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Monday, November 03, 2014

End capitalism before it ends you

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Socialists are told that capitalism is an efficient system of production and rational allocation of resources but is it really true? These facts from UNESCO web-site may have many doubting it.

Some 20% of the world's children go without basic immunization, most of whom live in remote and often impoverished areas where infection is more likely to lead to death.

Over 9 million children die each year from preventable causes, most of them from dehydration, routine infections, or one of several major diseases for which vaccines are available.

Some 500,000 women die in childbirth each year while over 3 million infants die from dehydrating diseases that could be eliminated through breast feeding or Oral Rehydration Therapy, a simple and cheap mixture of clean water, sugar and salts.

Over 17 million people die each year from curable infectious and parasitic diseases such as diarrhea, malaria and tuberculosis.

Over 500 million people are infected with tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, river blindness, and schistomiasis, all of which are now preventable.

Over 18 million people are infected with the AIDS virus.

More than a billion people lack access to any health-care.

There are 1.75 billion people without adequate drinking water.

A billion people are without adequate housing, and 100 million are homeless.

Nearly a billion people, mostly women, are illiterate, and about 130 million children at primary school age and 275 million at secondary level are not enrolled in school.

There are over 53 million uprooted people or refugees in the world, 80% of which are women and children.

There are over 110 million landmines scattered in 64 countries killing and maiming over 9,000 children, women and civilians of all ages each year, and over one million since 1975.

On top of these outrageous conditions are layered the alarming environmental problems confronting the world:

Around the planet, 26 billion tons of topsoil are being eroded per year from the world's farmland. That's 3 million tons per hour.

Deserts advance at a rate of nearly 15 million acres per year.

10 million acres of rain forest are destroyed annually.

Over 200 million tons of waste are added to the atmosphere each year.

Over six billion tons of carbon from fossil fuel burning were added to the atmosphere last year.

There is a 6 million square mile hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, and a 4.5 to 5% loss of ozone over the Northern Hemisphere.

The planet has warmed at least 1° C in the last century, and given the annual carbon, CO2, CFC, and methane transmissions into the atmosphere, it will rise another 2.5° to 5.5° in the coming century.

There are over 31,000 hazardous waste sites in the US alone, while in Europe, Estonia, and Lithuania acid rain has damaged over 122.6 million acres of forest.

There are over 130,000 tons of known nuclear waste in the world, some of which will remain poisonous to the planet for another 100,000 years.

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