Society and Politics

The Production Of Suffering

     My bank has introduced a new feature recently to try and keep pace with technology. You send them a text and they reply with the amount in your account, it’s a great feature! The L-O-L is a bit much though… You know, I once saw a pigeon on the bus, it got off at the financial district and all I could think was “cool. That bird makes more money than me.” In case you’re wondering how much money I have... I just tried to wash a paper plate.

Almost everyone can relate to jokes about being broke, and that’s because -believe it or not- most people don’t have a lot of money. As a matter of fact according to the Institute for Policy Studies 71% of adults have a net worth of less than $10,000, that’s 5.3 billion people. ¾ths  (75%) of the world’s population shares just 3% of the wealth while the top 0.7% of the population controls a whopping 45% of the wealth. This means that the richest people control 15 times more wealth than nearly 3/4ths of the world.
Our current system places an extremely high esteem on the amount of money one can make and the amount of wealth someone has,  and this way of thinking –of valuing profits over people- has very real effects on the world and very dangerous implications on what we consider normal in our modern society.
If society would prioritize people just a bit more the world would be in a much healthier, happier, and less wasteful place.
Now we will trace our society’s downward spiral into poverty, from going hungry and neglecting your health, to having to sell what's  most valuable to you, and finally to being kicked to the curb and abandoned, so crack open that ramen packet and let’s dig in.

    Now just as many a college students are starving or barely making ends meet, so too is 10% of the world in extreme poverty: earning less than $1.90 a day, with about 1 in 9 people on earth undernourished. While many attribute this to things such as overpopulation or natural disasters like droughts or issues in technology, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates enough food is currently produced to feed 12 BILLION people, 5 billion more than currently exist, the FAO (spell out what it stands for)  also notes that “Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year – approximately 1.3 billion tonnes – gets lost or wasted.”. These losses are mostly during production or transportation in Developing Countries due to lack of proper infrastructure –I mean it’s hard to have efficient food transportation when your roads are full of potholes- and in Developed Countries most losses are at the distribution and consumer level, mostly due to supermarket regulations that overemphasize appearance of food and plain old waste on the part of the consumer. Additionally 783 million people lack access to clean drinking water according to UN-water, again due to a lack of infrastructure and an estimated 19.5 million infants are missing basic vaccination against diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, measles, and pertussis according to the World Health Organization.

The reason for this is because the current system is that of production for profit, and while we produce more than enough food to feed everyone, and have the resources to provide clean drinking water and Health Care readily, available millions of people still go without simply because there is no money to be made in helping them! Furthermore the companies praised for raising living standards and bringing these people out of poverty only increase the amount of inequality within those countries and further deepen the rift. the top 5 countries with the highest rate of inequality between rich and poor: Chile, Mexico, Turkey, the United States, and Israel-  also lead the world with the 5 highest poverty rates according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, . These same countries give millions to corporations in tax breaks and land grants.The only thing that trickles down with this type of economics is the bill, going straight to the taxpayer's wallet.

    In the course of my research I've seen tons about things like Obamacare or Universal Basic Incomes that would 'make life better for everyone' or companies like Monsanto, Tesla, and Google creating things that could  'change the world ' and well... Have you ever had it happen to you where something looks awesome in the ad but then it turn out that buying it was a huge mistake?...
Well let me tell you about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, they are an organization that lobbies US Legislators to pass Legislation written by them for the benefit of their member Corporations: essentially a private club for corporations to decide what they want the government to do, with members such as State Farm Insurance, ExxonMobil, The American Bail Coalition, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, UPS,  and many others like the media giant Comcast, the NRA, AT&T, and Verizon.
And it isn't just ALEC that manipulates governments to increase profits , in the past year, spending on lobbying in the US totalled 3.15 billion dollars - this is more than double 1.57 billion at the turn of the century- says statistics analyser Statista .

This is the nation we live in: one where millions are unemployed and those who aren't must slave away just to make ends meet, and yet over 3 billion dollars are spent just to... persuade lawmakers to cut taxes and benefits for the working class. Were I describing a nation such as Mexico or Guatemala people would say it's a “corrupt state” or that's the way things are in the third world” or worst of all just shrug and say “that's just life”. The fact that excuses like those are considered legitimate and that this is the norm just goes to show how far we've fallen, the United States is supposedly a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” but what we see today is a government of bureaucrats, paid off by corporations, for the benefit of the elite. This level of corruption, where the highest levels of government are influenced for the profit, is simply deplorable.
    While it's no secret that the most powerful people on earth tend to be less than model citizens, what is often ignored is the human cost of this.The Rich and Powerful don't just lower their moral standards, they kick them to the curb.

Nadia Chouchair was the married mother of 3 daughters: 14 year old Mierna, 11 year old Fatima, and 3 year old Zienab Chouchair. They lived with their elderly mother Sirra in a flat in West London.  On the 14th of June 2017 Grenfell Tower -the building housing their apartment- caught fire. The flames quickly spread up the sides of the building due to exterior cladding added to improve the aesthetic of the building and boost property values.
Nadia her family, and about 80 people died because of the blaze. In the time following the fire, residents have told the BBC that they felt  “Ignored by the authorities, and pushed out by affluent outsiders”, these people have not only had their homes destroyed now they are being brushed aside simply because they are victims of an inconvenient truth: that in our current system, profits are more valuable than people.

This is not the first incident caused by this either.
     In the United States the town of Flint, Michigan had its drinking water contaminated with lead simply because the city council was trying to save money, In Columbia in 1985 following a Natural Disaster, helicopter pilots choose to transport news reporters instead of humanitarian aid because they paid better. This disregard for human suffering continues to be ignored with excuses like “it's a corrupt council” or, “Idiotic management” or, worse that “these things just happen in the third world”, despite the fact that this behavior is itself a part of the status quo.
What I am calling for is not simply a reform or for better regulation, but for a solid change of base. As long as profit is still the top priority we cannot expect anything else to be able to compete with it, instead we need to completely change our priorities. Instead of fighting each other for everything from scholarships to jobs to cooperate we should elevate our world above issues as petty as hunger or poverty.

The Philosopher Karl Marx once wrote “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” meaning that each person should contribute what they can and take what they need. In a world where we have more people than job and, where technology is eliminating the need for human labor I ask:
Why should Graduate students live off of Ramen, and poor children starve when we can feed  12 billion?
Why should people around the world and here in America go without clean water when we can easily be provided?
Why should those who are supposed to represent us receive millions when their constituents can't even get decent healthcare?
and finally

why should any of us as students, parents, workers, and as fellow human beings tolerate a single one of these injustices, when it is so easily within our power to end them?
We as a society need to question these issues and act on them to make possible a world where poverty is as alien a concept as feudalism. Where food and water are not commodities but rights. Where democracy is as central to our lives as our social media accounts, and where human life carries not a price tag, but the real meaning and weight of an individual. And finally, to sit down over a bowl of ramen and realize that we are all in this together