chomsky cites henwood

Leslilake1 at aol.com Leslilake1 at aol.com
Tue Feb 27 23:28:35 PST 2001


Hope I'm not reposting this...

Znet - the lessons of seattle

Interviewer: Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, called the demonstrators at Seattle “a Noah’s ark of flat-earth advocates.”

Chomsky:
>From his point of view that’s probably correct. From the point of view
of slave owners, people opposed to slavery probably looked that way. If you want some numbers, a recent issue of Doug Henwood’s invaluable Left Business Observer gives the global facts. This is a recent estimate by a World Bank economist. It only goes as far as 1993. In 1993, the richest 1 percent of the population had as much wealth as the bottom 57 percent. So that’s 2.5 billion people. The ratio of average incomes from the world’s top 5 percent and the world’s bottom 5 percent, that’s the one that increased from 78 to 1 in 1988 to 114 to 1 in 1993, and probably considerably more since. The inequality index, the Gini index, as it’s called, has reached the highest levels on record. That’s world population. One might argue that this doesn’t matter much if everyone is gaining, even unequally. That is a terrible argument, but we don’t have to pay attention to it, because the premise is incorrect.



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