Black Flag 213 index
10 Billionaires Could Wipe Out Poverty
Abolish wage-slavery; organize One Big Democratic Classwide Union.
In a faith-based religious newsletter called "Ministry of Money," the following except appeared in a story about poverty which I thought worth sharing:
"As unbelievable as it may sound, the combined wealth of the world's seven richest people could end world poverty. A United Nations Human Development Report recently published (and reported in the June 22, 1997 issue of Manchester Guardian Weekly) notes that an $80 billion anti-poverty program would provide access to basic social services and eradicate poverty. The net wealth of 10 billionaires, according to the report, is worth 1.5 times the combined national incone of the 48 least developed countries. The growing gap between rich and poor is also quantified in the report: in 1960 the richest fifth of the world's population was 30 times as wealthy as the world's poorest fifth; in 1994, they were 78 times as wealthy."
As we witness accelerating economic polarization in the U.S., it is important to also ponder the global implications of wildly bifurcated distributions of income and wealth. The cold terms of financial accounting cannot begin to describe the incalculable human suffering that lies behind the numbers.
Gives one pause to reconsider Marx's aphorism: "expropriate the expropriators."
Abolish wage-slavery; organize One Big Democratic Classwide Union.
Michael Eisenscher meisenscher@igc.apc.org
http://iww.org/join/