becoming

Archbishop of York, John Sentamu’s recent comment on poverty and the global economy:

Tomorrow morning I will attend a meeting to launch a campaign of ‘Education for All’ as part of the global effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, including the eradication of global poverty by 2015. Of course for such a target to be achieved there needs to be stable financial systems. There needs to be stable financial systems. Without a solid global economic base to work from, the eradication of world poverty would be an even greater task. But as one columnist recently noted, “the President of the United States recently announced a $700 billion bailout plans for banks and financial institutions. One of the ironies about this financial crisis is that it makes action on poverty look utterly achievable. It would cost $5 billion to save six million children’s lives. World leaders could find 140 times that amount for the banking system in a week. How can they now tell us that action for the poorest on the planet is too expensive?

[via maggie dawn]

The MDGs represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world’s main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the MDGs promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases.

Set for the year 2015, the MDGs are an agreed set of goals that can be achieved if all actors work together and do their part. Poor countries have pledged to govern better, and invest in their people through health care and education. Rich countries have pledged to support them, through aid, debt relief, and fairer trade.

And across the Atlantic, a similar question was asked by Andrew Stephens-Rennie of Empire Remixed:

There’s something dirty about this. Incredibly filthy. Breaking down the $700B bailout to a per-person cost, this averages out to $2,333 per person. And yet, what did the average American receive when these companies were profitable?

The silence is deafening.

How is it that the American government races to socialize corporate debt, all the while shunning the socialization of corporate profit? Privatize profit. Socialize debt. Another spectacular example of ways the rich get richer and the poor poorer. I don’t think I’m too far off in naming this a system of oppression.

And he concluded with this: “we need to respond with clear heads. We need to find ways to root ourselves in stories of hope, not simply the tales of fear being delivered to us from Wall Street’s prophets of doom.”

Yes, which story are you in?