Raj Patel discusses hunger in America. The new documentary “Finding North” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival exposes how one in every four American children suffers from hunger. Nearly 30 percent of American families, more than 49 million people, often go without meals.
As the economic crisis deepens, this is the moment to consider moving towards much shorter, more flexible paid working hours — sharing out jobs and unpaid time more fairly across the population. The new economics foundation (nef) set out the case in its report 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century.
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralising. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined? (Excerpt from ‘In Praise of Idleness’ by Bertrand Russell)
Money As Debt is a fast-paced and highly entertaining animated feature by artist & videographer, Paul Grignon. It explains today’s magically perverse DEBT-MONEY SYSTEM in terms that are easy to understand.
Manfred Max-Neef believes that economists are fixated with growth for growth’s sake. As a result, they overlook the qualitative values essential to human development. Whereas growth is quantitative, qualitative values leading to the development of human well-being and happiness are harder to measure but of equal importance.
737 Trans-National Corporations (TNCs) control 80 per cent of the global economy. This includes a ‘super entity’ of 147 at the core that controls 40 per cent of the economic value of TNCs in the world.
The richest one per cent of Americans earn nearly a quarter of the country’s income and control an astonishing 40 per cent of its wealth. Inequality in the US is more extreme than it has been in almost a century – and the gap between the super-rich and the poor and middle class people has widened drastically over the last 30 years.
