2 October 1997 Edition
What to do with a billion dollars
By Mary Nelis
In New York last week the multi-billionaire Ted Turner, the other half of Jane Fonda, announced that he was giving the United Nations a donation of $100 million a year for the next ten years. The billion dollar giveaway was the profit his vast media business had earned him in the previous nine months. He still had a fortune of $2.2 billion left, according to Newsweek magazine.
Turner amassed his great fortune through the communications revolution and the globalisation of commerce. Other billionaires have also made well advertised donations. It obviously pays the rich to give some of their huge wealth away and they usually recoup it by tax and other benefits.
While we ordinary folk struggle to keep a roof over our heads, we also struggle to understand how some people can amass so much personal wealth. The global communications system, for all its sophistication and technology, doesn't tell us how the Ted Turners of this world make all this money when so many decent human beings die each day, denied even the opportunity to earn their living.
According to Newsweek - owned, incidentally by Ted Turner - the United Nations was the logical choice for Turner's benefaction, since global thinking has been the key to his success.
Yet the same United Nations has come in for strong criticism over the years from Third World countries for its failure to appreciably alleviate global poverty and hunger.
The editor of a paper called The Earth Times, Pranyay Gupte, warns that once the so-called development mandarins get their share of charitable donations, there's little left for the poor. A huge industry has sprung up around the need of the Third World, giving lucrative employment and perks to those already well heeled. Gupte points out that in the United Nations, 70 cents of every dollar of donated money goes towards salaries, travel and administration for its officials. A typical global conference on aid - now fashionably called sustainable development - costs at least $10 million.
If this is the case, it is the biggest scandal of the 20th century. Since the cold war ended the superpowers have been jetting all over the world to Earth Summits, Rio, Helsinki, and wherever. The money left over from these bureaucratic junkets for worthy causes such as the plight of refugees, environment protection, family planning and protecting women and children is drastically diminishing.
Small wonder that the late Mother Teresa, who had access to the powerful bureaucrats of the UN, epitomised at her death the well-worn phrase, "the poor you will always have with you." For she knew that growth in the US meant increasing poverty for everyone else.
While Ted Turner was doing his goody two shoes act in New York, Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham were serving a hot meal to the homeless starving poor of Baltimore, USA. An hour's flight from the luxury of the Waldorf Astoria, Viva House, one of the many Catholic Workers homes throughout the US, is situated in an improverished underclass neighbourhood, a world apart from renaissance Baltimore. The millions of tourists who flock to Baltimore's art decor dockland, with its upmarket shops, bistros and art galleries, would have no concept that across the six lane intersection lies one of the worst slums in the US.
Nor would they understand, or even want to, that Baltimore's docklands once provided work and homes to those now queuing for a meal at Viva House before the factory owners moved the work to Third World countries and the developers tore down the apartment blocks which the unemployed could no longer afford.
The entrepeneur of Baltimore's Harbourplace Development is currently developing Belfast's Laganside. We are indeed emeshed in the global thinking which gives us the swollen bellies of children in Haiti, Zaire, Korea, where the past keeps dropping out and returns to haunt us under different names as the world shrinks to a global village.
One of our Presidential candidates, Dana, told us that her song Fairytales is number one in Guatemala. But life for the poor in Guatemala, where 150,000 have died and 45,000 have disappeared at the hands of the CIA-backed junta, is anything but a Fairytale.
Ted Turner's billion dollars will not produce a fairy tale for those most in need. He should do the honourable thing and keep it for himself.
In New York last week the multi-billionaire Ted Turner, the other half of Jane Fonda, announced that he was giving the United Nations a donation of $100 million a year for the next ten years. The billion dollar giveaway was the profit his vast media business had earned him in the previous nine months. He still had a fortune of $2.2 billion left, according to Newsweek magazine.
Turner amassed his great fortune through the communications revolution and the globalisation of commerce. Other billionaires have also made well advertised donations. It obviously pays the rich to give some of their huge wealth away and they usually recoup it by tax and other benefits.
While we ordinary folk struggle to keep a roof over our heads, we also struggle to understand how some people can amass so much personal wealth. The global communications system, for all its sophistication and technology, doesn't tell us how the Ted Turners of this world make all this money when so many decent human beings die each day, denied even the opportunity to earn their living.
According to Newsweek - owned, incidentally by Ted Turner - the United Nations was the logical choice for Turner's benefaction, since global thinking has been the key to his success.
Yet the same United Nations has come in for strong criticism over the years from Third World countries for its failure to appreciably alleviate global poverty and hunger.
The editor of a paper called The Earth Times, Pranyay Gupte, warns that once the so-called development mandarins get their share of charitable donations, there's little left for the poor. A huge industry has sprung up around the need of the Third World, giving lucrative employment and perks to those already well heeled. Gupte points out that in the United Nations, 70 cents of every dollar of donated money goes towards salaries, travel and administration for its officials. A typical global conference on aid - now fashionably called sustainable development - costs at least $10 million.
If this is the case, it is the biggest scandal of the 20th century. Since the cold war ended the superpowers have been jetting all over the world to Earth Summits, Rio, Helsinki, and wherever. The money left over from these bureaucratic junkets for worthy causes such as the plight of refugees, environment protection, family planning and protecting women and children is drastically diminishing.
Small wonder that the late Mother Teresa, who had access to the powerful bureaucrats of the UN, epitomised at her death the well-worn phrase, "the poor you will always have with you." For she knew that growth in the US meant increasing poverty for everyone else.
While Ted Turner was doing his goody two shoes act in New York, Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham were serving a hot meal to the homeless starving poor of Baltimore, USA. An hour's flight from the luxury of the Waldorf Astoria, Viva House, one of the many Catholic Workers homes throughout the US, is situated in an improverished underclass neighbourhood, a world apart from renaissance Baltimore. The millions of tourists who flock to Baltimore's art decor dockland, with its upmarket shops, bistros and art galleries, would have no concept that across the six lane intersection lies one of the worst slums in the US.
Nor would they understand, or even want to, that Baltimore's docklands once provided work and homes to those now queuing for a meal at Viva House before the factory owners moved the work to Third World countries and the developers tore down the apartment blocks which the unemployed could no longer afford.
The entrepeneur of Baltimore's Harbourplace Development is currently developing Belfast's Laganside. We are indeed emeshed in the global thinking which gives us the swollen bellies of children in Haiti, Zaire, Korea, where the past keeps dropping out and returns to haunt us under different names as the world shrinks to a global village.
One of our Presidential candidates, Dana, told us that her song Fairytales is number one in Guatemala. But life for the poor in Guatemala, where 150,000 have died and 45,000 have disappeared at the hands of the CIA-backed junta, is anything but a Fairytale.
Ted Turner's billion dollars will not produce a fairy tale for those most in need. He should do the honourable thing and keep it for himself.