People in distress have risen up many times in history. In the United States there were workers' movements in the early part of the 20th century that gave birth to unions and to socialism, which had not yet become a taboo word, and there were the civil disobedience acts, sit-ins, freedom marches, etc. in the 1960s that led to the creation of anti-segregation laws.
A global look on poverty and hunger
People will ultimately rise up when they are being cruelly oppressed. Apartheid in South Africa came to an end, nations in Latin America are rising up against unjust and cruel corporate exploitation of their national resources. Dictators such as Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines and Pinochet in Chile have seen their powers come to an end. Many other military regimes in Africa and Latin America have been overthrown, much to the concern of the Unites States governments, which looked kindly on the foreign collaborators who supported the big-money industries while their poverty rates were steadily increasing.
That is also how the World Bank and the IMF have often lost their victims, after having first bled them virtually dry through loan payback money. The new more or less leftist regimes in Latin America are standing up to big money, saying 'Enough' and focusing on improving the standard of living for their millions of poor people instead of piling up money in greedy Western banks as payments on indecent IMF loans. [1]
Turning to the global problem of world hunger seen against the rapid increase in the world population, there is no foundation for the theory that the whole problem is the overpopulation of the world. As a widely renowned authority on the subject of world hunger, Professor Jean Ziegler (UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and author of various books on globalization and on what he calls the crimes committed in the name of global finance and capitalism) attests in his book 'L'empire de la honte' (Editions Fayard – 'Empire of Shame', translated in 14 languages but not in English) that enough food can be provided globally for twice the number of the current world population of 6.6 billion. Drastic measures are needed, however, to assure that food supplies be more evenly distributed and not wasted as is very often the case today.
Quote from Gian Paolo Accardo's interview with Jean Ziegler for La libre Belgique (In the introduction to the interview): "Ziegler talks about the need for a moral insurrection." He says: "Through the [international] debt, hunger is the weapon of mass destruction which is used by the cosmocrats to crush - and to exploit - the people, in particular in the Southern hemisphere."[...]" A complex set of measures, immediately feasible and which I describe in the book, could quickly put a term to hunger. It is impossible to sum these up in one sentence. One thing is certain: world agriculture, in the current state of productivity, could feed twice the number of today's global population. So it is not a matter of fate: hunger is man made."
The rot in the structure
Severe poverty, wide-spread unemployment and lack of health care and quality education are the rot in the structure of the United States economy that will ultimately make the building collapse. No nation can continue to exist with only the upper crust living in obscene luxury and millions barely existing in deep poverty, lacking the essential means of what can be referred to as civilized living. Profound neglect and indifference are causing the rot in the structure to spread and to ultimately spell the doom of the economic system the way it has been functioning during the past few decades to the triumph of the billionaires and the distress of the forgotten people.
The wild-fire capitalism that is at this time running the business of the world needs to be subjected to complete restructuring. The top-heavy structure which ignores the base of workers has to topple when the base caves in. And cave in it will if its demands continue to be met with utter contempt by the now powerful gamblers who are in the lead of the business world.
A wealthy country that cares nothing for the health and well-being of its citizens cannot be saved unless it changes its policies radically. It has to realize that the general health of each member of the body is required for the survival of the body itself. If the base dies, the whole body will disintegrate. Sadly, the leaders of today's world seem to be blind to the fact that there is rot in the structure that makes up the world economy and that drastic measures are required to repair the damage already wrought. It is not by any means an exclusively moral issue. It is an issue that, if solved, might end up saving the world, ecologically and humanely.
© Copyright 2007 by AxisofLogic.com
[1] More about IMF disastrous policies in Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz': 'Globalization and Its Discontents'
*McClatchy Story on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch website
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_24011. shtml
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