Millions Stand Against Poverty in 24-Hour Global Rally
UNITED NATIONS - Anti-poverty activists Wednesday organized thousands of meetings and demonstrations across the world to highlight the plight of the downtrodden and the poor.
Organizers said about 39 million people joined the international anti-poverty campaign during the 24-hour period, setting a new Guinness World Record for participation in mass rallies against poverty.
People participated in more than 6,000 rallies in 110 countries in support of the campaign called “Stand Up and Speak Out.” This year, the event coincided with the 20th International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
From workers to peasants to students, those who joined the global campaign against poverty urged governments to fulfill their commitments on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
The MDGs include a 50-percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three quarters; the promotion of gender equality; and the reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases.
“Every day 50,000 people die needlessly as a result of extreme poverty,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in a statement, noting that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider.
Like demonstrators across the world, Ban took world leaders to task for the slow progress towards achieving the MDGs. “(The) record is mixed,” he said. “Many countries are still off track.”
UN experts on development say, worldwide, almost 1 billion people are still living on less than a dollar a day and some 72 million children are not in school.
In Ban’s view, poverty can be eradicated only if governments of both developed and developing countries live up to their promises. He urged poor countries to spend more on health and education and, in the same breath, appealed to wealthy ones to increase the level of their official funding for development.
For his part, UN General Assembly President Srgjian Kerim noted that more than anywhere in the world, it was in sub-Saharan Africa where governments were failing to achieve the MDGs. Kerim said that, as this year marks the midpoint to the goals’ deadline, the world community must recommit its efforts to eradicate poverty.
The president said he would use the current General Assembly session to “build consensus” for urgent actions to achieve the MDGs.
Last year, 23.5 million people took part in the mass rallies to support the MDGs; 3.6 million in Africa; 19 million in Asia; 55,000 in Latin America; 520,000 in the Middle East; and 900,000 in Europe.
“By standing up last year, millions around the world demonstrated their frustration with the lack of real progress in poverty eradication,” said Salil Shetty of the United Nations Millennium Campaign before the event. “This year, millions more are joining this growing global movement of people who refuse to stay silent in the face of poverty or broken promises to end it.”
For this event, the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) and the UN Millennium Campaign worked with large numbers of national and local partners — from schools and universities to local community groups and women’s groups, choirs, and sporting clubs to faith groups, trade unions, and corporations.
The events planned were meant to be entertaining and engaging, while making a strong impression on national and regional politicians and governments, as well as state and global institutions. Millions of people also joined the campaign in cyber space, posting blogs, wikis, videos, and pictures on various online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo.
In Italy, Microsoft created a dedicated micro-site for the action, and in many poor countries — especially in Africa — mobile phone technology enabled groups to pre-register their activities online view videos of “Stand Ups” in other countries.
In Rwanda youth groups organized a “Stand Up” soccer tournament with 20 primary schools. A youth network in Ghana appointed “Stand Up” ambassadors to lead events all over the country.
In Bangladesh an umbrella movement of youth groups mobilized 10,000 young people to block a busy crossroads with a human chain, and in India, a local organization planned a march of 20,000 Dalits (also known as “untouchables”), focusing on land rights and the achievement of the MDGs for Dalits in the State of Madhya Pradesh.
Similar events also took place all over Europe and North and South America. In Germany the Euro 2008 Qualifier soccer game against the Czech Republic saw fans starting the match with a massive “Stand Up” moment. In The Hague the national anti-poverty campaign displayed 200 life-size avatars representing members of the public from across The Netherlands.
In London trade union representatives, students, and the UN Deputy Secretary-General used a white band — the symbol of the global anti-poverty campaign — to call for renewed commitments on more and better aid, debt cancellation, trade justice, gender equality and public accountability.
Religious leaders in many parts of the world also joined in.
During the campaign, many activists highlighted the link between gender inequalities and poverty because women constitute the majority of the world’s poor, largely as a result of their unequal opportunities and access to resources, discriminatory laws, and unequal distribution of household resources.
© 2007 One World
It seems that Americans more than any other group on the planet are conditioned to be complacent about global poverty and hunger. Have heard people who thought of themselves as ‘progressives’ say that there’s too many people on earth, therefore it’s ok to let some starve. Guess they’d see it differently if they happened to be born into abject poverty in a forgetten part of the world, OR if they grasped the fact that we’re all interconnected. Poverty and hunger will be eradicated from the face of the Earth, that will lead to a peace unlike aught imagined.
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“The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world on the day of that great revolution.” Federico Garcia Lorca
“Without sharing there can be no justice;
without justice there can be no peace;
without peace there can be no future.”
The World Teacher
“A world of glaring inequality is never going to be a fully safe world. For millions of people, the threat of terrorism, or of weapons of mass destruction, is remote compared to the daily threat of poverty, hunger, unsafe water, environmental degradation and disease. We have come to a decisive moment in history.” Kofi Annan
“A human being is part of the whole, called by us Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein
http://www.ONE.org
Well, at least it all averages out well. Our country worries about the rich, and the rest of the world worries about the poor! Of course, Bush is so out of it he doesn`t know what is going on anyplace or much less care, and is so busy vetoing the poor kids insurance benefit. Everything is Beautiful!
Max, I don’t think those who say there’s too many on the planet want people to starve. In a way it is logical to believe that if there were less of us here the earth’s resources would be less strained. It is a conciousness of lack vs prosperity. Rich or poor == this way of looking at ourselves and our environment keeps us stuck in this hard place. The fact that there is more than enough for everyone, which is reflected in the ONE campaign and all the quotes you listed, is a notion we must collectively embrace.
It’s sobering to realize that it took all of history up to about 1850 for the world to get 1 billion people, then to over 6 billion now. Most of us can’t begin to fathom the needs that exist, and I’m grateful for the example being set by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as to where resources can be sent by folks who have played and won bigtime the game of business.
Despite their lack of natural resources, direct democracy has given the Swiss the highest per capita income in the world. Representative democracy is for the super-rich. Direct democracy is for everyone else.
During the 1970’s a concept called Zero Population Growth (ZPG) was popular. Big business realized that sucessful ZPG would solve many problems but would seriously erode profits. By 1980 people would look at you as though you had grown an extra nose and a couple of extra eyes if you mentioned ZPG.
Population growth is at the heart of the world’s most pressing problems, including climate change. Continued denial of that fact will prevent those problems from being solved but will continue to improve the bottom line of big business.
I disagree, andersdl. There is more than enough for everyone. We have to share and multinational corporations have to stop the way they do business. It is a matter of operating differently in the world. I can accept that population may be part of the equation, but the more serious problem is how we think and act towards the earth and each other.
What do Brazil, Mexico, Russia and the USA have in common?
A rapidly expanding billionaire class.
Rampant poverty.
And a distressed middle class.
That’s the take of Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston in a soon to be released book–Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill) (Portfolio, December 2007).
In it, Johnston seeks to afflict the comfortable top one tenth of one percent of Americans–the 300,000 men, women and children who last year made more money than the bottom 150 million Americans.
Yes, we all have the right to vote and change this unbalanced state of affairs.
But political power in the United States is exercised by this narrow, rich segment of the population.
Much of the wealth transfer upstairs has come at the hands of corporate welfare artists who have shifted billions from the middle class to the billionaire class.
Some politician could take the central political issue of Free Lunch–wealth inequality–and run on it to the White House in 2008.
But the current crop of corporate candidates will likely ignore it so as to not offend the funding class.
While Johnston focuses on the perfectly legal schemes that bloat the richest of the richest at the expense of the rest of us, much of the thievery he documents is the result of pure un-prosecuted or under-prosecuted corporate criminality.
“One of the new rules has been to make sure there are far too few cops on the beat on Wall Street to even write down all the legitimate complaints, much less pursue more than a handful of evildoers,” Johnston writes.
“More importantly, the actions of Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers and the others were just part of a massive shift in practices and policies that continue. The Wall Street scandals are not over. The conduct they reveled is just becoming institutionalized.”
“Thousands of executives at hundreds of companies took money from shareholders through deliberate actions that distinguish them from bandits only because they wielded pens instead of pistols,” Johnston writes. “The techniques are subtler and less overtly violent, but the results are worse, for they undermine the legitimacy of society in ways that street bandits do not. The rules allow this.” —- Russell Mokhiber
Meg @ 4:32pm said:
“I disagree, andersdl. There is more than enough for everyone…”
~ which I’m sure will remind many of us here of Ghandi’s insight: *There is enough for everyone’s need, but not for eveeryone’s greed.”
We have already paid the price to end poverty in the United States.
What is the purpose of the income tax, if it isn’t to be used for the “common good.”
Enough taxes are taken each year, for the government to be able to provide for the “common good,” i.e., food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare for all those residing in the country.
Everyone can be given the “basic” social services and have a living standard raised to a life sustaining level.
If tax revenues were used for the “common good,” there would be no hungry, and no poor in America.
The needed social services currently exist; i.e., Food Stamps, Section-8 Housing, Medicare, and Social Security.
These services can be expanded to include all individuals applying for assistance.
We are actually “one day” from eliminating poverty.
For this to happen, all that the U.S. President has to do, is to sign an Executive Order that will expand these services to provide all the basic necessities of life for all people residing in the United States, and it could be done in just, one day.
Have you noticed the money that is wasted? Have you noticed the hugh defense budget? Have you noticed that with Trillions of dollars spent on war, taxes haven’t been raised.
The U.S. is spending out of fear, instead out of love, for it’s citizens.
A plan for ending poverty exists, and can be found at WWUNITED.ORG (The Worldwide United Foundation).
Nothing else is working. I invite you to go to WWUNITED.ORG and sign the Declaration.
Max, Meg, I agree with you both on the notion of population. Not only does the bulk of food production go to feed livestock (for Western/OECD consumption), but tonnes of grains, milk and other foodstuffs are “destroyed” to maintain their international price.
It appears, then, that we have too much food. Our economic structure is such that, it is not in any agribusiness’ interest to feed the world. It’s simple economics, really. Price is determined by demand. Suppress the supply of food, such that people starve (demand) and the price of food remains high enough for agribusiness to WANT to engage in the market.
Is “over-”population a problem? In this economic structure it is. It is a problem because the food produced by developing countries are luxury goods (coffee, sugar, spices, etc.). They do not feed the populations that grow the food. More and more land is devoted to market production rather than subsistence. This is not a problem of over-population, but one of capitalism.
I have witnessed the environmental degredation that comes with such production. In St. Lucia, W.I., my family were banana farmers. They devoted acres to its production as did much of the island. (luckily, my family also produced for subsistence). The bananas went to European/British markets. But their environmental impact is felt to this day. The short stalks and roots of the plant, grown in the hilly, volcanic soil leads to erosion.
World poverty is an outcome of the “dominator” value that overrides every system of the world and enables 37% of the financial wealth of US to be owned by 1% of the population while the BOTTOM 90% own only 28%. We accept this as ‘just the way it is’ in our system–but it doesn’t have to be this way at all.
Riane Eisler in her book, Real Wealth of Nations…creating a caring economics, pulls together a whole system picture and shows how we can change this. There are other options
www.realwealtheconomy.com www.partnershipway.org
Poverty will end when profit ends. When the graceless accumulation of things and the gluttony is recognized by the participants. We as a nation have been taught to consume. That is our purpose. Our soul purpose in the world crime against life. Most of what we buy is compulsive, disposable junk. The good news is that most of those who create want out of their blind greed are eating themselves to death. Also part of the set up. Slow economically profitable death. Greed supports a multitude of industries, insurance, pharmaceuticals, medical, research, and the list goes on into just about every back door of capitalism. If one follows the trail there is little in our society that is not based on insatiable want.
The reason that Americans don’t respond is because they haven’t figured out yet that they are the ones trapped in the most obscene poverty ever contrived. Along a 3 mile stretch of grotesquely ugly, strip malls I counted over 50 places to eat. Not one of them serving anything clean or healthy.
Do you trust what you see? I trust that more than the clap trap of the experts paid by agenda funds to slant statistics, lie, or withhold information.
What I see going into these garbage slues are fat people dying of malnutrition. Although this reference will seem radical to many and impossible for most to comprehend because of the brainwashing and propaganda that has been part of our lives. For some it may be of value. Follow the thread… http://www.shipatsea.com/_Media/david_wolfe-the_sunfood_die.pdf.
When we stop thinking that what we have is what everyone else has to have, we will begin to be on our way towards eliminating poverty. When we withdraw from the marketplace and simplify our lives, we will move closer to being human beings. When we mature out of our dependence on toys, and instant gratification, we will free ourselves. We will free the pathetic money crippled wealthy from their sick power over the world. We will free others to find their own joy, in their own culture, by their own strengths.
We don’t have the right to take a cultures dignity by imposing our disease on them. A simple life is not poverty until you impair it’s possibilities with corruptive structures. America has become a malignancy for gain. A parasite. The world bank is specifically set up to give loans to enslave the poor in debt. Their land will be stolen as the banks liberated the farms from the farmers to build agribusiness. The Missionaries give generously to extort souls away from their traditional beliefs. Of course if that doesn’t work then there is always the plague of war and genocide to prove one god better than another.
I have lived poor. Not by choice. Guess what? I didn’t need even one tenth of what I thought I did. I was healthier, I was happier! My life started to have more meaning. Wow!
The problem is too many people. The economy is more automated and people will suffer because of.
“When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
Poverty kills more people annually than any known disease.
I write here not to try to convince or oppose anyone but to encourage those of us who perceive the injustices of the world to try to organize ourselves at the same level as those who are in a position to eradicate poverty but who do not have the will to do so. With organization our thoughts have a greater chance of becoming a practical force and as difficult as it seems, the most difficult journey start with a single step. Join a group of like-minded people in your area or start one, if none exists.
Kill the poor. A pandemic is the only solution. Poverty brings misery, disease, and an early death, yet poor people keep having kids. What “love” it is to doom another generation.
The basic fact is that humanity is selfish, stupid, and spiteful. Men & women have children out of mindless instinct, not compassion for their children. Men “love” women for their asses and women “love” men for their assets. Child planning is at best a selfish retirement scheme to raise captive caregivers.
The whining moralists would commit every evil if only they had a chance to. Young women are bitchy while they are beautiful but transform themselves into “sweet” old ladies when affected kindness serves them. “Have mercy!” is the cry of the weak, but when they gain power they become merciless. So damn the poor, the only compassionate thing to do is to kill them all off so they stop breeding more miserable generations.
anomal. Not so. More good persons than bad.
‘Poor’ is not a disease; it is a condition, and, a change of circumstance will cure that condition.
Maybe it is anomie.
I also agree that there are too many people. Still, there is a 10% per capita excess of food in the world. When people everywhere have plenty of food (and condoms), and assurances that they’ll be taken care of when they get old, they will stop having so many children.
A major cause (as i understand it) of excess births is the lack of social security in empoverished nations. Couples will give birth up to a dozen times hoping that one or two will survive, stay in the area, and care for them (the parents) when they’re too old to care for themselfs.
As people involved in poverty/hunger eradication work know, social scientists have observed that as the standard of living increases in undeveloped parts of the world, the birthrate decreases.
Food, social security, birth control, & education should be (and will be) freely available for everyone. When we get that set up, then we will see the population decrease. People will be informed that the earth eco-system is already stressed to the max, that it is no longer necessary for them to have huge families, and such will be discouraged.
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“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
This has been another great Discussion.
so many great ideas generated from the article on the world poverty movement.
Oh the Swiss do have a parliamentary or representative government (half direct) with 3 different councils…Ireland and Denmark are actually better living standard average if you consider other stuff but check it out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland.
I appreciate, Anomal, your boldness about “kill the Poor”…… aren’t you a registered Republican?
At least Barbara would have them eat cake first…
About the idea that the poor have too many kids….. “When you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose”.
Keep the light,
Jim
Thanks Max, for the inspirational quotes. If only we could convince the masses that we have the answer in the palm of our hand. If only all the so-called Christians of the world (especially in the U.S.) would really follow the teachings of Christ, the world could be fed many times over and there will be “the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known.” Will it happen? Not in my lifetime.
Great comments!
Meg & UN-Common, et al:
There’s enough bad food for everyone, but communities need to be eating what is natural to their geographical areas and what they can grow locally. Frankenfoods have made extinct thousands of varieties of vegetables that people here in America alone used to eat.
Read Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” - highly recommend!
I hate to be cynical about global poverty, and I certainly don’t wish to diminish the overwhelmingly positive aspects of ending poverty. But, when the multitudes stop clamoring for their next meal, are free to spend their time seeking yet better lives for themselves, and have a taste of what else there is to be had, there’s going to be massive social upheaval, e.g. Sudan and Nigeria. (Don’t debate me; see Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.) Beware of unintended consequences.
Well, now that they know the problem, what is their solution?
Here is the solution and it will work.
http://wwunited.org
Sign up and be counted.