hunger and capitalism [important statistics and quotes, but poor article]:
Nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty.
(...) "A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in extreme poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 — half the federal poverty line — was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year."
(...) Professor Jean Ziegler (UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and author of various books on globalization and on what he calls the crimes committed in the name of global finance and capitalism) attests in his book 'L'empire de la honte' (Editions Fayard – 'Empire of Shame', translated in 14 languages but not in English) that enough food can be provided globally for twice the number of the current world population of 6.6 billion.
(...) "Through the [international] debt, hunger is the weapon of mass destruction which is used by the cosmocrats to crush - and to exploit - the people, in particular in the Southern hemisphere."[…]" A complex set of measures, immediately feasible and which I describe in the book, could quickly put a term to hunger. It is impossible to sum these up in one sentence. One thing is certain: world agriculture, in the current state of productivity, could feed twice the number of today’s global population. So it is not a matter of fate: hunger is man made.

more on trickle-down:
The folks that put words and ideas into the mouth of Ronald Reagan in the economic insanity of the 1980s cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then down to 28%. How well I remember Reagan’s budget director David Stockman telling American workers that the tax cuts would stimulate the American economy and benefit the workers.
(...) Cold war profits soared, but the number of people below the poverty level increased from (31.8 million) to (39.3 million) according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States. The federal budget deficit grew from $74,000 million in 1980 to $221,000 million in 1986 and what was called the greatest collapse of U.S. financial institutions since the 1930s left the working poor devastated and facing foreclosures on their homes.
(...) From 1986 to 1989, 296 savings and loan institutions with total assets of $125 billion were forced to close and many workers realizing the American dream of home ownership for the first time lost their homes.
(...) Henry Wallace, vice President under FDR and Presidential candidate then, said back in 1948 "War preparations create record profits for big business, but only false prosperity for the people—their purchasing power shrinks as prices rise, their needs go unfilled, and they are burdened with new debts." He was right then, as Harry Truman prepared for the war In Korea and became the worst trickle down labor president in history, and Wallace would be right today.
(...) Thousands of holocaust survivors living in Israel live in shameful poverty, as Trickle down is a stanchion of Israel’s economy. Some 80,000 of the 260,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel are living under the poverty line, according to the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund.
(...) War profits do not trickle down they land on the workers drip by drip, but inflation keeps them at the faucet trying to survive. Those of us who call ourselves "peace people" do what we can issue by issue.

decent article on neoliberal love affair with growth:
“Economic growth cuts poverty!” is forever the inveterate, unrelenting dictum of World Bank statisticians. These four simple words, stale and contentious as they are, were in fact the title of a recent Forbes magazine article based on World Bank predictions for eliminating poverty in South East Asia[1]. As reported in the American journal that speaks to the super-rich, if economic growth continues to increase in this region of the world with the largest concentration of poor people, then “poverty can be significantly reduced, if not eliminated, within a generation.”
(...) The bank’s Chief Economist, François Bourguignon, was careful to point out that these figures “go beyond growth” to ask how income is distributed and whether health care and education are conjointly improving, but the unspoken assumptions remained clear; globalisation is good, free trade and liberalisation is a prerequisite for ending poverty, and the only answer to human needs is a market-based world economy as defined by the Washington Consensus.
(...) As one commentator in the UK wrote[6]: “That the key global economic statistic has for so long been derived by means which are patently useless is a telling indication of how little the men who run the world care about the impact of their policies. If they cannot be bothered even to produce a meaningful measure of global poverty, we have no reason to believe their claim that they wish to address it.”
(...) The survey of data goes on to quote a number of putative successes; real per capita income growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been stronger in the period since 2000 “than any time since the 1960s”, it says, alongside higher growth rates in middle income countries, and there is no hesitation in asserting that “one factor behind this performance is strong macroeconomic polices”, in other words, those policies known collectively as economic liberalism. This growth in low-income countries, it goes on to brazenly attest, has “clearly resulted” in lower poverty incidence.
(...) Does the “rapid global growth” in 2006, in this context, really provide cause for the “optimism about progress in advancing the Millennium Development Goals” as the World Bank continues to submit? Is just under one billion people living in extreme poverty, about a sixth of the human population, with almost half of the remaining developing world living on two dollars a day, really cause for a note of “optimism” at all?
(...) This year has also seen the release of a number of independent and disquieting studies into poverty and wealth distribution; according to the recent McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 census figures in the US, for example, the number of poor Americans living in deep or severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, growing by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005, what they described as “a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion.”[8] Poverty levels are falling, says the World Bank. Poverty levels, at least on a national basis in the richest countries, are actually increasing like never before, say the independent studies. In the UK, even the latest official figures show that poverty has increased for the first time since Tony Blair came to power in 1997.[9]
(...) The key issue concerns not just poverty levels and the misleading ‘dollar a day’ measure, but the corresponding crisis of inequality. The World Bank report freely admitted that despite abject poverty being on an apparent decline in global terms, inequality among citizens in the same country is on the rise. In the past decade, it also admits, poverty reduction was not always or everywhere commensurate with income growth. As contemporary studies have shown[10], inequality is in fact harmful to economic growth, and income distribution is not only worsening year-on-year, but it results in the paradox of overall decreasing poverty levels and a simultaneous increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
(...) The income gap has so widened, according to a recent analysis of tax data in the US[11], that the top 10 percent of Americans have reached a level of national income share not seen since before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The top one percent of wage earners, it showed, saw an increase of 14 percent, compared to an overall percentage decrease in earnings for 90 percent of the country. The income gap is growing faster in the US, as other figures reveal[12], than in any other developed nation.
(...) The US government, meanwhile, continues to argue that its tax policies, benefiting the top one percent of the country more than anyone else, are not adding to the widening income gap but are simply “more progressive”[15]. Higher taxes for the rich, they argue, would cause top earners to work less and take fewer risks, thereby stifling the deity of economic growth and threatening the goose that lays the golden eggs, a claim left unsupported by a shred of economic theory or empirical evidence[16].
(...) ...belief in the panacea of economic growth could be called the noumena of today’s world leaders, as without it the ideological premise of the Washington Consensus and it’s ‘ten prescriptions’ would crumble before our eyes; liberalisation and privatisation only make sense if market forces are continually unleashed in the blind pursuit of infinite expansion. Another rudimentary metaphor to add to the trickle-down theorists limited repertoire, in this sense, might be the description of a cancerous tumour.

from envio, january 2002:
[trickle down] The most defined feature of the new government’s economic design is that the motor force of economic growth during its five-year term will be large-scale foreign investment, followed by national private business investment. This growth strategy is based on the very traditional idea that the benefits of the big investments will trickle down to the others.
(...) These two investments reflect the new government’s priority areas: tourism and the assembly plants known as maquiladoras, which process imported materials for re-export and are exempt from import and export taxes. The latter will be given particular priority because this type of operation seems to be of greatest interest to the investors currently sniffing around.
(...) [employment] With all polls showing unemployment as the social problem most affecting the population over the past decade, Bolaños’ campaign promise to create new jobs sparked particularly high expectations. Like its predecessor, the current government is counting on the maquila industrial parks—commonly referred to as free zones—as the quickest way to mass-create the longed-for jobs. Indeed, when Alemán took office, around eight thousand people were employed in the maquiladoras; today, according to the Central Bank, that figure has climbed to nearly forty thousand. Nonetheless, his seemingly exclusive reliance on big investors is questionable considering that small urban and rural businesses still provide the bulk of Nicaragua’s jobs and the government has no clear plan for this sector.
(...) Bolaños is offering investors two advantages. The first is competitive prices—"starting with the cost of our labor force," to use his words. The second is security, at least compared to most of the other Central American countries vying for tourists and maquila investors. In his opening speech at the investment forum, Bolaños told the audience that "Nicaragua is a safe country, its people very warm and welcoming. We have one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America, and the public safety we can offer today is the envy of our neighbors north and south. There are no kidnappings or violent crimes against tourists or investors here, and the tourists who come don’t have to listen to special instructions about security beyond the dictates of common sense."
(...) [the future of agriculture?] The most noteworthy aspect of this government’s economic strategy is that agriculture, for nearly two hundred years the kingpin of the national economy and the source of the new President’s own wealth, has been left in the dust. It seems to be viewed as a problem rather than a solution, a sector that drags on the economy rather than driving it forward.
(...) [credit] In Nicaragua, private commercial banks do not work with the rural productive sectors. The bulk of their credit portfolios is dedicated to financing consumption. An individual can easily get a loan to buy one of the plethora of luxury 4-wheel-drive vehicles clogging Managua streets today, but faces often insurmountable obstacles when applying for a loan to plant papayas for export. Around five years ago, the World Bank set up a program to extend private banking services to the countryside, providing a US$30,000 subsidy to the banks for each branch they opened in rural areas. The banks jumped at the offer, but did precisely the opposite of what the World Bank intended: they used these branches to attract the savings of the rural population and thus increase their capacity to finance consumer loans in the cities, providing no credits for any rural productive activities.
(...) [strategy for poverty] If very few resources have been invested in the productive sector in the past decade, the Poverty Reduction Strategy, now an official World Bank-approved document that the new government is committed to implement, does not appear particularly concerned with production either, mentioning it only in very general terms. The strategy’s main objective is to create a social safety net that will use subsidies to alleviate (not reduce) the poverty of the most vulnerable population. The strategy does not propose incorporating the poor into the national economic project. Based on a very traditional mentality, it assumes that the poor will automatically be pulled in as the large, modern sector of the economy grows.
(...) [on GDP] In 1990, the annual per capita GDP was equivalent to US$454. Today it is US$484. In other words, eleven years after the war, during which Nicaragua has been receiving an annual average of US$500 million in foreign cooperation, the income of each Nicaraguan has only grown US$30! If that is not shocking enough, it must be remembered that this figure only expresses a mathematic or artificial reality, homogenizing the head count of not only both babies and the retired, but also the very rich and the very poor. It in no way reflects real income distribution, which is profoundly inequitable in Nicaragua and becoming more skewed with every passing day.
(...) [poverty] International analysts calculate that a country’s economy must grow at least 7% a year to effectively reduce that country’s poverty. During the reactivation period of the past seven years, Nicaragua’s economy grew an average of 4.5% annually.