Thomas Pogge (on our culpability for poverty)

I find his reasoning so satisfying and so depressingly true:

I argue that current global institutional arrangements as codified in international law constitute a collective human rights violation of enormous proportions to which most of the world’s affluent are making uncompensated contributions.
[...]
Each day, some 50,000 human beings – mostly children, mostly female and mostly people of colour – die from starvation, diarrhea, pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, perinatal conditions and other poverty-related causes.”
[…]
This catastrophe was and is happening, foreseeably, under a global institutional order designed for the benefit of the affluent countries’ governments, corporations and citizens and of the poor countries’ political and military elites. There are feasible alternative designs of the global institutional order, feasible alternatives paths of globalization, under which this catastrophe would have been largely avoided. Even now severe poverty could be rapidly reduced through feasible reforms that would modify the more harmful features of this global order or mitigate their impact.

Full article here [PDF].