John Perkins Poverty

I have to agree with the evidence this video shows. The strongest piece of evidence was the first 8 minutes of this video, especially John Perkins’s opening statement. When he said at least 24,000 people die from hunger related diseases every single day, I immediately agreed with his claim that this shouldn't be happening because we have the resources to prevent this. I was further convinced by his statistics and percentages. We already have the problem of the one percent, so the idea of having a five percent problem isn't that hard to believe. When Perkin's said that less than five percent of the population lives in the United States, and that we, as Americans, are consuming more than 25 percent of the world's resources and contributing 30 percent to pollution, I couldn't agree with …show more content…
The only thing that I can't really a hundred percent agree on is the part where they talk about where poverty comes from. This is mostly due to the fact that I find it very hard to believe that someone was actually able to research this. This topic is too broad for someone to point the finger and say "Yeah! Poverty started here." I know I’m not a historian or anything like that, but I like to believe that there was poverty in the years prior to 1492. This is also proven in the video when the narrator talks about a similar practice that happened before in Europe (6:50). However, I do understand that Eric Toussaint is just saying a key date and the poverty that happened prior to 1492 probably wasn't a global problem. I still feel like he shouldn't have put such an emphasis that year. Either that, or perhaps the video structure made it seem like Eric Toussaint was saying poverty started there. The narrator said “Where do we have to look to understand how this all started?” The next section after that is Eric Toussaint saying “I think there is a key date: 1492.” The structure of the video made me think Toussaint was answering the narrator’s