Apparently the world’s poor suffer when there is rapid economic growth.
A system like the economic growth model we know today creates trillions of dollars of super profits for corporations while condemning billions of people to poverty. Poverty is not, as Sachs suggests, an initial state of human progress from which to escape. It is a final state people fall into when one-sided development destroys the ecological and social systems that have maintained the life, health and sustenance of people and the planet for ages. The reality is that people do not die for lack of income. They die for lack of access to the wealth of the commons.
And now it is calamitous to the world’s poor when economic growth seems to be slowing down.
The global financial crisis could become “a human and development calamity” for many poor countries, the World Bank said, urging donor nations to speed delivery of money they have pledged and consider giving more.Developing countries, its main constituency, face “especially serious consequences with the crisis driving more than 50 million people into extreme poverty, particularly women and children,” the bank said Sunday
I love reading these things and then hearing the looters/fascists come up with all manner of excuses about how these two positions are in fact reconcilable.
Another good insight, Prof. Rizzo! 😉
I am continually dismayed by people who see ‘corporations’ as some kind of evil entity. Of course a corporation is, I think, really just a fictional entity, a contractual arrangement between numerous parties.