There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root. - Henry David Thoreau
On a side street in Nairobi’s bustling neighbourhood of Shauri Moyo, Faisal Ngila shouts to street vendors, motorbike taxi drivers and pedestrians. “Do you know taxes are increasing in Kenya?” he asks, handing out flyers urging Kenyans to say “no to Unga (maize flour) tax” by dialling a phone number that will register their signature on a petition.
What would you say if we told you that the biggest obstacle to eradicating poverty is the way we think about it?
http://thinkafricapress.com/culture/poverty-has-creation-story-lets-tell-it
Governments of rich countries constantly celebrate how much they spend in aid to developing countries, and multinational corporations splash CSR credentials across annual reports and product lines - neither of them confess how much they take out of developing countries.
If implemented, the agreement will mean millions of people can start supporting themselves on their own small plots of land. It will give fresh life to long neglected legislation that should be protecting the rights of poor and marginalised communities, like the Land Reform Acts from the 1950s and the more recent Forest Rights Act of 2006. Most importantly, it will require state and national governments to work together in new ways to ensure landless poor and marginalised people can secure their rights.
Ever wondered how tax dodging works in America?
It’s about time we called out the great myth that mass poverty just is, as if it were a natural part of some universal moral order. Such thinking is both profoundly untrue and disastrously misleading.
“Those who understand how power actually works - how it concentrates, congeals, barricades, and self-preserves - recognize this is a lie. The plutocrats who crashed the global economy now claim they are the ones to rescue us. The WEF is a convening of ‘shared interests’ with only one shared interest - the accumulation of more power.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alnoor-ladha/plutocrats-versus-the-peo_b_3016647.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
People-led Transformation: African Futures
Hakima Abbas proposes a transformation in the international discourse towards people-led development. Focusing on rural development, she offers a paradigm shift towards a decolonized economic model based on the knowledge and values of people rather than profit.
Multinationals happily extract profits from countries and then team up with tax havens to avoid paying their share of taxes that make the countries profitable for them in the first place.
