lovebombanarchy
26th April 2006, 03:26
In today’s world, poverty is an enormous problem. Billions of people worldwide don’t have the resources they need to survive. Billions of people are starving because they don’t have enough food, and are sick because they can’t afford health care and medicine. Billions of people are at a disadvantage because they can’t afford adequate shelter, or education. More than half the world’s population earns less than $2 of income per day.
At least 8 million people die every year because they are simply to poor to survive, approximately 22,000 people per day!
At the same time as so many people live in crippling poverty, the rich are living lives of unimaginable luxury.
At the turn of the century, the world’s 225 richest people had combined assets of over one trillion dollars, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people.
These billionaires can have anything that they want without ever having to work at all, while the rest us are condemned to extreme poverty and wage-slavery.
Why is this? It’s because of an economic system called capitalism. Capitalism is basically a system of violently enforced economic hierarchy. It came into existence when a tiny group of elites violently seized control of resources that had once belonged to all people equally, and then made everyone else work as wage-slaves just to regain access to small portions of the stolen resources.
Once there was a time, before the rise of civilization, when all resources belonged to all people equally, and everyone took what they needed and wanted, and there was no violent conflict between people. This era ended when elites started using violence, and violent institutions such as the government, military, and police forces to claim more and more resources for themselves, more than their fair share, causing poverty and hunger to exist, for the first time in human history.
There are actually enough resources to give everyone in the world food, water, clothes, shelter, education, and health care.
For example, take food: we produce enough food every year to feed 9 billion people nutritious meals, 3 billion more than are even alive! Even so, 1 out of every 7 people is starving, including 90 million children! Why? Because the rich criminals make more money by letting us starve than by feeding us. This has got to stop!
Poverty is the not the product of a natural scarcity of resources, rather, it is the product of a politico-economic system which prioritizes the interests of the wealthy minority over the interests of the poor majority. Under the state-capitalist politico-economic system, trillions of dollars in resources are spent every year to protect and advance the interest of the wealthy elite. For instance, the US government spends almost half a trillion dollars every year on its military force, which exists solely to protect and advance the interests of the corporate elite, and perhaps $815 billion every year on corporate welfare, compared with just $193 billion on welfare for ordinary Americans, according to one estimation. (Zepezauer, M. (2004). Take the Rich off Welfare. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.)
In a rationally organized society, resources would be owned by the people who used them. Our society, which prohibits some people form using the resources they desperately need to survive, while granting other privileged people ownership over more resources than they could ever possibly use, is highly irrational, and extremely unjust by any ethical standard.
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just a very simple, brief introduction to these ideas, that some of you might find useful ( i know when i was first getting into anti-capitalism, stats like these would have really helped). sources can be found in the pamphlet on my website.
At least 8 million people die every year because they are simply to poor to survive, approximately 22,000 people per day!
At the same time as so many people live in crippling poverty, the rich are living lives of unimaginable luxury.
At the turn of the century, the world’s 225 richest people had combined assets of over one trillion dollars, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s population, or 2.5 billion people.
These billionaires can have anything that they want without ever having to work at all, while the rest us are condemned to extreme poverty and wage-slavery.
Why is this? It’s because of an economic system called capitalism. Capitalism is basically a system of violently enforced economic hierarchy. It came into existence when a tiny group of elites violently seized control of resources that had once belonged to all people equally, and then made everyone else work as wage-slaves just to regain access to small portions of the stolen resources.
Once there was a time, before the rise of civilization, when all resources belonged to all people equally, and everyone took what they needed and wanted, and there was no violent conflict between people. This era ended when elites started using violence, and violent institutions such as the government, military, and police forces to claim more and more resources for themselves, more than their fair share, causing poverty and hunger to exist, for the first time in human history.
There are actually enough resources to give everyone in the world food, water, clothes, shelter, education, and health care.
For example, take food: we produce enough food every year to feed 9 billion people nutritious meals, 3 billion more than are even alive! Even so, 1 out of every 7 people is starving, including 90 million children! Why? Because the rich criminals make more money by letting us starve than by feeding us. This has got to stop!
Poverty is the not the product of a natural scarcity of resources, rather, it is the product of a politico-economic system which prioritizes the interests of the wealthy minority over the interests of the poor majority. Under the state-capitalist politico-economic system, trillions of dollars in resources are spent every year to protect and advance the interest of the wealthy elite. For instance, the US government spends almost half a trillion dollars every year on its military force, which exists solely to protect and advance the interests of the corporate elite, and perhaps $815 billion every year on corporate welfare, compared with just $193 billion on welfare for ordinary Americans, according to one estimation. (Zepezauer, M. (2004). Take the Rich off Welfare. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.)
In a rationally organized society, resources would be owned by the people who used them. Our society, which prohibits some people form using the resources they desperately need to survive, while granting other privileged people ownership over more resources than they could ever possibly use, is highly irrational, and extremely unjust by any ethical standard.
---
just a very simple, brief introduction to these ideas, that some of you might find useful ( i know when i was first getting into anti-capitalism, stats like these would have really helped). sources can be found in the pamphlet on my website.