TBF
TBF's JournalKill Capitalism ~ Save the World
It will take 100 years for the world’s poorest people to earn $1.25 a day
Jason Hickel ~ Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Follow @jasonhickel on Twitter
Monday 30 March 2015 03.00 EDT
If you follow international news you will be accustomed to headlines announcing that world leaders have succeeded in cutting global poverty in half over the past couple of decades. Its sounds like brilliant news, but it’s just not true. The numbers have been furtively manipulated to make it seem as though our economic system is working for the majority of humanity when in fact it is not.
The sustainable development goals, to be decided in September, will take this dubious good-news story a step further. This time, the main goal is not just to further reduce extreme poverty, but to eradicate it entirely – and to do so by no later than 2030. This is a welcome move: it’s about time we finally got around to putting poverty eradication firmly on the agenda. But it also raises some tough questions. Is it possible to end poverty under our current economic system?
A few weeks ago economist David Woodward tackled this question in an article published in the World Economic Review. His findings are shocking. He shows that, given our existing economic model, poverty eradication can’t happen. Not that it probably won’t happen, but that it physically can’t. It’s a structural impossibility ...
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/30/it-will-take-100-years-for-the-worlds-poorest-people-to-earn-125-a-day?CMP=fb_gu
144 years ago today
"Citizens: If you are able to make the Revolution’s victory of March 18th definitive, it will remain one of the greatest moments in the history of humanity."
More good photos here: https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/the-first-international-and-the-paris-commune/
Marx on the Paris Commune: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm
Rosa Luxemburg was born on this day in 1871 -
Rosa Luxemburg, founder of the Spartacus League, brutally murdered by proto-fascists in January 1919, was born on this day in 1871, just two weeks before the Paris Commune took hold. Two months after her death, in its new International Relations Section, basically an aggregation of press clippings and documents from overseas, The Nation published the full text of the Spartacist Manifesto: “Arise and face the struggle! Arise and act!” In 2011, Vivian Gornick reviewed a collection of Luxemburg’s letters, under the headline, “History and Heartbreak.”
When I was a child, Rosa Luxemburg’s name would sometimes be mentioned with awe in my slightly irreverent left-wing household. Who was she? I’d ask. A great socialist, I’d be told. She criticized Lenin. She was assassinated. For years I thought the Soviets had murdered her. In a sense, I wasn’t so far off. In 1931 Joseph Stalin had Luxemburg “excommunicated” from the canon of Marxist heroes. If she’d been living in his Russia she’d certainly have been eliminated. No revolutionary as independent-minded as she could fail, come the revolution, to be denounced as a counterrevolutionary….
There she was: a girl, a Jew, a cripple—possessed of an electrifying intelligence, a defensively arrogant tongue and an unaccountable passion for social justice, which, in her teens, led her to the illegal socialist organizations then abounding among university students in Warsaw. In the city’s radical underground, she opened her mouth to speak and found that thought and feeling came swiftly together through an eloquence that stirred those who agreed with her, and overwhelmed those who did not. The experience was exhilirating; more than exhilirating, it was clarifying; it centered her, told her who she was….
http://www.thenation.com/blog/200289/march-5-1871-rosa-luxemburg-born
Counting on Billionaires
Philanthrocapitalists like George Soros want us to believe they can remedy the economic misery that they themselves create ... by Japhy Wilson 3-3-15
"In the tale that I am about to tell, we will see how Soros is not only “taking money in at one end and pushing it out at the other,” but is also eating the stuff that comes out at the other end."
Philanthrocapitalism is the latest “great white hope” of international development. Unlike traditional philanthropists, who were content to write checks for good causes, “philanthrocapitalists” like Bill Gates and George Soros have supposedly transformed development aid by infusing it with the business principles of innovation, efficiency, and enterprise.
Michael Green and Matthew Bishop (US business editor of the Economist) celebrate this transformation in their best-selling book, Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World and Why We Should Let Them. Bishop and Green argue that philanthrocapitalism is a “new social contract,” in which increasing inequality is to be accepted in exchange for “the rich regarding their surplus wealth as the property of the many, and themselves as trustees whose duty it is to administer it for the common good.”
Should the rich not be sufficiently generous, they warn, “they risk provoking the public into a political backlash against the economic system that allowed them to become so wealthy.” This danger is well understood by “the leading beneficiaries of the winner-takes-all society, [who] worry increasingly about the political risks of growing inequality and are concluding that philanthropy may be one of the best ways to manage those risks.”
In a characteristically amusing and suggestive metaphor, Slavoj Žižek has likened this ideological strategy to the phenomenon of chocolate laxatives: each presents the cause of the problem — chocolate constipates, capitalism impoverishes — as the solution to its own pathological symptoms. Žižek’s favored example is Soros: speculator, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest men in the world ...
Read more here (fascinating story giving an example of Soros Millenium Villages project): https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/george-soros-philanthrocapitalism-millennium-villages/
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