1.4 BILLION PEOPLE IN THE WORLD MAKE $1.25 A DAY.

   That is a fact. That is a moral scandal.

   Yesterday, I was at the United Nations for the unveiling of an important, if a bit boringly titled, "Social Protection Floor for a Fair and Inclusive Globalization". You should read this report but you can get the gist of the crisis just from this one paragraph in the executive summary:

About 5.1 billion people, 75 per cent of the world population, are not covered by adequate social security (ILO) and 1.4 billion people live on less than US$1.25 a day (World Bank). Thirty-eight per cent of the global population, 2.6 billion people, do not have access to adequate sanitation and 884 million people lack

access to adequate sources of drinking water (UN -HABITAT); 925 million suffer from chronic hunger (FAO); nearly 9 million children under the age of five die every year from largely preventable diseases (UN ICEF /WHO); 150 million people suffer financial catastrophe annually and 100 million people are pushed below the poverty line when compelled to pay for health care (WHO). [emphasis added to the whole thing because it all bears emphasizing]

   The gathering inside one of the UN’s large conference halls included a significant number of representatives from UN members and, importantly, the director-general (the top spot) of the International Labor Organization, Juan Somavia, and Michelle Bachelet, the Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UN Women, who is also the former president of Chile.

    Bachelet was passionate about the crisis–but I think she missed the mark a bit by focusing almost all her remarks on what countries needed to do…"every country will have to find its own capacity"…"if there is no political will in the country, there will be no success"…but she didn’t say one word fingering multi-national corporations and the financial manadarins who will completely ignore this report.

   I’m not suggesting she doesn’t understand who is screwing the people–but it is entirely unwise to put the fixing of this mess on the backs of national governments when most of them are being forced by the bond market and central bankers and a whole host of the elite (either the actual wealthy or their errand boys) into imposing austerity on the people. The report is an indictment on the system–but it, too, says too little about the role played by "free market" robbers.

    It was Somavia who had it right. He said, "we can’t get out of the crisis by following the same policies that created the crisis". And, then, he ticked off all the failures of the globalization model: inefficient, socially unfair, environmentally damaging and high levels of growth without jobs.

   Interestingly, Somavia told the audience that, upon his arrival in New York, he went down to Occupy Wall Street to–and, here, he made a gesture of rubbing his fingers together–to FEEL what people were saying. He, and Bachelet, made other references to the rumbling cascading throughout the globe in opposition to the robbery of the wealth of the planet by the few.

    The absurdity of the push for austerity–of the actual existence of the idiotic SuperCommittee or the obsession over the non-existent debt and deficit "crisis"–is fully explained by this:

      1.4 BILLION PEOPLE IN THE WORLD MAKE $1.25 A DAY.