The rich grow richer, the poor eat poison 
(republishing, copying, no restrictions)
By: Father Shay Cullen
Poverty is the direct result of greed and the hunger for power and domination of the rich over the poor. When I was a young missionary assigned to a rural parish in Zambales. Rounding a small wooden school house I was saw a small child whose mouth was gaping hole, no upper lip and protruding single tooth. I felt a shock of pity and from that experience Operation Hair-lip was born. Since then 34 years ago thousands of children had corrective hair-lip operations. It was pure charity. Little has changed. There is still no public health service in the Philippines all has to be paid for. Thousands die from their inability to buy medicines and medical care.
Teenager Jenny ran away from rural hunger and poverty to the city and was sold into a sex bar then rescued and helped recover. Last week she went on a home visit. Her parents with five other children live in a crumbling shack in the middle of a sugar cane field on the Island of Negros. Like millions more they are ignored by officials and abandoned to a life of poverty. There is no toilet, running water, electricity, beds or chairs. Life is lived on the floor in the one room shanty with leaking grass roof and fragile bamboo walls. They wake at 4 AM eat a handful of rice and boiled leaves and toil in burning heat all day planting sugar cane. Their skinny emaciated bodies tell of a life not long to live.
It was famine food that fed them until Jenny brought a richer healthier diet with the money she earned as a part-time actor with a theatre group. We can help change their lives.
If not for church and charities few would survive the ravages of hunger and disease. When sick, most just lie down and die. The medicine is not there for them. Those who can traipse to the cities in their torn rags join the teeming masses of slum dwellers where the chances of survival are just a few notches higher. Medical help is even more expensive and the poor turn to selling their bodily organs to the rich for transplants. Then weakened they can no longer work long hours and soon die from complications and lack of treatment.
This is the kind of poverty that is rampant in resource rich Philippines. A wealthy country where millions live precarious lives in the streets and beside open sewers overshadowed by the glittering skyscrapers that tower the sky. Here behind the smoked glass windows and stainless steel, surrounded by sumptuous art and ambience, the millionaire moguls bargain and barter the nation’s wealth among them. Many of them are self-serving legislators that block pro-poor laws and protect and expand their ill-gotten wealth. Corruption and bad governance is like a curse on the nation. Billions flow to the pockets of the rich -nothing but pointless promises for the suffering poor.
A community of indigenous people of the Manobo in North Cotobato is starving in Lama-Lama President Roxas city. The drought killed every crop and they are eating a poisonous variety of ground potato called “Kayos”, heavy with hydrocyanic. What is behind such poverty and inequality?
The corruption spawned by Jueteng the illegal gambling , robs the poor and feeds the rich. Bishop Oscar Cruz of Lingayan has bravely and consistently spoken out against it, the manila times columnist Marlen V. Ronquillo has pointed out that not only governors, mayors and Police are on the bribe taking list but some priests too. Shocking allegations and now the overseas workers reports indicate are being used to launder the ill-gotten billions. Their dollars are given to the point man of the Gambling lords in their place of overseas employment and pesos are handed over to the workers family no bank interest charged.
The colonial conquest of the Philippines by Spain and then the United States left a powerfully entrenched elite comprising about 2% of the population of eighty million. An estimated 200 rich families own or control about 70% of the wealth.
The poor are the pawns of a system where they ironically provide an abundance of cheap labour to the privileged and wealthy elite. With massive unemployment millions become overseas workers and live in exile supporting their families whom the seldom see.
Ironically it is their earnings that provide the hard currency that gives the banks and captains of capital the capacity to enter into corrupt deals with foreign cronies in the name of globalisation. For example they pass laws favouring international mining interests or those propagating GMO crops that generate vast wealth none of it bettering the lot of the poor. They leave a damaged landscape and a impoverished nation.
Trying to save the abandoned and change this massive inequality is the heartbreaking challenge facing all who work for a just and compassionate society. [End]
