Oxfam Quotes

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

International correspondents with their long dictaphones, and dirty jeans, and five hundred words before whiskey, are slouched over the red velvet chairs, in the VIP section in the front, looking for the Story: the Most Macheteing Deathest, Most Treasury Corruptest, Most Entrail-Eating Civil Warest, Most Crocodile-Grinning Dictatorest, MOst Heart-Wrenching and Genociding Pulitzerest, Most Black Big-Eyed Oxfam Child Starvingest, Most Wild African Savages Having AIDS-Ridden Sexest with Genetically Mutilatedest Girls...The Most Authentic Real Black Africanest story they can find...

The original Hippies were cool because it was who they were. But the ‘movement’ grew in numbers because it became the 'in thing’ to do. And sad as it is, most of them were plastic Hippies. The original Beatniks did what they did not because they were ‘hip’ but because it was who they were as a person. These were Carefree Scamps, but the plastic Hippies weren’t carefree at all And besides that, they smelled like an Oxfam shop

She felt sorry for him. A hippie chick who looked like she bought her clothes at Oxfam and a puff of wind could blow her over?

Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth’s population – that’s three-and-a-half billion people.

To begin with, even though the rich countries have low average protection, they tend to disproportionately protect products that poor countries export, especially garments and textiles. This means that, when exporting to a rich country market, poor countries face higher tariffs than other rich countries. An Oxfam report points out that 'The overall import tax rate for the USA is 1.6 percent. That rate rises steeply for a large number of developing countries: average import taxes range from around four per cent for India and Peru, to seven per cent for Nicaragua, and as much as 14-15 percent for Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal. As a result, in 2002, India paid more tariffs to the US government than Britain did, despite the fact that the size of its economy was less than one-third that of the UK. Even more strikingly, in the same year, Bangladesh paid almost as much in tariffs to the US government as France, despite the fact that the size of its economy was only 3% that of France.

Oxfam stated, “Climate change was first seen as a scientific problem, then an economic one. Now we must also see it as a matter of international justice. Human rights principles give an alternative to the view that everything from carbon to malnutrition can be priced, compared and traded.

According to Oxfam, for example, the fifty largest American companies have, by perfectly legal means, shifted over $1 trillion to offshore tax havens, costing the US government about $111 billion in lost tax revenue.

en 2015, Oxfam affirmait que 62 personnes possédaient à elles seules les mêmes richesses que 3,6 milliards de personnes,soit la moitié la plus pauvre de l'humanité . Cet écart se creuse à un rythme accéléré , puisqu'il y a seulement cinq ans, on parlait de 388 personnes. p.94

On Christmas morning when the beach is calling and the family’s gathering and the presents are a mystery (or definitely feels book-shaped anyway), and after the splendour and celebration of Christmas Eve, we don’t want Christmas Day to be an anticlimax. We’ve gifted our Oxfam goats or geese and bought our CWS calendars, and what we’d like, on Christmas Day, what we really want, is for things to be—perfect. Just like the old days. Something new, but also something familiar. And that’s what’s so wonderful about the Christmas story, and why preachers penning their reflections approach with trepidation but also with joy: at Christmas, the news is all good.

The place where Guled had come seeking sanctuary was, according to Oxfam, a ‘public health emergency’, and had been for several years. It was a groaning, filthy, disease-riddled slum heaving with traumatized people without enough to eat. Crime was sky high and rape was routine. And the population was about to explode again. On the day Guled arrived the camps held nearly 295,000 people. Twelve months later, at the end of 2011, there would be half a million. Guled

Oxfam Davos released a report entitled Economy for the 1%. It states:  “62 people own the same as half the world.

Oxfam found that the top 1 percent of the world now owned nearly half the world’s wealth— and are on track to own as much of the rest of the 99 percent combined by 2016.

What about email? You got email on your phone?’ Ricky ‘Yeah, but I don’t really wanna answer them ’cos they're like 70 pence a time or something. I got an email from Oxfam, saying if I wanted to buy some goat again. That’s cost me a quid.’ Karl

In 2014, when Oxfam arrived in Davos, it came bearing the (then) shocking news that just 85 individuals controlled as much wealth as half of the world’s population combined. This January, that number went down to 80 individuals.

Many charities are very clearly in the business of doing good work for starving children in Africa, and suchlike e.g. Oxfam. But when you get to healthcare, the ‘charitable’ aims can become significantly less clear. Heart UK, for example, is ‘The Cholesterol Charity.’ This organisation was presumably set up to help poor starving cholesterol molecules.

I was relieved when I counted my shoes that there were less than 100 pairs. I lined them in three squadrons, ready for combat. The kamikazes in the vanguard were ready for the Oxfam shop. In the second chevron were the old favourites with heels worn down, their future in the balance. In the rear, with medal ribbons and fancy tooling, the Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks went back in the velvet bags and boxes they had come in.

In the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco, for example, a group of fishing families had lived since 1914 on islands in the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 1998 the Usina Trapiche sugar refinery petitioned the state to take over the land. The islanders say that the refinery then followed up its petition by destroying their homes and small farms, threatening further violence to those who did not leave. When the fishing families rebuilt their homes, they were burned down. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo use Usina Trapiche sugar in their products, but until Oxfam’s campaign they denied responsibility for the conduct of their suppliers. Oxfam asked all of the Big 10 food brands to show ethical leadership by requiring that their suppliers obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous and local communities before acquiring land. Nestlé was the first to support this principle fully. Then Coca-Cola declared a policy of zero tolerance for landgrabbing by its suppliers and bottlers and committed to disclosing its suppliers of sugar cane, soy, and palm oil, to conducting social, environmental, and human rights assessments, and to engaging with Usina Trapiche regarding the conflict with the people of the Sirinhaém River estuary. In 2014 PepsiCo also accepted the principle of responsibility for its suppliers. Associated British Foods, the largest sugar producer in Africa and another Big 10 food corporation, is now also committed to the same principle.12 The gains from these policy commitments are more difficult to quantify than in the example of Ghana’s oil revenues, but in the long run they too may be very substantial.

Under Narendra Modi, the rich have become richer, and inequalities have increased. A 2018 Oxfam report revealed that 10 percent of the richest Indians garnered 77.4 percent of the nation’s wealth (against 73 percent the year before)119 and that 58 percent of it was in the hands of India’s “1 percent” (while the world average is 50 percent). The earnings made by this handful of people in 2017 were equal to India’s budget for that year. Also in 2017, the fortune of India’s 100 richest tycoons leaped by 26 percent. The richest of them all, Mukesh Ambani, increased his wealth by 67 percent, according to Forbes India120—a publication, moreover, that belongs to this billionaire. Ambani’s fortune again rose by 24 percent in 2018.121 Going slightly beyond the 100 richest, the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List identified the 953 richest Indian families and gave figures showing that their fortune represented more than 26 percent of the country’s GDP122—which meant that if a tax rate of 4 percent was applied to the nation’s 953 richest families, it would give the government the equivalent of 1 percent of India’s GDP.123 According to Crédit Suisse, the number of dollar millionaires in India jumped from 34,000 in 2000 to 759,000 in 2019,124 which means that the country has one of “the world’s fastest-growing population of millionaires.”125 The average wealth level of these millionaires increased by 74 percent over this period.

Others in global development, including groups like Oxfam and leaders like Paul Farmer, take a view that’s more grounded in history and politics. They see in today’s poverty the results of a colonial and imperial history that was designed to exploit countries and people. That exploitation continues in the lives of poorly paid workers in unsafe sweatshops stitching our clothing, in factories that pollute over there so we can have clean air over here, and in poor people using their bare hands to mine the metals that make our high-end smartphones work.

wonderfully clarifying. Looking at the Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse, the source of Oxfam’s claims, we can play with some of those numbers to shed more light on the topic.[*] Forty-two million people have more than a million dollars each, collectively owning about $142 trillion. A few of them are billionaires, but most are not. If you have a nice house with no mortgage in a place such as London, New York, or Tokyo, that might easily be enough to put you in this group. So would the right to a good private pension.[*] [19] Nearly 1 percent of the world’s adult population are in this group.

worked with Oxfam for over a decade.