Diary of a Walking Butterfly

Source: Faultlines / Al Jazeera

For a bank “crisis”, the capitalists can raise 5, 10, 20 trillion dollars. For war they can always raise the same. Yet when there is famine, like in Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, and Ethiopia, only $1.2bn is committed, even when “official” estimates say $2.5bn is needed. They always underestimate human need, so its likely much higher. And we can only expect that, like in Haiti, so much of the aid will not make it to the people who need it, but will be used for repression and other anti-human goals. Take a minute to ponder this: 20 trillion is 20,000 billion.

Famine, like the so-called “housing crisis”, isn’t about a lack of food. Rather, more perversely, it simply means that there are huge numbers of people who can’t afford to get a piece of the vast social product that the workers of the world create, because a tiny class of idle-rich parasites – the 1%, the capitalist class – can’t make a profit from those people. If they can’t make a profit from a group of people, it doesn’t consider those people part of the food “market”. So they starve, in a world of vast abundance.

From Al Jazeera:

“Tens of thousands of Somalis have died and the UN warns that 750,000 others are at risk of dying before the end of the year”.

“Famine is declared when acute malnutrition rates amongst children exceed 30 per cent and more than two people in 10,000 die per day”.

“Children have borne the brunt of the disaster across the affected region, with an estimated 2.34 million suffering from malnutrition”.

“Out of that, more than 566,000 children are severely malnourished and at risk of death”.

Further Reading on capitalism’s absurd and perverse logic:

“Financial Times: ‘Demolitions would boost housing market’“, by Liam O’Ceallaigh