it up (after all why pay to clean up 1 foot off your property it's not yours).

I lived in Wenzhou, China last year.

"Apart from being a useful starting point to visit Yandangshan , Wenzhou is also a fascinating place to see what deplorable damage the modern economy can do to an ancient agrarian culture. From the designer boutiques and European car dealers downtown, through the poverty of the surrounding shanty towns to the utter hopelessness of those left behind in the surrounding villages, visitors can see very clearly how dual economies are tearing the nation apart. Nowhere else is the wealth gap more pronounced than here, in a city that the propagandists have made famous for its concentration of millionaires. The official media constantly lauds "the Wenzhou model," which, like "socialism with Chinese characteristics," is a way of talking about raw capitalism without having to admit to the Communist Party's U-turn. In reality, the city is simply home to innumerable sweatshops which churn out cheap plastic goods ranging from disposable lighters to adult novelties. Visitors to Wenzhou may be alarmed by the high concentration of beggars, or the frequency with which some local men tend to urinate in public. http://www.frommers.com/destinations/wenzhou/3385010001.html


1880 billionaires and close to 30,000 millionaires live in this city that can only be described as the armpit of the world. Nobody pays taxes because no one can see the forrest for the trees. Can't see much beyond the pollution because that would affect profit to actuall try and clean the air or putting baghouses on the smelters.

The rich guy driving one of his ten cars none being worse than a Porsche will drive through disgusting streets filled with piss and old toilet bowls and beggers everywhere. No one stops to think that gee why not pool some money together and hire a street cleaner. The poor can't pay for it and they can't afford to remove the garbage. What is needed is government services and for that you need someone to pay for it. But since cleaning the streets does not make profit for the rich guy they see absolutely no need to do it.

This is happening in the United States where towns are looking pretty crummy. You see the goal is money - not beautification (after all you can take a holiday and see beauty in a country that pools the money together to keep things clean), any single thing that interferes with pure profit and the dollar bill is meaningless. And that sir is a fact.

The only people who can make it otherwise are educated people who have a brain and know that other things other than the dollar bill are more important and governments that don't get bought off easily. In Africa the government is corrupt - a company can go in and pay off officials and kill the people there no problem - which was the point of the LeCarre novel which is fiction but probably not far off the truth since his background was in that field.

The people there could probably clean up better but they're probably working 18 hours a day for 10 cents that will make an Amplifier manufacturer in the United States a millionaire for something that doesn't remotely resemble a hard day's work. Where is that slave going to get the time to carry garbage 5 miles just to get it out of the city. It's not like they can afford trucks - or shoes.