Things are bad, getting worse, and becoming dangerous in America and Europe. In China, the fuse has been lit; there's going to be an enormous explosion in the near future. The numbers are astounding: 26 million workers unemployed in just a few months; 40-50 million this year are likely to become unemployed as the depression worsens. Millions of these people are migrant workers from rural areas; they went to the industrial cities to work and sent much of their wages back home to their families. Now they're out of work, and their families have next to nothing to live on. Would you calmly watch your family slowly starve? The horror gets worse: China is suffering the worst drought since 1951. Millions of small farmers will certainly be forced off their bone-dry land. Mass hunger (that's the modern euphemism for famine and starvation) is now more than just a possibility.
And the human stories are just appalling. The brutality desperate people suffer from their rapacious employers, the callous unconcern for their lives--these stories sound like Charles Dickens wrote them except that they are true right now in the 21st century in the country that until just yesterday (or the day before) was supposed to be the world's economic miracle. Capitalist miracles aren't worth much these days.
Read about China here
Read about coming food shortages here
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