Privatised Charity & Systemic Poverty: Two Incompatibles In Neo-Liberal Economic Paradise!
Dr. Ameer Ali
A systematic and unrelenting attack by neo-liberal economic orthodoxy on New-Deal-modelled economic structures built after WWII has made poverty systemic and left the onus of its eradication in the hands of private charity. Governments’ shift of priorities and programs from people to market, from households to corporations and from welfare to growth has created this horrendous outcome. The public sector has been progressively denigrated and rolled back to make way for private sector to expand and encroach into what was once consensually accepted as the legitimate terrain of state management, such as education, health care and welfare of the old and vulnerable. This radical transformation in economic priorities was undertaken in the name of economic efficiency and growth. In the course of this conversion even the vocabulary of budgetary allocations to health and education has been changed from investment to expenditure. In short, the neo-liberal phase of capitalism ushered in in the 1980s under a more fashionable cliché of globalization has made economic growth and poverty inseparable twins.
The global economic record of the past four decades – since this orthodoxy was enthroned by ‘Washington Consensus’ and its comprador intellectuals as the most desirable economic design ever invented by humanity – has exposed the hollowness of its promise of prosperity for all on the one hand and the stark reality of a class war pushed from the top by governments backed by a powerful corporate elite. However does one care to read the available economic and income data one cannot escape the horrible fact that the richest 20 per cent of the world population consumes 90 per cent of goods produced, while the poorest 20 per cent shares just 1 per cent. The Credit Suisse Research Institute in its 2013 report on wealth distribution among the world’s adult population carries this startling truth: Of a total 4,666 million adults and a total wealth valued at 241 trillion, a staggering 83 per cent of the latter is owned by a tiny 8.4 per cent of adults leaving the rest 91.6 per cent to share the remaining 17 per cent. An Oxfam report points out further that the wealth of the 85 richest people in the world is equal to the wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion, and that since late 1970s, tax rates for the richest have fallen in 29 out of 30 countries for which data are available. It is now public knowledge that the giant corporations do not fulfil their tax obligations in the jurisdictions in which they earn their profit. Their transfer pricing mechanism is a deliberate device to dodge taxes.Read More
