IT IS WEALTH THAT IS THE PROBLEM- POVERTY IS MERELY A SYMPTOM

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World
By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.

...

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

...

Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0216-30.htm

[CountAllVotes]

1. wow! Here is a picture of a "Hooverville"

not a hell of a lot of difference is there?



:dem: :kick:

[jwirr]

2. Kim Stanley Robinson was on "The Planet" on Link today. He made

a comment that we have never really left the feudal era rich/poor dichotomy. This picture certainly shows that - the poor village at the foot of the castle.

[CountAllVotes]

3. seems no castles when there were Hoovervilles

n/t

[jwirr]

6. They are just not in the picture. Our robber baron's built their homes

on the other side of town to get away from the smokestacks.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

5. The photo

almost looks as if where spliced together but it is not. And sadly it is only one of thousands of examples.

We are conditioned to think of how to alleviate poverty which is the wrong approach and can never be done as long as there is such exhorbitant wealth which steals from us all.

Those conditions of wealth are also hammered into our perceptions as something that we should strive for and if we don't get their it is still just over the horizon or it is through some failing of our own. Never is it mentioned that there are consequences in this rigged game.

[Warpy]

9. That's exactly why the New Deal worked

It scraped off the insane income at the top to the tune of 90% and circulated it back down at the bottom where it would keep moving and do some good.

Kennedy drove the first nail into the coffin of the New Deal when he lowered that top marginal rate. I don't think he quite realized just how much that benefited the plutocrats and how it would enable them to start to rise again, buying media and Congress along the way to finish the job.

We have to have the will to scrape it off the top again if we're ever to have anything resembling a democracy, let alone a decent economy with opportunity for all of us.

[pnorman]

18. I had to "right-click" that photo to see where it came from.

(....alchemysite.com/blog/uploaded_images/Sao_Paolo-Rich_Poor-733490.jpg)

Sao Paolo it was, and it's certainly an arresting photo! It well illustrates that link you had also provided. Thanks for both!

pnorman

[WHEN CRABS ROAR]

4. Also I'm not very proud that America leads the world market in

arm sales.

[jody]

7. The disparity between a few with excess resources and the many with next to nothing has existed for

millennium.

Society has sometimes closed the gap for a few decades but the difference soon returns.

Part of the cause is luck, part is evil, and part skills possessed by gifted and talented individuals that give them a competitive edge in the game of life.

IMO, the only real equalizer is application of the Golden Rule.

[Cerridwen]

13. By "us" to "them" or by "them" to "us"?

Because, in all the history I've read, "they" never learned "The Golden Rule" as anything other than how to "fleece the sheep" whilst we "sheep" have been well indoctrinated into "Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us". Cue "Kumbaya".

Sounds like a suckers game to me; and "we're" the suckers.

[Greyhound]

14. It is a suckers game, pure and simple.

In the end the house always wins, that's they way the game is rigged, in casinos and the banking industry is even more rigged.

They "loan" something they never owned, and charge a perpetual fee for doing it. There is no more certain a con game and since it is not a crime there is no risk whatsoever.

[mntleo2]

8. Greed and Wealth Is The Ultimate Sin

...because it about having a bunch of things you really do not need, while your neighbor who does need it, starves. Greed causes war and suffering, greed causes poverty. I am using the word "sin" here deliberately, because it is a transgression and the rich are transgressing against all of humanity, they are decimating the world.

One need never aspire for wealth, the wealthy should be considered a scourge. To have more than you need is wrong. It is up to each individual to know what "more than I need" means because it is different for each of us. What I "need" is different than what you "need" still, it is important to know when you have surpassed the threshold between need and want. It is a journey in and of itself to discover how much you do not need that you think you do need.

This is why the original Christian movement was based in a life's journey as to why "it was harder for the rich to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle ..." It is why many of us believe in taking a vow of poverty. Because it is in poverty you truly see the hypocrisy of wealth. that most of our codified laws are more about ownership for the rich, it is not about morality. In poverty you find that the only thing you have of worth is yourself and your word.

Cat In Seattle <---who is proud to have spent my life working for social justice instead of accumulating wealth

[hay rick]

16. contemporary Christians

living in McMansions and driving Hummers. Guess that's what Jesus would do. LOL.

I have always believed that a modern civilized society should offer everyone the opportunity to provide basic necessities for themselves and their dependents. At this point it should be EASY. So much technological progress, so little social progress...

Money is important when you don't have enough of it. Once you have the minimum that you require, earning more only consumes a priceless item which can be described as...time remaining alive.

[keep_it_real]

10. This is unreal:

From the article:

"The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage."

[Greyhound]

11. "There is no trickle down, only a siphoning up from the toiling many to the moneyed few."

That is the system in a nutshell and it has existed for far longer than the USA. It is what most of the architects of this country were trying to eliminate.
:kick: & R

[Cerridwen]

12. Sure there's trickle down - it's called getting pissed on...

or shit on depending on your mood.

The real reason people don't bother to look up the food chain to see who the real enemy is, is because they're tired of getting piss (or shit) in their eyes when they look up. They look to their neighbors or those less well off than they, and blame them.

Until people realize that they are NOT the "have mores" (if you post on this board, you are NOT a "have more" you are just a wannabe) and start working with the other 98 or 99 % (depending which numbers you accept), we'll continue to get pissed on and the rah-rah capitalists and law-and-order types will continue to wonder why their vision is blurred.

[Greyhound]

15. LOL! Thank you for posting this, disgusting but true. n/t

:kick:

[Orwellian_Ghost]

17. HOW WEALTH CREATES POVERTY

India now has 8% economic growth, yet it is home to a third of the world’s malnourished children.

MONEY HAS BECOME a measure of how wealthy and how poor people are. It has become the measure of human wellbeing. To live on less than a dollar a day is the definition of poverty. To increase incomes to more than a dollar a day is interpreted as an end to poverty. This equating of money with wealth and wealth with wellbeing is misplaced on multiple counts. Money does not reflect nature’s wealth or people’s wealth, and it definitely fails to measure the wellbeing of society.

Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same root: oikos, the Greek word for ‘household’. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognised and respected its basis in natural resources, the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics based on the household was women-centred.

In today’s world, economics is separated from, and opposed to, both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of improving human welfare, for the majority of people poverty and dispossession have increased. While being non-sustainable it is also economically unjust. While being promoted as ‘economic development’, it is leading to under-development; while projecting growth, it is causing life-threatening destruction.

...

http://www.resurgence.org/2007/shiva240.htm

[Mnemosyne]

19. KnR, because this is so very important for people to understand. n/t

[Hannah Bell]

20. love parenti. n/t