It's Time to Shine a Light on the Poverty Creation Industry
http://www.occupy.com/article/its-time-shine-light-poverty-creation-industry
Poverty is human-made. It is created – knowingly and with scientific efficiency – by a vastly sophisticated industry that includes private companies, think tanks, media outlets, government policies, and more. This "Poverty Creation Industry" is about the least talked about feature of our global economy and yet it is perhaps the greatest market force in the modern world. Until we acknowledge this startling truth, progress towards global prosperity and sustainability will fall far short of what is possible.
This isn’t to suggest that there’s a dark, smoky room somewhere in which a small cabal plots to cause immeasurable misery just because they can. This isn’t a conspiracy theory. In truth, it happens in big boardrooms and political conferences, where people create rules and execute strategies to "maximize self-interest" as economists say, by extracting wealth from others. This is largely driven by a maniacal focus on short-term profit or advantage while ignoring one of its primary effects – the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people. Willful ignorance, though, as any legal scholar will tell you, is no defense in law. It’s about time we applied the same standard to our economic rules and realities.
Revealing the Culprits
You don’t need to dig very deep to find the main culprits. If we apply the old Latin rubric cui bono? – literally 'who benefits?' – there are some very clear and unsurprising suspects.
The richest 0.001% of the world control 30% of the financial wealth; the wealthiest 0.1% about 81%. So the rich are indeed extremely rich. More important than their static worth, though, are trends over time.
(More at the link.)
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