Mickey Z

Cool Observer

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Monday, July 31, 2006

Poorgasm

*Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.

*The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined.

*Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.

*Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.

*51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.

*The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation.

*The poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money.

*20% of the population in the developed nations, consume 86% of the world’s goods.

Read more here...

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Joe Bageant sez: “American progressives need to wake up to the fact that they are just as big a part of the world’s problems as the Republicans, so long as they insist on living the American lifestyle. As long as they continue to thoughtlessly consume the world as if it were their birthright. All talk and no walk. Buying organic toilet paper and voting for evasive Democratic hacks just isn’t going to cut it, guys ... Here is what I consider the most important philosophical question anyone can ever ask themselves: ‘What is the question to which my life is the answer?’”

Derrick Jensen sez: “You want to know why we don’t rebel? We still think we have something to lose. That’s what’s stopping us. As soon as we realize we have nothing left to lose we’ll be dangerous.”