Wednesday 18 September 2013

Cant always get what you want - but if you try you'll get what you need...

 

There is a song tbasic-needs-web-gifhat goes "You can't always get what you want, but if you try real hard you'll get what you need". Nope, not true.

With 3 Billion in poverty and billions more struggling to make a living even if you try really hard you can't even get what you need. You need food, a home and water at least to be alive yet many do not have these basic human rights. So the sentence is misleading.

Poverty doesn't  exist because people are lazy - there simply are not enough jobs available to make a decent living. People work hard - even to death just to able to feed themselves or their family. There are horrific jobs people are forced into just to make money. It always comes down to money or rather the lack thereof.

There is definitely enough food, in fact there is enough food being produced today globally to feed 12 billion people. That is a lot of food,  then why are more than 1 billion starving with a  food surplus enough for an additional 5 billion people? Well, the people do not have money to buy the food and so the food gets thrown away.

What about water? Companies like coca-cola that mass produce "diabetes-in-a-can" and other drinks require large amount of water and to get the water they claim lakes and rivers and what-not fencing it of and making it illegal for anybody else to get to that water. You have countries where people live right next to a water treatment plant, but cannot drink the water because they cannot pay for it. So they suffer.

Having a Living Income  would end all of this suffering. If people had money to buy the things they need like food and water and housing you would have no starving, no thirsty or homeless people. And that is one of the   principles of the Living Income Guaranteed proposal -  to make sure everybody has their basic human rights and actually  get what they need.   

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