Privledge Equals Poverty

We’ve all gotten the rap when as tiny children we didn’t want to finish our supper, specifically when it tasted god-awful, that there are children starving in [insert ambiguous third world region here] and they’d love to have what we have. Though we were never really able to figure out what was the connection between the two. Then later in life we get our heads filled with America is the greatest most bestest country in the whole wide world and we should feel lucky to live in it. Now I don’t dispute any of this. World hunger is a serious problem and the United States is the most privileged. I’m just wondering why?
Lets play a thought game, a colorful thought game at that.
So imagine a playpen ball pit at Chucky Cheeses with only a set amount of those Technicolor dream balls in it. Now these playpen balls can symbolize a lot of things; power, privileged, money, food, it doesn’t matter. At rest the playpen ball level is flat, smooth and even. But add an outside force, a kid jumping in, maybe he got pushed, whatever, balls start to fly all over the place and the pit is no longer even. But more importantly, for any rise of playpen depth in one place there most correspond to an equal decrease in depth somewhere else. For every crest there is a trough. It all has to come from somewhere.
For every wealthy tycoon, there most be a far larger number of poor migrant workers to give the tycoon his position. It’s like a realpolitik version of the math games we used to play in elementary school. If there are only 5 apples and Jim has 4 of them, then Julie can only have 1 apple. Except here instead of apples we’re dealing with bullion used to buy, well, apples, among other things I guess. But mostly apples.
This is true for entire counties and civilizations. You can sip your grande chai latte and surf Facebook on you MacBook (which oddly enough I’m doing right now) but your ability to do so is dependent on somebody else in the world being in roughly the exact opposite situation. The equation most balance out for a zero net gain for the whole.
According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund the population of the world that is living in “extreme poverty” or on less than a dollar a day is 1.5 billion with a b. Expand that to under $2 a day and the figure jumps to a little less than half the human population.
Back on the home front, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the top 1/5 of this countries’ most affluent (who I imagine all wear monocles) owns about 49.8% of all our wealth. And the difference between the rich and poor is only increasing. Between 1980 and 2003 the richest 1/20 of households saw their income increase by 132%, while the bottom 1/5 only saw an increase of 24%.
The ratio between the average CEO and employee’s wages has widened in the last fifteen years from 107;1 to 411;1. An increase of 384%. In fact if the national minimum wage in this country had kept up with the average CEO’s it would currently be $22.61 an hour. (It should be noted that the greatest portion of this increase occurred during the Clinton era, not the two Bush eras).
A simpler way to figure out income inequality (also called social stratification or “Why am I wearing rags and he’s got a damn-awesome monocle?”) is the Gini Index done by the United Nations. It’s a simple scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is perfect egalitarianism and 100 is when one person owns everything, literally everything. Most industrial countries have a Gini Index of about 20 to 30 (Denmark’s is 0.247 as an example). The United States’ is 46.9, which is comparable to Turkey, Tunisia and Mother Russia. Worse yet it’s been increasing steadily since 1972, rising over 20% in that time.
Most disturbing of all. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 35.5 million Americans were ‘food insecure’ in 2006, up 400,000 from the year before.
I’d admit all these statistics are pretty dull and tedious, but the point is things are not getting any better and will not for the foreseeable future.
Now is this just the way things are because that’s just the way things are. Of course not, it’s like saying apples fall down from trees or planets orbit suns, just because. It’s like saying that you broke up with your girlfriend because she was “just a bitch” when it really had more to do with a certain disease she caught from you, which you quincidentaly caught from her sister. There are always causes to lead to the effects.
There is a deep seeded, institutionalized error in the system itself (like your deep seeded need to hook up with your partner’s siblings) that causes all this heartache. Not the wicked deeds of a few wicked men, but the greater system itself.


NEW WORLD ORDER

As Noam Chomsky says Globalization can mean many things, some even positive, like the building of friendly relations with people international, the whole “we’re all in the same boat” deal. But in these modern contexts Economic Globalization (also called Neo-Liberalism) means the spread of the “free-trade” market system and laissez-fare economics globally. Breaking down tariffs, destroying embargos (though Cuba is still under embargo since the ‘60s for some reason), cutting governments out of the loop of things till they have zero say in their own countries economy. Till the whole world is one seamless, flat, glorious market place where we are all free to move about as we please.
Sounds wonderful doesn’t it. Well some western businessmen were so enthralled by this new cult they created such churches as the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organization, to spread this gospel of “let the market decide everything” to the grateful masses. And if any of them noticed the inherent contradiction in a series of quasi-government groups imposing their will on other nations to deregulate and privatize that nation so their market could be free from all coercive groups, they said nothing.
The partial logic for all of this is based on the Neo-Classical school of economics, the oldest and most archaic school in that field which about 90% of all economists ascribe to in some part. It says that for some magical reason, an economy behaves at highest efficiency when there is zero interference from outside forces (I.E. government regulation). That means no welfare, no social security, no public institutions and especially no regulation or checks-n-balances over industry whatsoever. Oddly enough the same people (I.E. rich people, for hence forth referred to as ‘richies’) who would benefit most from a policy which would include tax cuts for richies are also the ones most pushing for it. These people are also the same who denounce trade unions for limiting competition but then do nothing to put a girdle on monopolies. Hmm I wonder why?
Globalization is designed to promote, no, force international competition of businesses, competition thereby promotes progress, and in the end it’s all in benefit for the consumer. Yeah. Ok. The scam there is when a company from a developed nation ‘competes’ with a company from a yetdeveloped nation, who do you think has an unfair advantage. It’s like Muhammad Ali vs. Woody Allen, who are you expecting to come out with a title. Theoretically in the long run the Woody Allen companies should benefit from the increased competition (which there is little evidence to prove), but as another economist, John Keynes, said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” That type of gradual redistributing of the wealth can take decades to work, if ever, and highly likely never. In the mean time Muhammad Ali will be exploiting Woody Allen, sucking all the life out of Woody to fill his bloated coffers like some Regan Economic vampire.
Then your assuming that multinationals who will be moving on Woody Allen like hyenas to a undefended antelope, are acting in some sort of benevolent role, shinning the light of civilization and consumerism on these backward savages. Ha! You create an entire system based on people acting in their own, and only their own, best interest (I.E. greed) it’s no surprise that the same individuals who created the system are the first to be corrupted by it. With less international regulation (thanks to the WTO) the multinationals have near free reign to take advantage of Woody Allen in any unnatural way they want.
Members of the Free-Trade cults will try to convince you their coercive policies have led to great progress in the third world (as if it’s a separate world then ours). Sure some (note: some) yetdeveloped nation have been on the up and up, but there is little direct evidence this is directly caused by either the WTO, IMF or World Bank’s policies. In fact there is far more evidence to the contrary.
Of the 76 countries that followed the World Banks ‘adjustment and reform’ programs in the 80s and 90s, only 4 ‘consistently improved their performances in inflation rates and growth.’ Several of the nations that have followed the IMF’s development scheme (emphasis on scheme or scam) have been met with extreme bouts of economic and social upheavals. Three of which are Kenya, Argentina and the former Yugoslavia. The later of which descended into a decade of civil war and genocide after the IMF decided to impose a debt repayment plan that halved the countries living standards in 2 years.
If globalization was really ‘working’ we would see empirically the closing of the gap between richest and poorest nation. Instead we have seen the exact opposite. According to the World Institute for Development Economics Research the richest 10% of the global population (9/10 of which are living in either the U.S., Europe or Japan) own roughly 85% of all the world’s wealth, while the bottom 50% own less than 1% of the wealth. And this ratio of the richest 1/5 versus poorest 1/5 has been steadily widening for decades. 30;1 in 1969, 60;1 in 1990 and 74;1 in 1998.
Nations such as those in the former Soviet Blocs have even seen their real Gross Domestic Products essentially disintegrate shortly after the introduction of ‘Free Trade’.
And while poverty is spreading to fill every corner of the globe the number of $U.S. Billionaires has been increasing exponentially. 99 in 1990, 587 in 2004, 691 in 2005 and 793 in 2006.
These inconsistencies are far too prevalent to be caused by minor errors that can be fixed through reform, Globalization as a system is designed at it’s core to work in just this way, without regard for the people it forces to be involved.
What does Globalization really mean? It means control. It means coercion. It means the lose of the independent nation’s sovereignty. It means institutionalized inequality. It means exploitation. It means 21st century colonialism. It means Imperialism.
(Interestedly enough the voting power in the IMF and World Banks of the U.S., European Union and Japan combined is far over half out over the total 182 member nations. These nations were also quincidently the chief colonial powers a hundred years ago.)


HEGEMONY AND HEMORAGING

The future looks bleak. Unless you’re a richie, then it looks awesome for a while followed eventually by bleak. By aiming to create one unified world economy at the worlds expense what has happened is that the World Trade Organization has literally outsourced stratification. When before there would be an enclosed class system of poor, middle-class and richies, now entire nations and continents have been drawn into a single world caste system of rich nations above middle nations and poor nations. The money is all going uphill.
The sad thing is only a handful of people in these richer nations are benefiting from the whole scam. The resources and wealth of an entire planet are flowing into America, Europe and Japan, but even then only the richest of the rich in the richest countries can be seen getting richer. Look around you. How has your life benefited from globalization? Besides the neat toys made in sweat shops and the coffee grown with next to slave labor, where is the benefit for you when your job is outsourced to half way around the world? This is the principal domestic byproduct of ‘Free Trade’ that you will rarely ever hear connect to it. Outsourcing of our jobs is caused directly by globalization cults and the corporate tycoons who follow them. If they see a cheap penny to be made by moving factories oversees, you better believe the faces of all the starving American children whose daddies just got canned won’t stop them.
Imagine a farmer innn… say Columbia for example. She grows a standard crop that she brings market, but thanks to globalization her produce has to compete with the same crop imported from America, which has been subsidized by the American government. Normally her government would be able to set up tariffs to protect her and the rest of the local market from such inconsistencies. But thanks to privatization and ‘Free Trade’, no such protection exists anymore. The American produce is so much cheaper that she can’t sell any of hers. Eventually she defaults on her bank loans, has to give up her farm, moves into the city to become another of the millions of migrant workers, and has to work in a sweat shop factory making some contrived bit of consumerism for an international corporation. This corporation then takes what she produced and sells it on the world market at a ridiculously inflated rate for an even more ridicules profit which goes strait to it’s stock holders.
And while all this is going on, the population of the world that is hopelessly poor and unemployed, or of so called ‘surplus labor’, is increasing. According to the United Nations, by 2030 the human population will be 8 billion with between 2 and 3 of those billions being classified ‘informal workers’ A.K.A. ‘migrant workers’ I.E. the denizens of shantytowns, slums and Dickinson nightmares the likes of which we’ve never seen, totally outside the traditional relations of production and progress.
To quote a 2003, U.N. Human Settlement Program report, “The collapse of formal urban employment in the developing world and the rise of the informal sector [the extreme impoverished] is seen as a direct function of liberalization [I.E. globalization].”
Imagine those commercials you see for the Christian Children’s Fund times a thousand. Worse yet, because of the Neo-Classical and Neo-Liberal Economics’ divestment from public housing and other welfare plans, there’s little that can be done to help them.
But let’s says these impoverished folk wish to try to better there condition, immigrate to a more prosperous country or flee to that country as a refugee from the newly created genocide in their own. Well, too bad. With all the talk of the more mystic followers of the globalization cults that goes along the lines, “a flat world economy where we are all equal citizens of the world and can move about as we please,” in the last decade we’ve seen a nationalistic strengthening of national borders against the so called, “Alien Invasion” that rivals that of the Great Wall of China. In places like the U.S., E.U. and especially Australia, to be a foreigner is a misdemeanor within itself and a refugee a capitol crime.
I know it’s hard, but let’s forget the human faces of the American whose job was outsourced, and the Columbian farmer who can’t sell her produce, and the child living in total squalor, and the ‘illegal’ shot at the border, and the stock holder who is the only beneficiary in this whole mess, and let’s look at the bigger picture for a second.
What Neo-Liberalism is gradually and silently creating is a stratified world where every individual nation is subject to it’s own individual portion of the division of labor along the supply chain. Whole nations producing nothing but agriculture, whole nations producing nothing but manufacturing goods, whole nations producing nothing but socks, and supervising it all, whole nations made up of the managerial class and their service industry (the one domestic industry that can’t be outsourced).
Nothing will be made locally anymore. Just think of how few items you see these days that can honestly say, “Made in the U.S.A.” And in that lays the crutch. The self-reliance, the self-sufficiency of whole regions will be totally non-existent. This whole glorious machine will be hopelessly addicted and absolutely reliant on the desperately fragile system of international trade and finance.
If all your are producing are cash-crops for export into the market, and the only way to get what you need is from the market, then what happens when something happens to the market? Think about it. And think about where the food you need to survive comes from.
Like all great paradigm shits, the end of our current market based one will come totally naturally with little need for provocation. Peak Oil.
The figures I’ve heard for when oil production will reach it’s historical peak and global fossil fuel reserves to be totally drained vary. Some say by 2030, others 2060. The point is it is an eventuality. Nothing will stop it. And since I’ve yet to any evidence that the political and (the far more important in our society) business leaders think in any way rationally or practically, we as a world will be totally unprepared.
With all the emphasis on ‘smaller governments’ the Neo-Cons, Neo-Classicals and Neo-Liberals have given us the ultimate in Achilles Heels, by divesting from public transportation systems and infrastructures. Without oil the post-panamax tanker ships won’t sail. Without oil the transport jets won’t fly. Without oil the tanker trucks won’t deliver across our nations highway system. Without oil, and with no system to replace it, international trade, the new lifeblood of the planet, will die. It’s like Frank Herbert’s Dune, except real, and alot more scary. Also no sandworms.
What happens next is pretty predictable. With nations requiring from one another the myriad of needs to keep civilization running, and the way to fill those needs suddenly gone, things will get icky. Starvation in most major cities. Cannibalism probably. You can’t really expect cubicle workers to know how to harvest grain. In all general chaos.
Sure I’m likely exaggerating this last prediction at bit, and the eventual fallout will be (like most times when you have dooms day prophesies) not as bad as you’d think.
But then again …… what’s to stop it?