
Most people don’t work on anything that technology and medicine depend on. There are so many jobs that only exist because capitalism is inefficient and gives rich people the right to get other people to do useless things.
Imagine how many people would be unemployed (freed up for rural living) if we got rid of the meat industry, replaced cars with public transit and bicycles, replaces airplanes with high speed rail and ships and not going, had built cities to be walkable from the start, gave people a comfortable life regardless of whether they worked, banned advertisements, made clothes and other products designed to last a lifetime, had a library economy to vastly reduce the number of tools necessary, got rid of intellectual property law so people didn’t need to design new drugs to repatent things and corporate megaprojects would collapse, redistributed wealth so people wouldn’t buy useless toys or mansions, and put everyone in comfortable rural spaces with lots of greenery and spaces where they could hang out for free so mental health is better and people get plenty of exercise.
Most people could work in agriculture without decreasing the amount that work on maintaining and improving our level of technology.
So I went into a bit of a deep dive.
Observatory.wiki is curated by members of the Independent Media Institute. The Independent Media Institute has, as one of its major donors the New World Foundation.
The New World Foundation was founded by a billionaire heiress, had Hillary Clinton as one of its board members in the 80s, is New Left (rejecting ties with labor to focus on personal liberties), and has investments in tobacco companies, fast fashion companies, and logging companies. Joan Roelofs, a professor in political science, used it as a case study of how donations (and the threat of withholding them) are used to push left-wing charities towards compliance with neoliberal ideas in her book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.
It is unsurprising, then, that this story credits neoliberal globalists initiatives without skepticism or broader contextualization. Maybe it really is that simple and the US helped Kazachstan out of the goodness of its heart. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Though… why does it credit Kazachstan for preserving ‘their part’ of the Aral Sea by creating a massive dam? Don’t dams keep water out of places? Why is Uzbekistan given the blame here, when the article says that the US helped Kazachstan first and Uzbekistan second? Did the US just work together with Kazachstan to monopolize the Kazach part of the water flowing into the Aral sea and then blame Uzbekistan for the shared lake continuing to dry up?
Is the US holding the Aral Sea hostage to pressure Uzbekistan into compliance?
(disclaimer: this is less than an hour’s work. I could truly be mistaken. Please do more thorough research before using this as evidence).