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By: Gavin Chait on 09 June 2007
As regards your question: "if capitalism is so great ... why do 20% of the world live in absolute poverty?"
The US has 95% employment and very limited amounts of poverty with virtually no starvation. So do all democratic and free-market states. The only countries where the starving exceed the well-off are disaster zones like Zimbabwe, Somalia or the Sudan. These are not countries that many, perhaps even yourself, would consider to have a surplus of free-market capitalism or representative democracy. Although they certainly do have an abundance of centralised brutality and authority.
I remember the story of the protester in Genoa. Given the number of police attacked and severely injured it is somewhat surprising that only one protester got killed. Imagine such a protest taking place in Zimbabwe? Do you think Mugabe's police would be as generous?
And a strike is no more effective than a war. Sooner or later an agreement requires dialogue.
Any example you care to name, where untrammelled brutality has been exercised in the name of profit (most recently at a brickworks in China) falls within countries that have little respect for individual rights, democracy or free-market economics.
It isn't free-market capitalism that is the problem. It is the lack of more fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, freedom of association, equality before the law, respect for minorities, and consensual rule by the majority.
The countries with the least respect for human rights also host the 20% of the world's population living in absolute poverty.
It may be nice to blame the US or UK for these problems, but how? North Korea? Myanmar? Zimbabwe? Are the leaders who create these hell-holes not responsible for their own actions? How on earth do you lay responsibility for these disasters at the feet of leaders of companies that sell cars, cell phones and microwave ovens?
I was at a biofuels conference late last year where a stunned British executive, having recently travelled through Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola, declared that there is more agricultural land in these three countries than is currently under plough in the whole of the rest of the world. "You could be the Middle East of biofuels," he said in awe. None of that land is being farmed since all three countries suffer from neglect and brutality. In Mozambique and Angola most of that land is still covered in landmines.
Protesting about this isn't going to amount to much. Western firms would love to invest but they can't. Politics keeps them out.
Perhaps you should reconsider your disregard for parliament.
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