
The root cause of the crises that affect humanity on a massive scale - mass poverty, displacement / landlessness, food insecurity, environmental degradation / climate change, wars, political instability / bad governance / corruption, pandemics, and social collapse - is the unsustainable extraction of the world's natural resources by multinational corporations, in a process that is facilitated by bilateral and multilateral agreements, and supported by international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. Everything that we use is derived from or depends on the use of natural resources, which include land, water, fossil fuels, minerals, forests, fisheries, and biological resources. However, multinational corporations are increasingly concentrating this natural wealth into fewer hands. A 2008 United Nations report revealed that the problem lies in a governance gap, whereby companies operate as multinational corporations, but are regulated at the national level, thus leading to conflicts and violations of human rights and environmental standards. A major study on global wealth distribution revealed that the richest 1% of adults own more than half of global wealth, while the richest 10% own 85% of global wealth. In contrast, the bottom half of the world's adult population own barely 1% of global wealth. Rather than lift the poor, corporate-driven globalization has therefore caused record income and wealth <b>...</b>
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