STWR - Share The World's Resources

To speak of the laws of prudence to the house less wanderer To listen to the hungry ravens cry in the wintry season. It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity: Thus could I sing & thus rejoice, but it is not so with me!

William Blake Enion's Second Lament

The eradication of extreme poverty in the world is one of the half-dozen or so major challenges facing mankind today. Some of the others are (not necessarily in that order): Nuclear weapons and their proliferation; the environmental deterioration of the planet (due to pollution); (1 and the various forms of violent conflict and their terrible consequences (wars, civil wars, genocides, ethnic cleansing, the refugee problem and, last but not least, international terrorism. (2 Extreme poverty (and its eradication) is a global problem in two essential senses. Firstly, in the geographical sense. It exists all over the world, including in the rich countries. (3 In the United States, for example, 13 per cent of the population live under the poverty line -- admittedly, here it is 'ordinary' poverty we are dealing with, which is far less catastrophic than 'extreme' poverty, defined by some international organisations as having less than a dollar a day to survive.

Poor women are getting pregnant unintentionally at considerably higher rates now than in the mid-1990s, and they are giving birth to many more unplanned children and having more abortions.

To get a good sense of where US policy is heading, one need only read the front page of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal - painful as that may be to do.

I skip the Times but do read the Journal daily because of the audience it reaches - high level people in business and government who want real information to guide them in their work. So despite the Journal being a voice for US business and imperialism, knowing how to read it and doing it carefully yields useful information and clues about what future US policy is likely to be.

The Wall Street Journal Signals Evo Morales Is Now A US Target

The May 2 Journal was a good example as they had a feature front page story headlined "Bolivia Seizes Natural-Gas Fields In a Show of Energy Nationalism." That alone signals a call to arms that's backed up strongly in the copy that follows.

The Journal began its heated rhetoric claiming Evo Morales has been "emboldened by Hugo Chavez's moves against private oil companies" and on May 1 (symbolically on May Day celebrating working people around the world including in the US in a big way for the first time) nationalized the country's largest natural gas field, San Alberto, and ordered the army to "take control of it and the country's other fields." It went on to explain that it ordered foreign oil companies to relinquish control of the fields, accept "much tougher operating terms or leave the country."

Chomsky's New Book

Noam Chomsky hardly needs an introduction. Throughout his lifetime as an internationally esteemed academic, scholar and activist he's the rarest of individuals I know. He's world renown twice over - in his chosen field of linguistics where he's considered the father of modern linguistics and as a leading voice for equity, justice and peace for over four decades. Although the dominant US corporate media religiously ignore him (especially on air), the New York Times Review of Books said of him a generation ago that "judged in terms of the power, range, novelty and influence of his thought, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most important intellectual alive today." He still is, and someone should inform the Times he's also still alive, but you'd never know it from the silence today from "the newspaper of record" and the rest of the corporate media as well.

The Theme and Issues Covered in the Book

In his latest book, Failed States, Chomsky addresses three issues he says everyone should rank among their highest ones: "the threat of nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's only superpower is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of (causing) these catastrophes." He also raises a fourth issue: "the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for fear....that the 'American system'....is in real trouble....(and) heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values (of) equality, liberty and meaningful democracy."

Ask professor Pangloss of the University of Chicago what we ought to do about capital gains or the inheritance tax or unions, and he will dazzle you with equations supposedly demonstrating that the political outcomes sought by the wealthiest Americans are also best for society as a whole.

That, at any rate, is the current economic orthodoxy. How well does it reflect reality?

Nearly 50 years ago, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith published The Affluent Society, in which he predicted that an increasingly wealthy America was in danger of producing "private wealth and public squalor." A few years later, Galbraith advised Presidents Kennedy and Johnson as they extended the post-New Deal state in ways that lessened the hardships of poverty for millions of Americans.

The America Galbraith lived to see - he died last week at the age of 97 - became an immensely rich nation. In real terms, the gross domestic product is now five times larger than when The Affluent Society appeared, which means that, when one accounts for population growth, the average American is nearly three times wealthier.

Amid all the consultant-packaged rhetoric about America being the "greatest democracy in the world," it often seems impossible to figure out exactly who controls our government. But every now and then, the public gets a fleeting glimpse into who is really running the show.

The specter of Anglo-American market capitalism dominated France's student unrest in March and April, and motivated popular rejection in France a year ago of the proposed new European Union constitution.

The election that has just given Italy a fragile center- left coalition, and recent conflict in German industry, involved the same question: how to remodel national economies, or whether to remodel them at all.

Advocates of the new model capitalism, and the globalization project that goes with it, like to present it as an expression of historical necessity, rooted in classical economics and embodying irrefutable laws. It is progress itself, they say. Those who do not conform to the rules of modern market capitalism, and do not offer the human sacrifices of lost employment and diminished living standards that the market demands, will fall by the wayside of history.

This is simply untrue, although most of those who say it undoubtedly believe it.