21–30 of 76 posts
and this is a problem!
I live in germany a "rich" country you may think... There is a growing part of people how have a fulltime job but they are getting not payed enough and must go employment agency to get subvention from the state...
Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Corrupt, heavy-handed governments, pursuing illogical economic policies or deliberate starvation of opposition tribes. You could write that check tomorrow and the day after, Zimbabwe or North Korea or Somalia or even India would be the same. There are places in the world where the locals are killing people for offering the polio vaccine to children. Further, global poverty is actually…
Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Corrupt, heavy-handed governments, pursuing illogical economic policies or deliberate starvation of opposition tribes. You could write that check tomorrow and the day after, Zimbabwe or North Korea or Somalia or even India would be the same. There are places in the world where the locals are killing people for offering the polio vaccine to children. Further, global poverty is actually…
Self-inflicted? That is a bullshit western justification. Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die.
Not to mention that their very countries were designed and drawn on the map by colonial powers, like dividing loot, with no respect to local populations and tensions (or with full intent to exploit them, in a "divide and conquer" move).
Or that even today the governments of those countries are appointed and remotely controlled by western powers, with everything from under the table deals to open military support for their cronies.
Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it".
Back of the envelope calculations, grabbing some numbers off of Wikipedia: "In 2005, 43% of the world population (3.14 billion people) have an income of less than U.S. $2.5/day. 21.5% of the world population (1.4 billion people) have an income of less than US$1.25/day." So the bottom 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25/day. 1/4 of the $240 billion annual income cited is $60bn a year, spread amongst 1.4 billion…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In our post-moral world, we could at least pretend that's on the table.
That type of confiscation of legitimately earned wealth would be profoundly immoral.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you got 100 000 cakes that you must eat them all in 1 month and i take away from you 10 cakes or even 1000 did it really matter to you? if you got 2 cakes for a month and i take away 1 does this matter?
>> "Does 1 cake really matter"? All of these "100 richest people" probably give away more than 100x what you earn in a year already. Are you honestly going to call them selfish? If you are, then you are saying everyone should give away as much of their "cakes" as possible. Can you afford to give away an extra "cake"? Probably. Then you are selfish too, by your own logic.
A quote from Charlie Chaplin:" The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate... has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed."
Yeah, and most of these rich people are also huge philanthropists that donate massive sums to charity.
Well, only 19 people have given more than $1bn to charity http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2011/05/19/the-worlds... which leaves a lot of people not giving much away. The Russian oligarchs seem to like to spend money on football teams and mansions not alleviating poverty, while the Chinese rich do not seem to give much away either.
Many Chinese rich would be very large employers. Also their culture of saving allows the US to continue spending outside of their means, for now.
Everyone commenting on here wants to believe that they will become one of the top 1%. No one here wants to contemplate what would happen if they fell to the bottom 1%.
Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Corrupt, heavy-handed governments, pursuing illogical economic policies or deliberate starvation of opposition tribes. You could write that check tomorrow and the day after, Zimbabwe or North Korea or Somalia or even India would be the same. There are places in the world where the locals are killing people for offering the polio vaccine to children. Further, global poverty is actually…
> Dire poverty is self-inflicted. Self-inflicted? That is a bullshit western justification. Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die. Not to mention that their very countries were designed and drawn on the map by colonial powers, like dividing loot, with no respect to local populations and tensions (or with full intent to exploit them, in a "divide and conquer" move). Or…
No, absolutely not.
And it is self-inflicted, "colonialist BS" aside (there are colonial issues, of course)
Religion and ignorance go a long way. You can't throw money to the problem
Things may seem nice and it's easy to blame 'colonial overlords' from the armchair or from the sociology departments of universities. Very Easy.
Now try teaching people about safe sex and AIDS. Try teaching people about the importance of an education.
There's one way to get a proper government and that's EARNING IT.
Oh by the way I come from one of those "milked" countries (not to extinction and certainly not much recently) so I know what "self inflicting" means.