Social Justice

[cadfael]

Last night at my Toastmasters Club one of the speakers promised to give us seven numbers that we would be able to remember, not only until today, but for a lifetime.

The numbers were:

18,800
4
13
½
2
1.3 billion
1

Their explanation follows:

$18,800 is the poverty level. Anyone earning less that that in the United States, with a family of four is living in poverty, and each of the family members must survive on $13 per day.

One half of the world's population earns less than $2 per day. 1.3 billion people on this planet must survive on about $1 per day.

Where do we begin?

Comments

[krkhst.livejournal.com]

Capitalism is not the answer for sure - some folks talk about needing to devolop and get jobs into these countries. Capitalism is finite, it has a wall, it needs poor people to produce goods cheaply to continue to make profit and expand. Corporations do not have the good of others in mind. When you can, a bite of the elephant could be living as sustainably as possible with goods produced locally and from small businesses....

[andronikos.livejournal.com]

"living as sustainably as possible with goods produced locally and from small businesses", still sounds like capitalism to me. Responsible capitalism, but capitalism none the less.

[krkhst.livejournal.com]

True, but it is as far from capitalism as I can get in the world today since I don't have the money to buy a farm and raise my own food/produce my own clothes/etc. Some areas of the world, before the idea of "helping the poor" really kicked off after WWII did in fact have people with no running water, no fancy clothes, no electricity, and so forth. But they could feed their children. Now, in so many of these countries people are being kicked off their land to build dams for electricity, put in some corporate farm or the like and then they really are suffering. You loan me the money to get started, and I'll go off the grid...