THE PROBLEM OF POVERTY … and … WEALTH
By Grahame Russell, December 2007
Many decry over and over the “problem of poverty”. Global leaders and institutions (United Nations) call for the “reduction of poverty” or the “alleviation of poverty” by such ‘n’ such a date.
It's as though poverty were the avian flu, a misfortune to be avoided and pitied, and then alleviated through assistance from the “more fortunate”.
But do the impoverished live in some separate, unlucky universe? Or do rich and wealthier people and countries and poorer and impoverished people and countries come from and depend on the same system, playing by the same rules?
Poverty reduction, let alone eradication of poverty (which should be the only goal), can’t be achieved if one denies that poverty is for the most part the symptom of generational and systemic exploitation and power abuse.
Poverty and powerlessness can’t be understood without understanding power and wealth accumulation, from the local to the global levels. Humans need to critically look at the creation and distribution of power and wealth (and of powerlessness and poverty) both inside nations and between nations, in communities and between individuals.
Impoverishment is not created in a vacuum, but in a local-to-global economic/ legal/ political order with enforced practices and rules (laws) related to control over property and resources, production and creation of wealth, and the ensuing distribution of wealth and poverty.
EARN & DESERVE
If millionaires and billionaires earn and deserve their wealth, property and power, it follows that impoverished billions of people earn and deserve their malnutrition, disease and starvation … and obvious powerlessness.
Owners of and investors in global shoe or clothing companies earn and deserve their billions and millions just as their workers - far-away or close-by - earn and deserve $1 to $5 / a day, earn and deserve to be fired, threatened or killed for organizing in the work place, earn and deserve to be shut out of the factory when it moves to a cheaper place. Same system, same rules.
Owners of and investors in global mining companies earn and deserve billion and million dollar profits, just as their local staff earn and deserve low wages, often working in harmful conditions, until the resource runs out and the company departs, leaving environmental destruction in the earth, waters and air, leaving health harms in the local community; just as the impoverished local communities earn and deserve to be forcibly displaced, to make way for the mine project. Same system, same rules.
Owners of and investors in the global military industry earn and deserve their billions and million dollar returns on their investments just as the victims of wars and of the repression of governments earn and deserve their suffering and death at the hands of the machinery invested in, used and profited from.
It is contradictory to praise and laud the billionaire and millionaire owners of and investors in the global economic/ legal/ political system, while lamenting and decrying the exploitation, impoverishment, repression and environmental destruction that the global economic/ legal/ political system produces.
We can’t have it both ways.
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Feel free to publish, distribute this article. Grahame Russell works with Rights Action, a tax-deductible organization in Canada and USA, that funds and works with community-based development, environment and human rights organizations in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and southern Mexico (Oaxaca, Chiapas); and educates about and is involved in activism related to global development, environmental and human rights struggles.
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