Occupy the Headlines

Occupy Wall Street is an odd movement with a very mixed bag of messages. I’m tempted to say that at least it’s generating some much-needed publicity for real social issues, but at the same time I’m worried that the messengers are a little too entangled with their own message. Because despite what the banners read, if you make at least $48 000 a year (before tax), you are actually “the 1%”. (To check exactly where you sit on the scale, have a look at the GlobalRichList website). It doesn’t really help when you have Kanye West wandering through and “encouraging” the protesters while wearing enough bling to pay off Rwanda’s national debt, either.

Whether the movement is actually going to have any impact is debatable, but there are a few real social injustice issues which I think are worth highlighting.

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Billions of people around the world live in desperate poverty. This doesn’t mean that they are envious of your new iPhone 4S because they’re still stuck with the iPhone 4, it means that their kids die of malnutrition and diarrhoea, both of which are preventable for a few cents. Overwhelmingly, they are in that condition due to factors completely out of their control – war, famine, lack of access to social infrastructure – and not due to lack of ambition or application on their part.

The other issue is the willful disregard for the connection between an opulent lifestyle in some quarters and degradation of human life in others. Yes, I’m perfectly aware that economics is not zero sum and that wealth can be created without taking it away from others. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that dreadful living conditions in large parts of the world are a direct result of lavish lifestyles in others.

Poverty and famine are mostly driven by greed. On a large enough scale, there’s always been plenty of food to go around: what causes famine is not a local crop failure but rather a political failure. When there is stable government, there is no famine because food is redistributed from areas with surplus. Hunger in Africa is used as a weapon in civil wars: you can donate all the food aid that you like, but until you stop funding war (through arms deals, through the diamond trade, through oil and mineral contracts) the food is just going to rot in the warehouse of the local warlord. You’ll note that all the aforementioned sources of war funding are hugely lucrative for Western corporations.  European and North American farm subsidies systematically crush the competitiveness of third-world food imports. (Here’s a fun stat: the G8 spends about a billion dollars a year on agricultural aid to poor countries, and about a billion dollars a day on agricultural subsidies at home. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Albert of Monaco probably get more aid money from the EU than Africa does).

Environmental degradation is a related issue. The climate impact from the contrails of corporate jets will not be suffered by someone sitting in an air-conditioned office (not to mention the cars, the factories, the toxic chemicals from making the aforementioned iPhones). And this is not a new phenomenon, either, or one that is linked solely to current concerns around anthropogenic climate change. Centuries ago, warlords in India were granted estates on the slopes of the Himalayas, and in order to increase the value of their holdings they controlled and diverted the floodwaters which run down from Nepal. Which is why the whole of Bangladesh still gets washed into the ocean every few years.

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The point is, these are serious issues that have catastrophic consequences for large parts of the world. So on the one hand, it seems worrying that these issues are being entangled with a bunch of relatively rich people who are protesting while tweeting about it on their smartphones. On the other hand, these issues have already been ignored for decades: the wealthy nations have looked at poverty, famine and suffering in the third world and said:

“We don’t care.”

Is it true that any publicity is good publicity?

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