"What natural disasters reveal about our planet and its destiny."
*Say, I bet you could do a great Fox News series on the suffering of rich guys in massive disasters. Texas is a great home of "neoliberalism" and it's so searingly hot here in Austin that people are swooning between their air-conditioned cars and their air-conditioned malls. They're also praying for rain and staging rain-dances, which is a very Haitian-style response to the factual problem of burning Texan oil in the atmosphere.
*Obviously a recital of the factually obvious doesn't help much in the current social climate, but I still perk up markedly when I hear some of it, even in UTNE READER.
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Dispatches-From-The-Apocalypse-Junot-Diaz.aspx
(...)
"We are in the age of neoliberal economic integration, of globalization, the magic process that was to deliver the world’s poor out of misery and bring untold prosperity to the rest of us. Globalization, of course, did nothing of the sort. (((Well, unless you were Brazilian, Chinese or Indian, which, come to think of it, is a pretty good argument.)))
"Although the Big G was supposed to lift all boats, even a cursory glance at the stats shows that the swell of globalization has had a bad habit of favoring the yachts over rafts by a whole lot. The World Bank reports that in 1960 the per capita GDP of the 20 richest countries was 18 times greater than that of the 20 poorest. By 1995 that number had reached 37.
"In this current era of neoliberal madness, sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, “the least developed countries lag more and more behind and within countries the number of the poor is growing; on the other side of the split screen is the explosive growth of wealth of the hyper-rich.” It would be one thing if the rich were getting richer because they are just that much more awesome than we are, but the numbers suggest that the rich may be getting richer in part by squeezing the poor and, increasingly, the middle class.
"This is a worldwide phenomenon. It is happening at the bottom of the market—in Haiti, for example, where per capita GDP dropped from around $2,100 in 1980 to $1,045 in 2009 (2005 U.S. dollars)—and at the top. In the United States, the poorest have gained much less than the wealthy: Between 1993 and 2008, the top 1 percent captured 52 percent of total income growth.
"The world’s goodies are basically getting gobbled up by a tiny group of gluttons while the rest of us—by which I mean billions of people—are being deprived of even the crumbs’ crumbs. And yet in spite of these stark disparities, the economic powers-that-be continue to insist that what the world needs more of is—wait for it—economic freedom and market-friendly policies, which is to say more inequality!
"Pieterse describes our economic moment best:
"Overall discrepancies in income and wealth are now vast to the point of being grotesque. The discrepancies in livelihoods across the world are so large that they are without historical precedent and without conceivable justification—economic, moral, or otherwise.
"This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being reproletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, when entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite-alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die..."
Read more: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Dispatches-From-The-Apocalypse-Junot-Diaz.aspx?page=4#ixzz1VtftGfJi
