Real people lose interest

Writing about the failure of the Doha round of multilateral trade talks, Clive Crook says:

Wherever you look, in the United States or abroad, you see capitulation to special interests and an utter lack of ambition and leadership.

Precisely so. We have a political system driven by everything except identifiable outcomes. So there's no correlation between what a party or politician says and what actually happens. Our economies are made increasingly complex by subsidies, favours and trade barriers that do everything to favour the large and global at the expense of the small and local. The result? Any relationships between policies and outcomes are further obscured. Unaware of what's really going on, real people give up. In our place are the corporations and the bureaucrats. It's in their interest, and their interest only, to allow governments to continue with their economic, social and environmental lunacies such as the agricultural subsidies, which as well as derailing Doha amount to a death sentence for Africans.