The Poverty Creation System

There is this great myth that poverty is just a natural part of some universal moral order. But poverty is man-made. It is created. This isn't to suggest that somewhere a small cabal plots to cause immeasurable misery just because they can. This isn't a conspiracy theory. It happens in business boardrooms and at political conferences, where people create rules and execute strategies to “maximise self-interest” as economists like to say, by extracting wealth from others. It is driven by their need to acquire profit or market advantage while ignoring the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people. What drives capitalism is the profit motive, by exploiting people and by exploiting the environment.

Wilful ignorance as any legal scholar will tell you, is no defence under the law. It's about time we applied the same standard to our rulers and indicted the guilty, such as the richest 0.001% of the world who control 30% of the financial wealth or the wealthiest 0.1% that control about 81%.

Over the centuries, global inequality has steadily increased. We know this because whilst ratios of absolute poverty have been decreasing over the last two centuries, the standard measure of inequality - the Gini coefficient - has risen from 43.0 in 1820 to 70.7 in 2002. (A score of 0 means everyone has exactly the same amount and 100 means one person controls everything.)

Somewhere between $21 and $32 trillion - or 10% - 15% of all privately held wealth - is hidden behind the great walls of secrecy. Of the 100 largest companies on the London Stock Exchange, 98 routinely use tax havens. Over half of all global trade flows between and within them so that profits can be siphoned off.

Capitalism is like a parasite, it is attached to the body of its host and drains its lifeblood that perpetuates global inequality and poverty. It uses the creativity of its other leeches, the lawyers, the accountants and the bankers to protect the few at the expense of the majority of the world's people.

Socialists believe change is possible only if the workers of the world demand change and condemn capitialism to posterity.