Second Nature Home > Short Essays by Dan Bruiger >

Widening Poverty Gap

As a result of the policies of globalism, there is a universal widening poverty gap and a decay of civil society in both developing and developed nations around the world. Every country with a national debt is, after all, a “debtor nation.” Homelessness is the counterpart in developed countries of third-world poverty. Within developing countries, the beneficiaries of international aid have mostly been business elites instituting practices that further disenfranchise the poor. The same is true of the new “aid” provided by global capital in the form of loans by such agencies as the IMF and the World Bank. These are loans that already impoverished developing countries cannot hope to repay. What they do accomplish is an effective takeover of control of the economies of such countries, which are thereby conscripted into the transnational program of unrestrained movement of capital and goods across borders, with unrestricted access to cheap labor. Third World governments are effectively extorted into submission by the threat of calling the loans, with the result that these countries lose the very right of self-determination the West so loudly vaunts. Local public policy can no longer intervene on behalf of the poor in the form of labor laws, unions, minimum wages, fair trade regulations, or environmental legislation.

RELATED TAGS: [IMF, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, widening poverty gap, structural adjustment, (domestic) homelessness, free trade, World Trade Commission]