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Progressive News & Views (since 1982)
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L I F E and my brother (6)
Clean Drinking Water
Many people do not have access to clean drinking water and must have
water piped to them and it hasn't been done.
"According to the U.N. 2002 Human Development Report, 1.1 billion
people lacked access to safe drinking water in 2000, and 2.4 billion
did not have adequate sanitation. Experts say growing water scarcity
is aggravated by desertification, deforestation and surging urban
populations, especially in areas already suffering low rainfall such
as parts of Africa."
* Ed Stoddard, The Birmingham Post (England) 8/29/2002
"Water consumption has outpaced swelling population growth,
multiplying six-fold in the 20th century when the number of people on
the planet tripled." (ibid)
Ironically in those resource rich areas of North Africa and West Asia
with it's huge corporate farms where locals are going hungry, they
also lack clean water because 70% of the available water is going into
agriculture, and not for local consumption. (A World Bank report
estimates that the Middle East and North Africa, with five per cent of
the world's population, have only 1% of the world's available
freshwater)
If you care about people you don't bomb the dams and water storage,
irrigation and hydroelectric power facilities and cause sewage to
spill into streets to spread disease of epidemic proportions. The
purpose of attacking Iraq's infrastructure was to impede economic
development because Hussein was popular with many Iraqis in spite of
what the media says about him and hospitals, medical care, and
education were all free before Bush Senior attack Baghdad and gas was
cheap because Hussein had nationalized it.
While the media has us arguing about whether the U.S. should "cut and
run" or stay to stop the carnage which would naturally result if we
left, those debates are false. It was never about carnage or what
might happen to the Iraqi people. The U.S. will not leave because
George W. Bush is there for oil, the same reason we have built
permanent military bases there and in Afghanistan and the other Stans,
to insure we get oil at prices we will control.
The U.S. wants governments that can be controlled by capitalist ruling
elites. And the U.S. government doesn't give a damn about endemic
poverty or the death and destruction it causes.
Neither is the U.S. government and other rich ruling elites in the
West concerned about eradicating world poverty and ending man-made
tsunamis against the children of the Third World - or the First World
for that matter.
(The U.S. has never been serious about millennium development goals
(MDGs).... We're worse off now than when they were first discussed and
agreed to in the United Nations.)
"The world's richest 500 individuals have a combined income greater
than that of the poorest 416 million. Beyond these extremes, the 2.5
billion people living on less than $2 a day -- 40% of the world's
population -- account for 5% of global income. The richest 10%, almost
all of whom live in high-income countries, account for 54%."
* Eva Cheng, Green Left Weekly, WORLD ECONOMY: UN report reveals
human toll of imperialism's escalating rampage - November 2005
The UN says that in an increasingly prosperous global economy, where
corporations are getting richer along with those who own them, "10.7
million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday,
and more than 1 billion people survive in abject poverty on less than
$1 a day."
Hank Roth
To Be Continued....
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