Warning: Don’t watch The End of Poverty? (or read about it) if you want to preserve your contentment with your lifestyle and the web of structures—historic and current—that make it possible.

[Beth Portello]

SOJOURNERS MAGAZINE - April issue

Reviews
Poverty is No Accident
The End of Poverty? written and directed by Philippe Diaz. Cinema Libre Studio.
review by Kaitlin Barker

Warning: Don’t watch The End of Poverty? (or read about it) if you want to preserve your contentment with your lifestyle and the web of structures—historic and current—that make it possible. If the notion of the United States as empire—and poverty as the direct result of empire—is unpalatable, turn the page quickly. Even if ending poverty sounds like a good idea, don’t proceed unless dismantling our current global structures also sounds good—because that’s what it will take to end poverty, according to a new documentary released by Cinema Libre Studio.
The question mark in the film’s title suggests that poverty may very well not end if we don’t seriously confront the structural violence that divides the global community along wealth lines. Filmmaker Philippe Diaz’s tour of the voracious expansion of globalization and capitalism begins in 1492 and traverses continents and centuries, weaving a historical tapestry of the creation of poverty. “Our economic system is, and always has been, financed by the poor,” states narrator (and actor) Martin Sheen, as the film builds its indictment of colonizers, conquistadors, and the modern-day market empire.

Interviews with authors, economists, activists, politicians, and historians from all corners of the world disclose what history books tend to gloss over: Land and natural resources were stolen from indigenous people of the Southern Hemisphere and the wealth was transferred to the North, financing industrial revolutions and hooking those countries on an addiction that has lasted from colonialism to today. Land and resources still have not been returned to the people, and now, instead of empires shipping away silver and gold in full view, transnational corporations have privatized more common natural resources, such as sugar cane and water, and topped it off with a mountain of debt repayment and unjust trade and taxes.

REAL LIVES TELL the real story. In São Paulo state, Brazil, we meet Edinaldo, a sugar cane worker for a privatized landowner who makes the equivalent of $6.50 a day, but only if he collects his entire 40-bundle quota. If he feeds himself, there’s almost nothing left to send home to his family. Here’s Edinaldo’s frank summary of the situation: “Whoever gets land gets a home. Because these days, the poor who don’t have a place to live are the poor that beg. Got it?”

Joao Pedro Stedile, a leader of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, elaborates: “The natural resources from Brazil—and in fact from every country—should be used to solve the problems of nutrition of their own country, given that in Brazil we have 50 million people [lacking basic nutrition] every day.”

A Maasai community in Kisumu, Kenya, despairs over rotted maize crops and flooded homes, and one woman laments the proliferation of malaria, typhoid, and diarrhea in recent months. Why? She points down the road to an American industrial complex, run by Dominion Company of Oklahoma. In the name of development, their river was dammed and now vegetables from fields where the Masai’s crops once grew are shipped back to the U.S. Nothing for the locals but the aftermath of aerial spraying: diseased and dead children.

“It is actually the South that is financing the North, to the tune of about $200 billion a year,” says Susan George, author of Another World is Possible, If ... and a staunch critic of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Sub-Sa¬haran Africa, for example, is currently paying a staggering $25,000 a minute to foreign Nor¬thern creditors, according to her calculations.

Poverty is a disgrace to humanity, but it’s also no accident. It exists “because of the system we’ve created,” says activist John Perkins, a former economic “hit man” who knows a thing or two about the under-workings of economic foreign policy. “We can say, without a doubt, that this system is an absolute failure .… Less than 5 percent of the world’s population lives in the United States. We are consuming over 25 percent of the world’s resources and creating roughly 35 percent of its pollution. That’s a failure.”

The End of Poverty? irritates the conscience. If there is an answer to the film’s question, it seems to be a communal one. Rather than valuing growth, French economist Serge Latouche suggests we begin “exiting the religion of growth, of economy, and rethinking a social organization.”

“Either we all emancipate or no one will,” Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera says at the film’s closing. “The stability of each person in your country or mine can only guarantee their continued well-being if the other’s well-being is guaranteed also.”

Kaitlin Barker is editorial resources assistant for Sojourners. For more, visit www.theendofpoverty.com.


Poverty is No Accident. review by Kaitlin Barker. Sojourners Magazine, April 2009 (Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 44).
Reviews.
(Source: http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0904&article=poverty-is-no-accident)

[Teri J. Dluznieski]

the underlying dilemma that perpetuates global poverty.


To reconcile opposing paradigms- being close to the Pachamama( Mother Earth), and living things, the concept of manual labour, and the modern “white collar” paradigm.
This paradigm probably exists on the larger scale than just my own personal level. The western “ white collar” myth, that most of us are living out. We have all bought into this story, and as a result, we have become a culture that does not do our own work. And we look outside of ourselves for our energy and work/ labour.
We are reliant on foreign oil- to the extent that we are willing to go to war to assure our supply of it into our culture. Oil itself is a perfect example of our being addicted to external sources of energy, cheap energy. Oil is a fossil fuel, it is called “neo- caloric: it is the stored calories, or energy of the Pachamama from previous ages. We rely on this external source of energy to do our work for us faster and cheaper than we could without its assistance. Further, the oil does not even “belong” to us in the western world, who are using the vast majority of it. We beg, borrow, and steal it- so addicted are we to it, and like a junkie, we do absolutely anything to have it.
Additionally, the western cultures make less and less of their own products. Cheap imports from overseas, exploiting other peoples’ cheap labour, doubly so, in the cases of sweat shop labour. In this way, we set a much lower value on someone else’s time and energy than on our own. And time is a universal concept. An hour is an hour wherever you are on the planet. And if each individual is equal, then their hour shouldn’t be any less meaningful or valuable than an American hour.
And in our own country, we have “illegal immigrants,” that we pay very little to do the work that cannot be done overseas. Work like harvesting our crops, sweeping our streets, washing dishes in restaurants. This is the work that we perceive as undesirable, unfulfilling, or not (financially) rewarding. Work that is beneath us. Perhaps it is the resonating story of my grandfather’s generation, and my parents’ generation- who taught us, that they worked hard, so we don’t have to. And we don’t!


" Dancing In Your Bubble"

The notion of " work" has become abhorrent to us.. it has become a 4 letter word...

IN south american countries ( I can't speak for all of them).. they believe in doing a good job- regardless of what the job is... in Western culture.. we want a good job... and take as much as we can get, and live at the very edge of our means.. if we make a million- we live on a 1.1 million dollar budget.

We can learn a lot from the indigenous cultures that have been managing their environments naturally.. all along.

[Martijn de Graaf]

*****

[Godfrey Dunkley]

Godfrey Dunkley, Cape Town
Modern taxation in most countries is a direct cause of unemployment and poverty with all the resultant problems. Marginal land is rendered sub-marginal and no longer economically viable. The cost of production is greater than the value of production. Land speculation and the withholding of land from production becomes profitable. Meanwhile labour is prevented from gaining access to land for self employment.
Even on prime land labour is rendered submarginal and there is a great economic incentive to replace a man, or woman, with a machine: Then what do you do with the man? What do you do with a thousand, or ten million?
Land lies idle for the want of labour, labour idle for the want of access to land; kept that way by outdated theories, opinions and costoms that allow for deadweight taxes on labour, production and capital but leave unearned fortunes to be made out of land speculation. This is also the direct cause of the worldwide economic downturn. The classical economists spoke strongly against our taxes but economists and government choose to defy their wisdom and the masses pay the price.

[m]

Can anyone compare this movie and site to the work Hans Rosling (www.gapminder.org) has done that provides considerable hope in fighting poverty vs what I have seen in www.theendofpoverty.com . Notice that his statistics are quite well researched.

[David Harold Chester]

This explanation puts its emphasis on the cause of poverty, unequal opportunity to land, but it does not explain how this scurge can be lifted, by good government becomming aware and enacting a policy leading to taxation of land values. There are a number of steps that such a benevolent government must take before this proposal is likely to have a lasting effect. Past efforts to do this have not achieved all that much success and it is necessary to plan and proceed in a legal manner that eliminates the power of the opposing land-lords, and stops their political forces from reversing the anti-poverty policy that we want to see permanently installed.