On more than one occasion over recent months I’ve heard or read something actually defending inequality. After a lifetime of hearing about the idea of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, I was hearing educated people saying inequality is what keeps the system going - a motive force propelling our society to ever new heights. At first, I found it hard to believe what I was hearing. Then, I thought perversely, if a little inequity is good for us, a lot of it must be better. After all, that seems to be the operating principle of the people currently in power in the nation’s capital. They keep pushing in that direction.
Despite repeated promises to eradicate hunger, the number of people going hungry continues to grow – now more than 852 million – with a child dying every five seconds from malnutrition and related diseases, an independent United Nations expert said today.
In a world of paradox and plenty, 852 million people are starving while one billion people are overweight, with 300 million of them considered medically obese.
Since hunger and famine are still widespread in parts of Africa and Asia, the international community is in violation of the right to food as a basic universal human right, according to a new study released by the United Nations.
On September 19, 2006, the global civil society coalition, Social Watch, launched its annual Report “Impossible Architecture” in the city-state of Singapore. This report was launched in the same location and at the same time that the World Bank-IMF held their Board of Governors annual meeting. However, the conclusions of the Social Watch report were dramatically different from those being reached within the WB-IMF conference halls.
’17,107 farmers in India committed suicide in 2003. Many of them were facing in surmountable obstacles in the 15 years after India opened its agriculture to global competition.’[1]
We can thank moronic editors, who know the hotsie-totsiest places to eat but not the important things of life that ought to go into their publications, for list journalism. To call this genre low-grade filler is to overpraise it. But there are exceptions, and the most valuable is the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the United States.
