Poverty
Related: About this forumWhere justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails,
and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
- Frederick Douglass
I think my daughter's eyes are blue. They might be green. She hasn't been around long enough to tell just yet, but they are certainly something. She recognized me for the first time just a few days ago, and smiled up at me in a simple, sweet way that obliterated my heart. She cannot focus on anything more than a few feet from her face, but that, like everything else about her, will change in time. Someday soon, she will be able to see everything, and tragically, this will be the world within her view.
A report released early this year by the organization Oxfam International revealed that the combined income of the richest 100 people in the world is enough to end global poverty four times over, and that the gap between rich and poor has exploded by some 60% in the last 20 years. Rather than hinder this division, the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated it. Money does not disappear, you see, but tends to be translated up the income ladder in times of financial distress.
According to UNICEF, nearly half the world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day. One billion children live in poverty, and 22,000 of them die each day because of it. More than one billion people lack access to adequate drinking water, and 400 million of those are children. Almost a billion people go hungry every day.
The incomes of 100 people out of the seven billion on the planet could fix that, and then fix it again, and then fix it again, and then fix it again. The exact total of the wealth of these individuals is actually something of a mystery, thanks to the tax havens they use to hide their fortunes. There are trillions of dollars squirrelled away in those havens - no one knows quite how much - and the subtraction of that money from the global economy has a direct and debilitating effect on the people not fortunate enough to be part of that elite 100.
More at Link! http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16593-the-end-of-the-beginning-of-the-end
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defacto7
(13,617 posts)Welcome to DU!
It is a disaster created by a few for the few. They are in a tower of separation from the rest of us and have no desire to empower the masses as that will erode their tower. They feed on dogma, greed and a form of megalomania. Marie Antoinette can't begin to compare with the expansive self-aggrandizement from which they proliferate and preen themselves.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)There are 311+ million people in the U.S., yet we hear about 1% being the problem. And, really, only a small percentage of those have the real wealth. That's like an elephant being hounded by a damn chihuahua.
If we weren't all so convinced that it was right to continue this way, if we weren't so scared of losing our beds on the plantation, we could end this tomorrow. We just have to learn to stop pointing fingers, because those people, the wealthy, are NEVER going to change. We will never make them change either, because they can always hire half of us to kill the other half until we change our way of thinking, as Jay Gould rightly pointed out.
The problem is that it may well end soon, whether we keep propping it up or not, because our little pyramid scheme is not making things better, and it can't go on forever. The odds are that if and when that happens we will be left with a bunch of people whose minds haven't been changed, who are eager to make it all better like it was before", who will follow some goofball preacher that says his snake oil will get us all better again right off the cliff.
defacto7
(13,617 posts)" we will be left with a bunch of people whose minds haven't been changed, who are eager to make it all better like it was before", who will follow some goofball preacher that says his snake oil will get us all better again"
...Just as it's been for century after century. Our only hope ultimately will be the changing of those minds. It only took one religious zealot to start the collapse of the Renaissance. It will have to be a monumental change since it is deeply ingrained in human civilization and has even become a "gene of the mind" memetics if I may, and it's root is in fear and greed, two even deeper aspects of human behavior.
It's gonna be a big job. We'd better get crackin'.