Chyna Fox: We know better and we refuse to do better

An emotional appeal from musician Chyna Fox following an encounter with Rose, a homeless woman.

It was a  powerful reminder of a "meeting" 12 years ago with a homeless man in Chapel Hill North Carolina who was calling on the US goverment to ratify the International Covenant for Economic Social and Cultural Rights. He wrote from a public library, I fowarded his progress emails by fax to Senator John Edwards,

iN 1996 his nonprofit work with families of MIA Vietnam veterans had offered the opportunity to serve on the Committee to Re-Elect the President and .  It concluded:

'It is only when wealth begins to concentrate in the hands of a relative few at the expense of billions of others who are denied even a small share of finite wealth that trouble starts and physical, human suffering begins. It does not have to be this way. Massive greed and consequent massive human misery and suffering do not have to be accepted as a givens, unavoidable, intractable, irresolvable. Just changing the way business is done, if only by a few companies, can change the flow of wealth, ease and eliminate poverty, and leave us all with something better to worry about. Basic human needs such as food and shelter are fundamental human rights; there are more than enough resources available to go around--if we can just figure out how to share. It cannot be "Me first, mine first"; rather, "Me, too" is more the order of the day.'

More than 50 years ago it was Dr Martin Luther King Jr who in one of the most poverful speeches in history, said

"It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of its colored citizens. This sweltering summer of the colored people's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end but a beginning. Those who hope that the colored Americans needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual."

In 1957 John Spedan Lewis,  the son of the founder of a major UK retail organisation had spoken out about the perversion of capitalism, saying:  

"The present state of affairs is really a perversion of the proper working of capitalism. It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have slums. Capitalism has done enormous good and suits human nature far too well to be given up as long as human nature remains the same. But the perversion has given us too unstable a society. Differences of reward must be large enough to induce people to do their best but the present differences are far too great.If we do not find some way of correcting that perversion of capitalism,our society will break down. We shall find ourselves back in some form of government without the consent of the governed, some form of police state."

In more recent times writing about The Way Out of The Black Poverty Cycle,the Washington Times argues:

"It is widely believed that it is the duty of the oppressed to struggle against oppression. Hence the admiration for Spartacus and his successors. But there is no moral law that the struggle against oppression, in whatever realm, must be carried on only by the oppressed, nor any historical analysis that holds that the struggling oppressed, on their own, must succeed in ending their oppression.

"The direct route to the end of oppression is for the oppressors themselves to work with the oppressed to end it. It is also the moral responsibility of those keeping the gate of educational opportunity closed to join hands with those behind it, to work together to remove that barrier to the fulfillment of the promise of emancipation."

Action to increase the income levels in black communities is what's  seen as the way forward.

One way of achieving this was described far from US shores in 2003, when our homeless founder had been in Crimea, with a message that's as relevant to the black community as it was to disenfranchised Muslims:

"Once a nation or government puts people in the position of defending their own lives, or that of family and friends, and they all will die if they do nothing about it, at that point all laws, social contracts and covenants end. Laws, social contracts and covenants define civilization. Without them, there is no civilization at all, there is only the law of the jungle: kill, or be killed. This is where we started, tens of thousands of years ago.

By leaving people in poverty, at risk of their lives due to lack of basic living essentials, we have stepped across the boundary of civilization. We have conceded that these people do not matter, are not important. Allowing them to starve to death, freeze to death, die from deprivation, or simply shooting them, is in the end exactly the same thing. Inflicting or allowing poverty on a group of people or an entire country is a formula for disaster.

These points were made to the President of the United States near the end of 1996. They were heard, appreciated and acted upon, but unfortunately, were not able to be addressed fully and quickly due primarily to political inertia. By way of September 11, 2001 attacks on the US out of Afghanistan – on which the US and the former Soviet Union both inflicted havoc, destruction, and certainly poverty – I rest my case. The tragedy was proof of all I warned about, but, was no more tragedy than that left behind to a people in an far corner of the world whom we thought did not matter and whom we thought were less important than ourselves.

We were wrong."

He described how business operating for community benefit would join forces with a microcredit union to minimise the cost of unsecured lending.

With his death 4 years ago, I've missed the chance to ask what he meant by "political inertia" Clinton had been instrumenrtal in getting his work in Russia off the ground with the Tonsk Regional Initiative. This was the subjject of an intrerview in 2004, when the conceptt of People-Centered Economic Development was introduced to the UK and a certain amount of resistance. We were treading on the toes of a very powerful neoliberal agenda.

"Essentially, P-CED challenges conventional capitalism as an insufficient economic paradigm, as evidenced by billions of people in the world living in poverty in capitalist countries and otherwise. Under the conventional scheme, capitalism - enterprise for profit - has certainly transformed much of the world and created a new breed of people in capitalist societies, the middle class. That is a good thing. But, capitalism seems to have developed as far as it can to produce this new class of fairly comfortable people between rich and poor, at least in the West where it has flourished for quite some time.

The problem is that profit and money still tend to accumulate in the hands of comparatively few people. Money, symbolically representing wealth and ownership of material assets, is not an infinite resource. When it accumulates in enormous quantities in the hands of a few people, that means other people are going to be denied. If everyone in the world has enough to live a decent life and not in poverty, then there is no great problem with some people having far more than they need. But, that's not the case, and there are no rules in the previous capitalist system to fix that. Profit and numbers have no conscience, and anything done in their name has been accepted as an unavoidable aspect of capitalism."

Clinton is very much a part of that agenda, in hs realtionship with Tony Blair and an Ukrainian oligarch whose generosity to both of their foundations far exceeds that in his own country, where our founder exposed starving children in 'Death Camps , For Children'. His message wouldn't have gone down well with this cabal.  

Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..

Doing Well By Doing Good, the neoliberal counterpoint

Interestingly it was Tony Blair who made social enterpreneurship government policy in 2002.  This differs from what we describe as social enterprise in that it is typically driven by foundations and grants, very much part of what's been described as the nonprofit industrial complex.

The Incite! leader Ruthie Gilmore spells it out in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded . "Neoliberals are not new Nice Guys they're new Mean Guys"           

IN this speech she relates the difficulty in trying to establish an autonomous for benefit model and how foundations are the stolen wealth of those who invest in promoting the future of their own kind.   

The neoliberal response to what can be described as a 'people first ' is that by corporations can profit by solving social problems. Clearly the more intractable problems like mafia maximisiing profit by minimising childcare expenditure isn't going to be tackled.  Nor are some of the more intractable problems in the US black community.

Clinton joined the global elite last year at the conference on Inclusive Capitalism, where once more familiar arguments were presented 

At Davos in 2014, the oligarch who donates to both Clinton and Blair foundations hosted and it was Tony Blair who chaired the onversation with Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Muhammad Yunus. It opened with a minute's silence for those who have suffered most in the Ukraine conflict so far.  Though they seem to be singing from our hymn sheet, the emphasis is still on "maximising economic and social return", in that order . 

Our late founder, who delivered our 'Marshall Plan' proposal in 2007 could be counted among those who perished. He left a message for US government when he called for support from USAID to support this postcapitalist strategy, where people come before profit maximisation.

"We are grossly underfunded in favor of missiles, bombs, and ordnance, which is about 100% backwards. Now, with even the US Pentagon stating that they’ve learned their lesson in Iraq and realize (so says top US general in Iraq ten days or so ago) that winning hearts and minds is the best option, I and others shall continue to think positive and look for aid budgets and funding spigots to be opened much more for people and NGOs in silos, foxholes and trenches, insisting on better than ordnance, and who understand things and how to fix them. We can do that. We can even do it cost-effectively and with far better efficiency than the ordnance route. Welcome to our brave new world. Except it’s not so new: learn to love and respect each other first, especially the weakest, most defenseless, most voiceless among us, then figure out the rest. There aren’t other more important things to do first. This message has been around for at least two thousand years. How difficult is it for us to understand?"