Eradicate World Poverty

by Thomas Dahlheimer

Every 3.6 seconds someone starves to death. 16,000 children die daily due to
hunger. 800 million-plus people go to bed hungry, including 300 million
children. 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day; more than 1 billion
survive on less than $1 per day; 162 million people subsist on less than 50
cents daily. The developing world spends $13 in debt service for every $1 it
received in grants. The world’s richest 1 percent owns 32 percent of its wealth.
In Latin America, the richest 1 percent receives over 400 times as much income
as the poorest 1 percent. The greater the disparity in wealth, the more violent
societies are.

How did this massive injustice and inequality come about? It began with
globalization’s beginnings in 1492. When Columbus sailed the ocean — not blue,
but red, with blood spilled by the Christian empire-building mission of Pope
Nicholas V. According to a United Nations World Conference Against Racism
document, his Papal Bull [Romanus Pontifex] “declared war against all
non-Christians throughout the world, and specifically sanctioned and promoted
the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian nations and their
territories.”

Pope Nicholas V’s war mongering, Christian world domination mission is what the
wealth of Europe was based on.

The Europe the explorers left was essentially economically, physically, and
spiritually bankrupt. It was the exploitation of all the Third World’s resources
that allowed Europe to exist at all. Our predominately Euro-American nation was
built at the expense of indigenous people, and to a great extent, by slave labor
imported from Africa. Before European Christian colonization began there was no
massive starvation as we see it today. The breakup of kinship tribalism and
tribal economic systems, that came to an end with the establishment of the
Industrial Revolution, radically degraded family values and created an economic
system that will — if not radically changed in the near future —lead to the
almost complete destruction of human life on earth.

Why should we care about Third World penury? Given declining U.S. living
standards, unemployment, evictions, and Moore’s contention in his popular
documentary film “Capitalism” that 1 percent of Americans own as much wealth as
the bottom 95 percent. Everywhere, it’s the same thing. The poor pay for the
system. They pay to put more and more money every year into the pockets of the
corporate elite.

We need a new system, of agrarian reform, redistribution of wealth, and sharing
of resources to put an end to world poverty. In “Capitalism,” Michael Moore
calls this new system “democracy”; others, like the president of Venezuela, Hugo
Chavez, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, calls it “21st
century socialism.” I believe in “21st century socialism” and neotribalism, the
ideology that human beings have evolved to live in a tribal, as opposed to a
mass, modern society, and thus cannot achieve genuine happiness until some
semblance of tribal lifestyles has been re-created or re-embraced.

Prior to 2000 A.D., Pope John Paul II, New Age/New World Order planners, the
Christian leaders of the Manifestation of the Sons of God Movement and Pat
Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network all called for the worldwide
redistribution of wealth and cancellation of debt in 2000 A.D. The World
Conference of Churches is also working to greatly eliminate the gap between the
rich and the poor throughout the world. There is hope that it and other groups
will be influential in developing a new paradigm, or new global economic system,
that will spread the global wealth around to the poor, and in doing so,
eradicate world poverty.