Catchy title, eh? Sadly, it's true. In Ireland a study came out and was reported yesterday in the Irish Times as Banks driving people to alcoholism and suicides.
This is not the first article of its kind I have read. In the last 12 months I have noted an increase in alcoholism (ok, the world drinks more, given that it is perhaps the last refuge for the poor and those on the way to poverty) and suicides caused by a chronic lack of money, money to pay rent or a mortgage, money to put food on the table, money to pay the rapacious banks, and when I say rapacious, I mean rapacious: the banks here have upped the mortgage rate by a whopping 1 and a half % in the last 15 months even though the EU Central bank has not. In other words, as the last sentence of the linked article says:
“Hundreds of thousands of people are struggling with debts they can’t sustain while bankers, brokers and solicitors are still partying.”
Note that the first link does not work, I've tried several times. If you Google the Irish Times and insert the title it will come through, somehow.
It's not an Irish problem, poverty has no frontier. This morning, in the NYT, there's this piece titled Researchers Link Deaths to Social Ills.
This might be a useful lens to help focus our minds,” said Dr. Galea, who is the chairman of the department of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “If you say that 193,000 deaths are due to heart attack, then heart attack matters. If you say 300,000 deaths are due to obesity, then obesity matters. Well, if 291,000 deaths are due to poverty and income inequality, then those things matter too.”
Then another article came into my email box, UN calls for greener food production to feed world in 2050 (note that the article was reproduced by the Washington Post with Foreign Policy from an AP story)
World food production will have to increase by up to 100 percent by 2050 and focus on greener methods to sustain an expected 9 billion population, the U.N. said Tuesday in its annual survey of economic and social trends. The U.N.’s annual World Economic and Social Survey called for governments to invest nearly $2 trillion (about 1.3 trillion euros) a year to help small-scale farming and to reduce environmental harm.
2 trillion a year? Where would the money come from? The World Bank? The IMF? They contribute greatly to the world's ills (see how the word "austerity" is gaining approval among the rich and powerful). Rising food costs were a factor to riots across North Africa and the Middle East in the last several months. Prices also surged as bad weather ruined crops from Canada to Australia and Russia banned grain exports after its worst drought in a half-century. We will see food and water riots in the coming decades as millions more people are sliding into poverty as they struggle to afford basic food supplies, and more and more are at risk of going hungry.
Even without a crisis, the number of undernourished people in the world will rise this year from 925 million to well over a billion the next as food costs keep rising and trade speculation is rife (and unchecked). The rich, however, enjoy a steep rise in income :
Between 1960 and 1980, the richest 1 percent of Americans received about 10 percent of the total national income. This was not an unusual level of inequality – many of the world’s most advanced countries had similar income distributions. But since 1980 the share of national income going to the richest Americans has shot upwards: by 2007, the top 1 percent received 23 percent of all income. The richest 0.1 percent of families received 12 percent, and the richest 0.01 percent, 1 out of every 10,000 families, received 6 percent of all income in the US. At this moment we are unique among the world’s leading nations in this income gulf.
In a report by a consulting firm, Capgemini, and a private wealth manager, Merrill Lynch, titled World Wealth Report 2011, the world’s millionaires saw their wealth increase by almost 10 per cent, as against the total world Gross Domestic Product that rose at just 3.9 per cent.