Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails,

[BillyRibs]

and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

- Frederick Douglass

I think my daughter's eyes are blue. They might be green. She hasn't been around long enough to tell just yet, but they are certainly something. She recognized me for the first time just a few days ago, and smiled up at me in a simple, sweet way that obliterated my heart. She cannot focus on anything more than a few feet from her face, but that, like everything else about her, will change in time. Someday soon, she will be able to see everything, and tragically, this will be the world within her view.

A report released early this year by the organization Oxfam International revealed that the combined income of the richest 100 people in the world is enough to end global poverty four times over, and that the gap between rich and poor has exploded by some 60% in the last 20 years. Rather than hinder this division, the recent global economic crisis has exacerbated it. Money does not disappear, you see, but tends to be translated up the income ladder in times of financial distress.

According to UNICEF, nearly half the world's population lives on less than $2.50 a day. One billion children live in poverty, and 22,000 of them die each day because of it. More than one billion people lack access to adequate drinking water, and 400 million of those are children. Almost a billion people go hungry every day.

The incomes of 100 people out of the seven billion on the planet could fix that, and then fix it again, and then fix it again, and then fix it again. The exact total of the wealth of these individuals is actually something of a mystery, thanks to the tax havens they use to hide their fortunes. There are trillions of dollars squirrelled away in those havens - no one knows quite how much - and the subtraction of that money from the global economy has a direct and debilitating effect on the people not fortunate enough to be part of that elite 100.

More at Link! http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16593-the-end-of-the-beginning-of-the-end