Economic growth which strips out the planet’s ecosystems is not sustainable
Helen ClarkRead
If the market is left to sort matters out, social injustice will be heightened and suffering in the community will grow with the neglect the market fosters.
Interpretation
Unregulated markets can exacerbate social injustices and increase community suffering.
Helen Clark highlights the dangers of leaving markets to operate without oversight. She argues that this neglect can lead to worsening social injustices and greater suffering within communities, illustrating the need for regulation and intervention to protect vulnerable populations.
In practice
During a community meeting discussing economic policies, this quote can emphasize the need for regulation.
I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address. In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives.
You have someone like Colin or many of the other athletes who have knelt, especially athletes of colour, and if you're not respecting what they're saying, if you're not believing their charges of police brutality or racial inequality, you're saying that they're lying.
The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.
It's important to recognise that opposing racism isn't just about presenting an alternative set of values; it's about looking at how the far right play on people's hardships in order to nurture a sense of enmity between white people and those racialised as migrants.
When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.
Exploitation. Now, there's a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.
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