Monday, March 05, 2007

Mystery: How Wealth Creates Poverty in the World

I read this article and made it a bit simple to understand for me of course. The links are there if you want to read the article.
Over the last half century Western Cooperations have invested heavily in Third World Countries. They invest on rich natural resorces. These countries do not have taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs due to the bullying of the rich countries. And the labour is cheap.
EG.
"In Haiti, for instance, workers are paid 11 cents an hour by corporate giants such as Disney, Wal-Mart, and J.C. Penny. The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.
The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States."


The cheap local labour is made by these Cooperations like this.
Western Governments give tax cuts to these Cooperations, to move out to the third world and even pay for the relocation. The Cooperations take the best land in these countries to cultivate monoculture crops, which need lots of pesticides. Now that leaves less and less land for the natives, to grow their organic crops. This displaces the local population from their lands and drive them to the urban slums, where they work for lower than the lowest wage of the land.
Western aid are intended to make it easy for the cooperation to operate by subsidizing the construction of the infrastructure of the countries eg ports, highways, and refineries.
The aid given has strings attached. Western products, which are susidised by the donar countries, have to be sold undermining local produce. These countries have to give preferences for the Western cooperations in investment, again taking the consumption away from the local produce.
Then again the aid, does not go to the local population; as much as 90% is taken by the corrupt officials from the presidents to the coulie.
In 1944 The World Bank (WB) International Monetary Fund (IMF), was created assist all nations in their developement. More money, the country contribute to these organisations more voting power it has. So starting from US then Germany, Japan, France and UK becomes the big guns in both organisations. The operations are done by selected bankers and ministry staff from rich countries, secrectly.
Say a country borrows money from WB and get into difficulties paying the money back; as it happens so often. Then it has to borrow money from IMF, to pay back the original money owed to the WB.
Now the IMF has something called SAP, Structural Adjustment Program. That means the country has to privatise the state owned infrasructure eg utilities, bus and railroads, mines etc, and sell them at a very low cost. Also grant tax breaks to western cooperations, reduce wages of workers, and make no attempt to stop foreign imports and takeovers.
Then the country has to let the forests to be cleared and let strip mining done, without due regard, to environmental catastrophesies. The subsidies for the health, education, transportation and food has to be cut, to make more money for the debt payment. Grow cash crops for exports taking it away from local consumption.
Now we have the Third World countries having their real wages reduced, national debt increased, environment destroyed making more warring factions in the country and driving people to escape to rich countries as refugees.
More of this can be found in:http://www.ichblog.eu/index.php?option=com_seyret&task=videodirectlink&id=375

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