Well, I've been lurking for a while now. Time to put up.

I'm hoping this isn't a dupe (far as I can tell it isn't), but I found it relevant and even uplifting, without blowing sunshine.

Ashraf Ghani is currently Chancellor of Kabul University, he set the path for Afghanistan's recovery after September 11th as Afghanistan's finance minister between July 2002 and December 2004. Dr Ghani is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the UNDP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashraf_Ghani

Thanks for that gwaan. I guess I should have done that. Next time.

This makes me so sad. Because policy in the first world goes entirely against everything this man says.

It does go against the *current* first-world mentality, yes. But I'm especially thinking of his comment about germany circa 1940s and what people would have predicted the future would have looked like for that country, when I say that this will most certainly change. And it may change simply because it has to; the world may tolerate nothing less.

With the advent of better and better global communication, it's getting too crowded to get away with screwing the little guy for much longer without somebody---and thus everybody---hearing about what's going on. Will the first world grow a conscience? Not overnight, but I think it could be argued that the seeds are being planted.

I think that ideas like Ghani's (and yes, they are somewhat orthogonal to existing accepted policies) are just the beginning of a torrent of coherent, progressive voices coming out of the third world on matters of globalization---and not just in a "globalization is Bad" kind of way. Fortunately, they can now be heard by more people than ever before in history, and it's becoming harder for the powers-that-be to simply shut them down out of turn.

This does make me hopeful. I hope not naively so.

(thanks for your support on my first submission guys)

Expired in Queue - 4 day limit.