Class War Against the American People
There has not been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in the United States for generations, so what, exactly, does “class warfare” really mean? Is it just an empty political catch-phrase? [...] I recently argued that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class.
Banks Are Starving People to Death
The current spike in petrol prices is not primarily a result of anything to do with the freedom fighters in the Arab world. Nor is it a result of OPEC’s production levels. Rather, the spikes are primarily a result of the speculative market on oil. This speculative market is driven by the practices of the biggest banks, who have special exemptions to treat commodities like a casino, who have zero incentive to appropriately hedge their bets, who do not provide the liquidity they were designed to provide, and who generally provide nothing of value to society except to push prices of things higher and higher so that very rich people will continue to invest with them.
http://rdd.me/ky5figlx
"We act against all evidence"
We are simply dramatically stupid. We act systematically against the evidence we have. We know everything that should not be done. There is nobody that does not know that. Particularly the big politicians know exactly what should not be done. Yet they do it. The more you have, the more greedy you become. And all this crisis is the product of greed. Greed is the dominant value today in the world. And as long as that persists, we are done. The United States is the most dramatic example. I have gone as far as saying that the United States is an "underdeveloping nation," which is a new category. We have developed, underdeveloped, and developing. Now you have underdeveloping. And the United States is an example, in which the one percent of the Americans are doing better and better and better, and the 99 percent is going down, in all sorts of manifestations.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us
Poor care for vice more than kids
In the Congolese village of Mont-Belo, we met a bright fourth grader, Jovali Obamza, who is about to be expelled from school because his family is three months behind in paying fees. Jovali's dad, Georges Obamza, weaves straw stools that he sells for $1 each. He said that the family is eight months behind on its $6-a-month rent and is in danger of being evicted, with nowhere to go."It's hard to get the money to send the kids to school," Mr Obamza explained, a bit embarrassed. But Mr Obamza and his wife, Valerie, have cellphones and spend a combined $10 a month on call time. In addition, Mr Obamza goes drinking at a village bar, spending about $1 an evening on moonshine. That adds up to about $12 a month -- almost as much as the family rent and school fees combined.
World poverty is falling
Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin have estimated the world's income distribution and suggest that world poverty is disappearing faster than previously thought. From 1970 to 2006, poverty fell by 86% in South Asia, 73% in Latin America, 39% in the Middle East, and 20% in Africa. Barring a catastrophe, there will never be more than a billion people in poverty in the future history of the world. Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006. Although world population has increased by about 80%, the number of people below the $1 line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006.http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/4508
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