Creating disparity: minorities taking more than their share

Majorities suffering long and deep

Editing by Carolyn Bennett

“Behind the increasing interconnectedness promised by globalization ─ are global decisions and policies and practices. These are typically influenced, driven or formulated by the rich and powerful.” Anup Shah is writing on the “Causes of Poverty.” He says, “These can be leaders of rich countries or other global actors such as multinational corporations, institutions and influential people.”

Facing such enormous external influence, “governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless.” Consequently, in the global context, “a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.” 

Here are some of the devastating facts, past and continuing. 

The state for the global majorities is POVERTY.

   

LIFE, LIVELIHOOD

Half the world’s population — more than 3 billion people (est.) — live on less than $2.50 a day

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT (GDP)

Market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given time period; GDP per capita, though not a measure of personal income, is often considered an indicator of a country’s standard of living (Wikipedia).

The GDP of the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (567 million people) is less than the wealth of the world’s 7 richest people combined.

ILLITERACY

 

Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.

EDUCATION

Less than one percent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 but this did not happen.

C

ONSUMERS AND SUFFERES: In 2005, the wealthiest 20 percent of the world accounted for 76.6 percent of total private consumption. The poorest fifth: just 1.5 percent

Twelve (12) percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of the world’s water; these 12 percent live outside the Third World.

 

CHILDREN

2.2 billion in the world; 1 billion (every second child) “live” in poverty; for the 1.9 billion children from the developing world −

640 million lack adequate shelter (1 in 3)

400 million lack access to safe water (1 in 5)

270 million lack access to health services (1 in 7)

CHILD DEATH

 

10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (figure equals total child population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)

1.4 million children die annually from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

2.2 million children die annually for lack of immunizations

15 million children are orphaned due to parental deaths from of HIV/AIDS (figure equals total child population in Germany or United Kingdom)

   

REGIONAL PEOPLE WITHOUT ELECTRICITY

South Asia 706 million

Sub-Saharan Africa – 547 million

East Asia 224 million

Other 101 million

ILLNESS (water, sanitation causes)

1.8 million (est.) child deaths each year result from diarrhea

443 million school days lost each year from water-related illness

 

Half of all people (close to this figure) in developing countries suffer at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits.

Millions of women spend several hours a day collecting water. 

Economic waste associated with the water and sanitation deficit: Costs associated with health spending, productivity losses and labor diversions … are greatest in some of the poorest countries. Sub-Saharan Africa loses about 5 percent of GDP (or some $28.4 billion annually), a figure that exceeds total aid flows and debt relief to the region in 2003.

DISEASE (Infectious diseases grow)

Forty million (est.) million people live with HIV/AIDS; 3 million died in 2004.

350–500 million cases of malaria (annually); 1 million fatalities; Africa: 90 percent of malarial deaths; African children: over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide

 

WATER, SANITATION 

(problems affecting half of humanity)

1.1 billion of developing countries’ people have inadequate access to water; 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.

Almost two in three people lacking access to CLEAN WATER survive on less than $2 a day; one in three living on less than $1 a day.

More than 660 million people without SANITATION live on less than $2 a day; more than 385 million on less than $1 a day.

Access to piped water into the household averages about 85 percent for the wealthiest 20 percent of the population compared with 25 percent for the poorest 20 percent.

1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometer (0.621 miles) − but not in their house or yard ─ consume around 20 liters (5.283 gallons) per day.

In the United Kingdom, where the average daily water usage is about 150 liters (39.7 gallons) a day, the average person uses more than 50 liters (13.2 gallons) of water a day flushing toilets.

In the United States − which has the highest average water use in the world ─ the average person uses 600 liters (159 gallons) a day.

N

ews on the World Socialist Web Site today contains some current reports showing what can only be termed criminal disparities created and sustained by rich nations’, corporations and individuals’ inordinate taking, plunder and negligence (including the oppressively contributory factors of endless wars of aggression, invasion, occupation, destabilization) leaving the majority of the world’s people in dire conditions that − given the present course and level of callousness ─ will last for generations.

 

CRIMINAL MANUFACTURE OF SUFFERING

In the world today “165 million children … are chronically malnourished.” This is a preventable condition that has affected “one in every four children at some point in their lives”: 38 percent of children from the least developed countries have had their growth stunted by malnutrition; malnourished children score 7 percent lower on math tests and are 19 percent less likely to be able to read by the age of eight; the poorest 40 percent are 2.8 times more likely to suffer long-term effects of malnutrition than the richest 10 percent.” 

Overall, “child malnutrition negatively affects self-esteem, self-confidence, and career aspirations. (Save the Children: “Food for Thought Report” based on studies conducted in India, Peru, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Vietnam)

Countries East and South

More than “1.3 billion people globally have no access to electricity; 2.6 billion have no clean cooking facilities. Ninety-five percent of these numbers of people live either in sub-Saharan Africa or developing countries of Asia; 84 percent live in rural areas.” (International Energy Agency)

  Countries West

In recent years, people living in industrialized countries have experienced “staggering growth in poverty and food insecurity: Greece’s children, 439,000 of them, “lived below the poverty line; 26 percent of Greek households with children had an ‘economically weak diet’; 37 percent lacked adequate heating; one in five families were living in ‘poor environmental conditions’; 10 percent (est.) of elementary and middle school students suffer food insecurity, the same ‘level of some African countries,’” (2012 UNICEF report); The United States’ households with children, 21 percent of them, were ‘food insecure,’ meaning that over the course of the year, these households “did not always have access to adequate food.” (U.S. Department of Agriculture data released showing its 2011 study)

Sources and notes

“Poverty Facts and Stats” (author and compiler Anup Shah, page last updated Monday, January 07, 2013): http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats.

http://www.globalissues.org/print/article/26

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

“Causes of Poverty” (Author and compiler Anup Shah), page updated Sunday, March 24, 2013, http://www.globalissues.org/issue/2/causes-of-poverty

“165 million children malnourished worldwide” (Jake Dean), June 1, 2013, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/01/maln-j01.html

“Food for thought report ─ Chronically malnourished children are 20 percent less literate - Save the Children Report comes ahead of June 8 G8 nutrition summit in London” Monday, 27 May 2013 - 5:12 p.m.. http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/2013-05/food-thought-report

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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“Democracy” as tool of Empire

Left-Center-Right acquiesce “obstructing democracy in the name of democracy”

Apropos the moment — Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “Democracy as Ideology of Empire”

Excepting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

“In the wake of 9/11, at the time of the war in Afghanistan, sixty U.S. academics issued a statement called ‘What We’re Fighting For: A Letter from America.’

“The signatories included some of the usual suspects, like Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, but also others whom we do not automatically think of as right-wing ideologues – such as the social democrat Michael Walzer.

“It is probably fair to say that their statement represented the views of a reasonably wide intellectual and political spectrum – at least by U.S. standards – from mildly left liberal to more-or-less respectable conservatism; and it is probably as civilized a defense of U.S. military intervention as we are likely to find.”

‘VALUES’ listed in that letter —

·       “‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

·       ‘The basic subject of society is the human person, and the legitimate role of government is to protect and help to foster the conditions for human flourishing.

·       ‘Human beings naturally desire to seek the truth about life’s purposes and ultimate ends.

·       ‘Freedom of conscience and religious freedom are inviolable rights of the human person.

·       ‘Killing in the name of God is contrary to faith in God’”

Ellen Meiksins Wood continues, commenting on those ‘values’ and their root —

“…We might find it hard to understand how these values could be grounds for an essentially imperialist war, especially the first principle about the freedom and equality of human beings. It is especially puzzling when considered against the background of actual U.S. foreign policy, which has generally shown little inclination to support democratic regimes in its dependencies, to say nothing of the Bush regime’s assaults on democracy in its own backyard and at home.…

“The essence of democracy as conceived in the U.S.A. is the coupling of formal democracy with substantive class rule, the class rule of capital. This involves a delicate conceptual balancing act between an assertion of popular sovereignty — government of, by, and for the people — and the dominance of capital, the subordination of politics to capitalist markets, and the imperatives of profit. “

What founds this easy acceptance, this acquiescence?

“… We are well prepared to view class power as having nothing to do with either power or class,” Wood writes. “We are educated to see property as the most fundamental human right and the market as the true realm of freedom. We are taught to view the state as just a necessary evil to sustain the right of property and the free market. We are taught to accept that most social conditions are determined in an economic sphere outside the reach of democracy. We learn to think of ‘the people’ not in social terms, as the common people, the working class, or anything to do with popular power, but as a purely political category; and we confine democracy to a limited, formal political sphere.

“As the founders intended, we think of political rights as essentially passive, and citizenship as a passive, individual, even private identity, which may express itself by voting from time to time but which has no active, collective or social meaning. So there is nothing immediately implausible to most Americans about applying this idea of democracy to imperialism.…”

Manifest in U.S. Foreign Policy, Foreign Relations — perpetual intervention, war

“… For all its democratic rhetoric, the U.S.A. has generally tended to prop up friendly autocratic regimes … by military and other means, to prevent the accession of a democratic regime or to overturn a democratic election; [and since] that is not always possible, another “important option” taken in recent years has been “obstructing democracy in the name of democracy.”

The United States’ “particularly useful” brand of democracy, Wood says, finds electoral processes and institutions that will in one way or another thwart the majority; and, most important, [this brand of democracy empties] democracy of as much social content as possible.”

The U.S. occupation of Iraq, for example, “has meant much more direct interference with a truly democratic transformation, as the occupying power has limited the field of candidates as narrowly as possible and made every effort to ensure the continuation of the U.S.-regime….

“… [W]hen all is said and done, de-socialization [emptied social content] of democracy is the crucial anti-democratic strategy — more important in the end than any electoral devices. The whole point of this strategy is to put formal political rights in place of any social rights, and to put as much of social life as possible out of reach of democratic accountability.”

Manifest globally, in ‘war on terror’

“If globalization is preparing the ground for democracy throughout the world, as leaders of the advanced capitalist states would have us believe,” Wood says, “it is doing so by ensuring that much of economic and social life will be beyond the reach of democratic power, while becoming ever more vulnerable to the power of capital.…

“[George W] Bush’s [now Barack Obama’s (?)] mission to spread democracy means, at best, trying to ensure compliant regimes and to prevent genuinely democratic transformations. At worst, it means war.

“… In a state of perpetual war, even the formal democracy of capitalist societies is under threat.”

As that was true in the Cold War, “it is true in the so-called ‘war on terror.’ There already have been assaults on liberal democracy, attacks on civil liberties in the United States and elsewhere.…”

Sources and notes

“DEMOCRACY AS IDEOLOGY OF EMPIRE”(Ellen Meiksins Wood), http://www.oneworld-publications.com/pdfs/New_Imps.pdf

Ellen Meiksins Wood is an international author and educator. Among her books are

Mind and Politics: An Approach to the Meaning of Liberal and Socialist Individualism (1972); The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (1986); The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (1992);

Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (1995); Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (1997); The Origin of Capitalism (1999); The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002); Empire of Capital (2003); Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2008). She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of California (at Berkeley and at Los Angeles), was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, and has taught political science at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Canada, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Meiksins_Wood

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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]

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Beyond Betrayal to actualized renewal — Pinkney

Commentary on what is, what’s possible
From Larry Pinkney's piece in Online Journal
Editing by Carolyn Bennett

WHAT IS

Many people in the United States “were insidiously lulled into a slumber” but some are now waking from their slumber.

The peace prize-toting, constitutional lawyer and purveyor of war … has demonstrated for the clarity of all conscious people that mere color or gender, et cetera, must never be deciding factors for making crucial choices and or political decisions. … Superficiality is superficial!

The android [automaton, robot in human form]-like state of so many is being replaced by “the pain of betrayal and the recognition that the Obama/Biden regime (notwithstanding the Obama and corporate-stream media double-speak) has, over the last two years repackaged and accelerated the Bush/Cheney policies of war abroad and economic, legal, and political disenfranchisement at home.”

Understanding that the corporate Obama/Biden regime and the scandalous Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have, for all practical purposes, established and codified in law, a very real, often not-so-subtle police-state in this nation — strengthens everyday people’s resolve to throw off this unacceptable and intolerable situation.

WHAT MUST BE

Everyday people in this nation must grasp the international nature of the struggle for justice and human rights worldwide.

“The people of the United States must recognize that our struggle here for political, economic and political justice and human rights intertwines with those of everyday people in Haiti, in Spain, in Greece, in Germany, in Norway, in Venezuela, in Brazil, in Argentina, in Palestine, in Zambia, and in every nation of every corner of the Earth!”

Internationalism must be the answer of everyday people to the blood-sucking bane of globalization. We are not alone — no matter what corporate-stream media might try and have us believe! This planet belongs to everyday people — not to the vampiric corporate elite.

We must be guardians and sustainers of this planet. …

… Let us move beyond betrayal to an actualized and sustained vision of renewal! Organize, Organize, and then Organize some more! At stake is our existence, the existence of the offspring and the planet itself.

Sources and notes

“Is the United States a nation of psychological androids?” (Larry Pinkney Commentary), January 7, 2011, http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/printer_6774.shtml, Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

Larry Pinkney
Former university instructor Larry Pinkney is a lecturer and writer whose pieces have appeared in a number of news sources including the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper, The Boston Globe, The Minnesota Daily, The Guardian (New York), Canadian Dimension Magazine, Vancouver (Canada) Indymedia, the ONLINE JOURNAL, and It’s About Time. Larry Pinkney has been co-chair of the San Francisco Black Caucus working closely with the Black Panther Party in the areas of employment, education and housing discrimination, and police brutality. Pinkney “is best known internationally for being the only U.S. citizen and former Black Panther Party member to have successfully self-authored a civil/political rights case from prison to the United Nations.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Pinkney



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Bennett's books available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY]; Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY]; LONGS’ Cards and Books: http://longscardsandbooks.com/ [Penn Yan, NY]
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