Economic Justice

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There are a number of economic ideas that can immediately begin to help make our world a better one.

Just consider for a moment that making roofs white or light-colored sends sunlight back to space and reduces global warming equivalent to taking all the world’s cars off the road for 11 years.

Source: Steve Conner, “Obama’s climate guru: Paint your roof white!,” The Independent, 27 May 2009. Steven Chu, the US Secretary of Energy and a Nobel prize-winning scientist, is the source and the article is online at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/obamas-climate-guru-paint-your-roof-white-1691209.html.

Ending World Hunger

We often hear government officials declare we will never allow another holocaust. The truth is severe hunger afflicts approximately a billion people annually. Every day over 24,000 people will die of hunger; 18,000 of them will be children.

To put this in perspective, less than 6% of the $700 billion bailout could provide clean drinking water and end world hunger.

The below chart by the World Watch Institute highlights the annual expenditure on luxury items compared with funding needed to meet select basic needs.

*The end world hunger figures were updated by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 2008.

Ever wonder how a solution to global hunger and drinking water compares to military spending?

Addressing world hunger is a way for the United States to save over eight million lives each year. Having eight million friends, not even counting their grateful family and friends, would do more to defeat terrorists than all the combined military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Current wars, projected by a Nobel Prize scholar to exceed $2 trillion dollars, shine a light on a more accurate cost for the US military.

The sad truth is global starvation is intentionally ignored so that U.S. taxpayers will continue to agree to pay more for Homeland Security, nuclear weapons programs, and black budget items to name a few than to end world hunger.

Imagine for a moment a loved one was dying from starvation. In a world where 1 in 5 people in the developing world do not have access to clean drinking water, a child dies in the time it takes to snap our fingers. In the Congo alone, war and poverty combine to kill 45,000 people every month. While politicians say never again when remembering the holocaust, the continuing slaughter in the Congo has taken over 5.4 million lives since 1998.

While governments around the world fail to meet the challenge, every person reading this has the opportunity to save a life. Part of the answer is we must act as individuals and not rely on government inaction. We can save a life by putting a flock of chicks, a goat, the tools to start a business, or clean water in the hands of people willing to work harder than you may be able to imagine.

Never believe corporate media and government officials who say that world hunger will always be with us. Ending world hunger is not as complicated as putting a person on the moon. We are talking about ending world hunger with the equivalent of 7 days of US war spending or a fraction of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and other bailouts such as the $100 billion Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout.

In every crisis there is opportunity. The financial crisis is an opportunity to teach people why the monetary system is a threat to domestic and international peace. By design it ends from time to time in a total financial collapse as demonstrated in 1929. Sound hard to believe, watch the Federal Reserve Introduction video.

Sincerely,

Dave Dionisi

PS. The resources below are in the order that we recommend you select them.

Resources:

9. Money as Debt video

10. Bank for International Settlements

 

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