ACORN

[kandrathe]

Why should those people have to choose between those choices? If this is the way it's supposed to be, how come they didn't die out before we had so much waste? The point is that we created, or at least help to sustain this situation because it's better for us, and not for them.

Poor people don't have many choices, especially those who are subsistence hunter/gatherer/farmers. From the beginning of life, let alone the human species, bad choices resulted in death. There are poor people who choose to sift through garbage dumps for "treasures" which is unhealthy, and also the opposite choice might result in death by starvation. There are poor people who choose to process, reprocess, recycle, or in other ways mess around with heavy metals, chemicals, and other dangerous substances and die from it, but on the other hand if they choose not to do so, they might also die from starvation. We might not make the same choices that they do, and maybe they do not know it will kill them. I feel bad that people starve, or are killed by their repressive governments, or die due to ignorantly messing around with dangerous materials. But, I really can't do too much about it unless I want to go be an environmental missionary or something.

Simply because we *need* workforces with low demands for dirty jobs like this.

"We" don't have anything to do with it. Our governments have set environmental, and worker protection laws that prevent us from having anything to do with it. Now, there is supply and demand. If there is a demand for something, then someone("us" who have protections or "them" who do not) will figure out how to supply it. And, those who demand it, will seek to pay the lowest price for it, and if that happens to be from another country without environmental or worker protections, then that is how we get to the situation we have today. If all countries decided to implement the same environmental and worker protections that we do, then the one who have the demands will need to pay higher prices that factor in those costs. "We" as consumer will pay a higher price for whatever the manufacturers needed the stuff for. And, consequently, "they" who have no protections will now lose their jobs to "us" because all costs being equal, the manufacturers will choose the closest source.