Date: Thu, 16 Sep 1999 10:01:45 -0400 From: Njoki Njoroge Njehu <wb50years at igc.org>
Toward Freedom Online Magizine Website <http://www.towardfreedom.com/aug99/un_list.htm>
What a World!
Ten troubling facts from the 1999 UN Human Development Report <http://www.undp.org/hdro/99.htm>
1. One fifth of the world's people -- those living in countries with the highest incomes -- produce 86 percent of world gross domestic product, 82 percent of exports, and 68 percent of foreign direct investment. They control 74 percent of the world's telephone lines. The bottom fifth, in the poorest countries, produce about one percent in each category.
2. Since 1994, the 200 richest people in the world more than doubled their net worth to $1 trillion.
3. Rich industrialized countries hold 97 percent of all patents worldwide.
4. The income gap between the richest fifth of the world's people and the poorest fifth increased from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1997.
5. Tanzania's debt service payments are nine times what it spends on primary health care, and four times what it spends on primary education.
6. Women occupy more than 30 percent of parliamentary seats in only five countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
7. English is used in almost 80 percent of all Web sites, although less than one in 10 people worldwide speaks the language. Meanwhile, the number of computers with a direct connection to the Internet rose from under 100,000 in 1988 to over 36 million in 1998.
8. Only 33 countries achieved a sustained annual growth rate of at least 3 percent per capita between 1980-96. During the same period during, per capita growth declined in 59 countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and the former Communist nations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
9. Organized crime syndicates are estimated to gross $1.5 trillion a year. The value of the illegal drug trade was estimated at $400 billion in 1995, about 8 percent of world trade, more than the shares of iron and steel and motor vehicles, and roughly equivalent to textiles, gas, and oil.
10. Adult literacy among Brahmins, -- a group at the top of the Hindu social system in Nepal -- is 58 per cent and life expectancy is 61 years. The figures for the country's Muslims are 22 per cent and 49.
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Njoki Njoroge Njehû (Ms.) Director 50 Years Is Enough Network 1247 E Street, SE Washington, DC 20003 Phone: 202/IMF-BANK or 202/544-9355 Fax: 202/544-9359 Email: wb50years at igc.org Webpage: http://www.50years.org
Class consciousness is knowing which side of the fence you're on; class analysis is knowing who is there with you.
----from a poster, source unknown
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
-- Frederick Douglass
The master's tools will never destroy the master's house.
- Audre Lorde in Sister Outsider