Scott Brinton

The end of poverty — and terrorism

Posted

Much of the Middle East now lies in tatters, ripped to shreds by terrorists. Why can this region find no peace? Why is it continually in conflict?

The reasons are numerous. I have a single unifying theory, though: income inequality. If you think about it, economic disparity, when mixed with combustible ideology, has sparked the majority of wars through the millennia.

The people of Yemen survive on a median per-capita income of $6.80 per day, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies. That means that about a third of people there –– the lucky ones –– live on $10 to $13 a day, and a third on $2 to $5 a day.

Meanwhile, next door in Saudi Arabia, the royal family has 15,000 members, and roughly 2,000 of them control the majority of the family’s mind-numbing oil wealth. Combined, the House of Saud is worth roughly $1.4 trillion. By comparison, the famed Walmart dynasty –– the Walton family –– is worth $152 billion, or just over 1/10 of that figure, according to the question-and-answer site Quora.

The people of Libya live on $29.32 a day; Lebanon, $27.60; Iraq, $18; Algeria, $15.30; Jordan, $14.10; Iran, $13.06; Tunisia, $11.80; and Egypt, $8.80, according to the International Monetary Fund. Yes, the Middle East is a very poor place, with pockets of incomprehensible wealth –– wealth never before seen in history.

Does income disparity excuse terrorism? No, no, a thousand times no! It does, however, help explain its rise.

When people live in a state of daily desperation, when all hope is lost, they are vulnerable to outside influences –– to promises of immortality, or even three meals a day, by really bad guys who pervert religion to seduce the unwitting and the sadistic and send them into society as suicide bombers.

Stopping terrorism requires a complex, multi-pronged approach that, yes, involves military intervention, as practiced by the Obama administration, but at the same time seeks social justice — equity — for the poor and oppressed around the globe.

We heard a lot about social justice a decade ago, before Iraq exploded in a fireball of sectarian violence perpetrated by marauding thugs. The U.S. was supposed to help rebuild the tattered country after the Bush administration invaded in 2003. We attempted nation-building at first, but nothing took hold. Eventually, the U.S. gave up. Now, it seems, there is only talk of perpetual war — the so-called new normal.

Thank goodness the United Nations is at least attempting to restart an international conversation that seeks to end global poverty and create a more peaceful world. Dr. Scott Carlin, an associate professor of geography at LIU Post in Brookville, is at the forefront of that conversation. He recently served as co-chairman of the U.N.’s Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals Together conference in Korea, whose aim was to unite countries behind 17 key development goals, including:

• Ending poverty and hunger.

• Providing quality education for all.

• Constructing sustainable cities and communities that reduce our carbon footprint and thus the threat of climate change, a.k.a. global warming.

“We want to place global citizenship as a new, important part of education,” Carlin told me recently. “We are citizens of our communities, our cities, our countries, but also the world.” As such, he said, we must possess “an active willingness to understand that the world is very diverse.”

Protecting the environment is critical, he noted. Nature provides resources that are vital to our existence, but they are limited. “It’s really important to be aware of the fact that we have a lot of work to do and a lot of money to spend to protect those resources,” Carlin said. “In spending that money, we are making investments in our future. Investing in the future is a wise use of tax dollars.

“The climate change issue is really going to affect us in a very big way,” he continued. “It’s already affecting us on Long Island. You really do need to educate people on climate change . . . Sea level rise is going to cost us a lot of money.”

In 2005, Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s famed Earth Institute, published “The End of Poverty,” a blueprint for eradicating extreme poverty around the globe. It was a hopeful book, with its reams of data laid out in beautifully precise terms.

“Since September 11, 2001, the United States has launched a war on terror, but it has neglected the deeper causes of global instability,” Sachs wrote. “The $450 billion that the U.S. will spend [in 2005] on the military will never buy peace if it continues to spend around one thirtieth of that, just $15 billion, to address the plight of the world’s poorest of the poor, whose societies are destabilized by extreme poverty and thereby become havens of unrest, violence and even global terrorism.”

A decade and a year later, his words ring as true as they did then.

Scott Brinton is the Herald Community Newspapers’ senior editor for enterprise reporting and staff development and an adjunct professor at the Hofstra University Herbert School of Communication. Comments? SBrinton@liherald.com.