1.4 BILLION People are extremely poor

Did you know that ALMOST HALF of the world’s population is considered poor? A full 1.4 BILLION people (ONE-FIFTH of humanity and MORE THAN HALF of all Africans) are extremely poor – which means they live on less than $1.25 a day.

Is it really all about making ourselves comfortable? Should we continue with our… well, let’s face it, excesses? Is it worth thinking outside ourselves? Could we be better off earning human decency points instead of another cash bonus? Just thinking…

Comment from Jack F. Stuart II:  No, Andrew, it’s about personal freedoms, not equality across the board. In truly free societies, people have the freedom to go as far as they want to go; in autocratic or despotic societies, those freedoms are restricted by those that supposedly know better about how you should live your life than you do. The so-called “99%” are really the tyranny of the majority. Pure democracies do not work and never have; the closest thing planet Earth has seen to a guarantor of individual freedoms is the used-to-be-rule-of-law society that is the U.S. To the extent other governments suppress individual freedoms they will never see so-called “1%” status.

thebrackpipe response:  Jack – I’m just putting the information out there. The more I delve into corporate American and am privy to various business mentalities, the more disappointed I become. Bottom line is that, in general, people don’t stop and simply appreciate what they have or have been blessed with TODAY. Also, for some crazy reason, many people believe that they have truly earned or deserve these ungodly amounts of money. Very few of the 1% truly EARNED it. Now, in the days of Rockefeller, perhaps those sums were truly earned, but today, absolutely not.

If would be cool if we cared about one another more. I guess that is all I’m saying.

Comment from Jack F. Stuart II:  I get that, and you’re a good person, Andrew. I also get that there are a lot of greedy and bad people in the world. The solution to the problem, though, isn’t forced charity. Money means power, and you’ll never win playing power games with the powerful. You win — actually, we all win — by maintaining rule-of-law government so that people are limited only by their ambitions and energy, not by a we-know-more-what’s-best-for-you ruling class that, ironically, relies on class warfare tactics to hold onto power.