Good Read -Poverty goals? No, it’s extreme wealth we should be targeting

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/19/un-poor-wealth-sustainable-development-goals
<snip>
If the pope and a few rogue academics expressed unease, it took a whimsical Swedish electro band to get to the root of the problem. The Knife produced a graphic novella announcing a new millennium goal: end extreme wealth. “As we all know,” says a UN official with a forbidding fringe, “extreme wealth is a huge problem in this world.”

Here, rushing towards your face like the ground after a pratfall, is everything that’s wrong with sustainable development goals – the reason their hopeful language sounds so tinny and unconvincing, the reason dyed-in-the-wool atheists find themselves siding with the pope, even when he isn’t entirely explicit about his objections.

The international community, having first established that it speaks for everyone (The Future We Want was the title of the foundational document from Rio – as though challenge or dissent, if it came, would be from those opposed to modernity), proceeded to look through the wrong end of the telescope. It is impossible to fixate on an income problem – whether a low income or a high one – without finding implicit fault in the people who are on that income.

Poverty is not a naturally occurring germ or virus; it is anthropogenically created though wealth extraction. Any goal that fails to recognise this is not only unlikely to succeed, but can only be understood as a deliberate act of diversion, drawing attention away from what might work; in its place, the anodyne, fairytale language of hope, in a post-ideological world where all politicians just want what’s best and a billionaire is just a benefactor you haven’t met yet

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. The money quote

Poverty is not a naturally occurring germ or virus; it is anthropogenically created though wealth extraction.

And when government works to AID wealth extraction from the poor, it creates more poverty. As we've seen in the wake of our 'economic recovery', which shunted the bulk of the wealth to the rich, and left ever more regular citizens in poverty or near poverty.

[malaise]

2. It's a great quote

a simple fact

[U of M Dem]

5. Had to steal that quote for the sig line. N/T

[daleanime]

3. K&R.....

and bookmarked.

[NonMetro]

4. It's Still The Same As It Was When Rousseau Wrote The Discourse:

Inequality was created the first time a man staked out a piece of land and called it his own, excluding all others from the resources everyone needs to live. Poverty is nothing more than a lack of resources, and this happens in our land of abundance because some people grab too much for themselves, keeping it from others. Yes, the rich create poverty every day, and they're scared to death that people might find out about their dirty little secret.

Some people in this country have 5 homes, while most people struggle to pay for one, and while many others have none at all? The evidence speaks for itself.

[mountain grammy]

6. K & R and thanks for posting

this very good article. Another truth:

One is constantly told, on the progressive side, that social democracy has had its day because people generally have become meaner; attitudes to poverty have hardened, and generosity has withered, the man on the street is actually very judgmental about people who can’t support themselves or their families. But how would attitudes look if we had spent the past 30 years asking questions about the rich: their characters, their honesty, their industriousness, their contribution to society? If the problem facing the British economy had been identified as the destabilising effects of extreme wealth, how long would it have been before the wealthy themselves came to be scrutinised?

Yeah, just when do we get to ask the same questions of the rich that are used to denigrate the poor?