News Gloss

Deception is the root of poverty

In the news: a telephone conversation between Bono & Wolfowitz. This is an extension of Bono's appearences at places like the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, etc. I have no idea if Bono is actually interested in eliminating poverty, but he's never uttered a word, at these festivals of power & priviledge, about the actual cause.

People would not be poor if a minority didn't profit from it. That's true in the US, and throughout the world. The resources of the world, which should belong to everyone, are stolen from them, by force, continually. The resources are abused & destroyed, wasted for short-term profit, and the poor have no access to even the most basic of them.

Stopping poverty would only require stopping this theft. There's no way to resolve poverty as long as the world is structured to maximize profit for the priviledged & powerful 0.1% of the population.

But this isn't talked about. The poor know it, and they are the majority. When things get so bad that they cannot live, they try to stop it ... but they'd prefer to just live their lives.

The amazing deceptions used by concentrated wealth & power to distract the educated classes, are not easily uncovered by textual analysis.

On the website of the World Bank: "The World Bank Group’s mission is to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world." The complete opposite is true -- it's the purpose of the World Bank to institutionalize poverty, so that a suffering labor pool is cheap to hire, and easy to profit from. It is the job of the World Bank to make loans which benefit the rich, and which are paid for by the poor. And it is the role of the World Bank to insist that governments do not try to change this situation.

How can all those well-meaning people at the World Economic Forum be so easily deceived, one might ask? Because the real nature of these institutions is almost too terrible to believe. Still, the actions of these institutions can be made transparent, and then it wouldn't be hard to build a model of what is going on ... the emotional distance of computer models, created from real data, could save us yet.

posted by Greg Bryant @ 11:58 AM