RICHS  AND  POORS

      When we look at the world, nine months after the Olympic Games in Atlanta, we might think first of the signs of unity. Television viewers all over the world watched the games. We were told that more than three billion viewers, more than half the world's population were watching the opening ceremony. The games also had many reminders of the extraordinary colapse of communism in Central Europe and other parts of the world, except China and Cuba.

     However, even as we celebrate global communication and wider freedoms, we have to face global poverty and global environmental problems and global unemployment.

     Worldwide Unemployment is now at the highest level since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Super sophisticated computers, with chips running incredible speeds, operating systems at the state of the art, robots and other cutting-edge technologies are fast replacing human beings in virtually every sector and industry.

     The world is fast polarizing into two classes.  One is an elite skilled in the new information technologies who control and manage the high-tech global economy. The other class is made up of the growing numbers of permanently displaced workers, women and men- specially in undevelopment countries- who have a few prospects and little hope of meaningful employment in an increasingly automated and robotized world.

     The latest United Nations Human Development Report shows that the total wealth of the world's 358 billionaires- My lovely friend Bill Gates (Chairman of Microsoft ) is $ 26 billions rich, according the latest New York Stock Market, and makes 30 million dollars a day- equals the combined incomes of the poorest 45 per cent of the world's population- 2.3 billion people.

     The total economic wealth of the world (global GDP) is $ 23 trillion, of which only 5 trillion, or 22 percent is accounted for by developing countries, even though they have nearly 80 per cent of the world's population.....And it's getting worse.

     Between 1960 and 1961 the richest 20 per cent of the world's population increased its share of total global wealth from 70 per cent to 85 per cent, while the poorest 20 per cent saw its global share fall from 2.3 per cent to 1.4 per cent.

     Eighty-nine countries are worse off than they were 10 years ago (Perú is one of them). In 19 countries, per capita income is below the 1960 level.

     In fact, there is a social and environmental disintegration in nearly every country of the world, David C. Korten notes in his important new book (it's a must to read it), " When Corporations Rule the World " . This disintegration, he writes, "... is revealed by the rise of poverty, unemployment, inequality, violent crime, failing families, and environmental degradation..."

     The breakdown of the social fabric that sustains human community and of the ecosystem's regenerative capacities is being accelerated by the continued quest for economic growth as the organizing principle of public policy. Yet, despite the signs of breakdown, " an active propaganda machine controlled by the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, " Korten notes.

     We are told that we will be less distressed if there is even less goverment control of market excesses. Economic globalization is promoted as both historically inevitable and a boon to the human species.

     We are, in fact, being fed a steady diet of myths that are propagated " to justify profligate greed and mask the extent to which the global transformation of human institutions is a consequence of the sophisticated, well-funded and intentional interventions of a small elite whose money enables them to live in a world of illusion apart from the rest of  humanity ," as Korten put it.

...Think.

_ : . _ : . _ : . _ : . _ : . _ : . _ : . _ : .

           INDEX                                 MOTHER TERESA