How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World

[Jcrowley]

Published on Friday, February 16, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World
By Michael Parenti

There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?

Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs. The U.S. government has subsidized this flight of capital by granting corporations tax concessions on their overseas investments, and even paying some of their relocation expenses---much to the outrage of labor unions here at home who see their jobs evaporating.

The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.

By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.

http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0216-30.htm

[baldguy]

1. Why should a corp pay you $15-20/hour

When they can pay someone in India $3-5/hour?

[blues90]

2. Sounds just like what's happening in the USofA

A bit different but we are sending our jobs away and selling off americas highways and businesses . We also are ending up a poverty country with corporate box stores and fast food spread out everywhere . No manufacturing jobs left in most states and unions dying off .

And a great min wage of $5 per hour at best hope $10 per hour and no health care .