"The campaign offers a hopelessly depoliticized picture of poverty—which is always a political problem above all—and fails to make serious demands of key institutions. From the perspective of the world’s poor, the Global Citizen Festival looks less like a strategic intervention on their behalf and more like a demonstration of young Americans’ support for a doomed agenda for global “development,” one that serves the interests of the rich and powerful first and foremost. As young people concerned about these issues, we urge Global Citizen to do better...
Ending world poverty in 15 years might sound impossible. That’s because it is—at least without a massive reordering of our world economy, which demands precisely the kind of political discussion Global Citizen avoids. Critics of the Global Goals have called them “a high school wish-list for how to save the world,” “worse than useless,” and a “betrayal of the world’s poorest people.”A studydone by economist David Woodward shows that poverty eradication is impossible under our current global economic system. Even under the most ideal conditions, it would take 100 years to bring the world’s poorest above the Global Goals’ poverty line of $1.25/day, and this amount of growth, in a carbon-constrained world, would have devastating environmental consequences...
It creates a similar paradox to the one Gary Younge has described in liberal discussions of racial inequity. “We have racism,” writes Younge, “but no racists.” What we get from the Global Goals and Global Citizen is a similar idea with regards to poverty—“a consequence that nobody caused, a system that nobody operates creating victims without perpetrators.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/you-cant-fight-poverty-with-a-concert/
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