US President Barack Obama is the latest voice from the “great and good” to bemoan the lack of achievement in the United Nation’s Millennium goals, first declared 10 years ago, to drastically reduce world poverty and generate sustainable development. Earlier in the week, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and ex-UN chief Kofi Annan espoused similar sentiments of disappointment with the fight against poverty and all its miseries. Welcome to the Theatre of Absurd.
Here we have the very managers and apologists for the economic system that generates poverty and environmental destruction on a massive scale seeming to lament those manifestations. Not only that, but they affect a demeanour of brooding puzzlement over why poverty remains so entrenched across the world, with over one billion people (and counting) deprived of basic necessities for a decent life.
Obama’s foray was particularly absurd and insidious. While he oversees a foreign policy involving mass murder and war crimes in several countries, Obama exhorts to the world to get serious about fighting poverty and human suffering. With his typical rhetoric of “deep concern” that sounds increasingly hollow, the US president said that we need to move beyond “managing poverty… to provide paths out of poverty”. He deplored “dependence” on Western aid (sic) and called for greater accountability among poorer nations.
But with as many as 20 million Americans now out of work and nearly 40 million individuals in the US receiving food aid, it is today clearer than ever that poverty and massive suffering is a worldwide human condition generated by the very economic system that Mr Obama presides over. The trouble for him and his other apologists is that the contradiction of elite wealth coexisting with massive poverty has become so patent and palpable that any rhetorical flourish to dissemble otherwise is now truly absurd.
