End Poverty or Fight Wars?
It appears we have a choice to make: shall we spend all our money on war, or should we end poverty?
"Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent US economist and a special adviser to the UN secretary general, argues in a new book that extreme poverty could be eradicated by 2025.1/30th! Just for the hell of it, let's take the Bush administration's (current) claim that our wars around the world are justified as efforts at spreading democracy. Ok, I'm going to go out on a limb and make the case that ending poverty throughout the world would go a good way towards spreading democracy as well. Even if you really believe in the wars of the Bushies, do you think that those wars are 30 times as likely to "spread democracy"? Don't you think that "the enemy" would have a much harder time gaining support if they were fighting a humanitarian superpower that had just ended poverty throughout the world than fighting a military superpower occupying countries and murdering civilians?
In The End of Poverty, he says much will depend on the choices made by Americans, who are paying a far smaller share of their income in foreign aid than they promised three years ago, and only a 30th of the 'nearly $500bn [£260bn] the US will spend this year on the military'.
'Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Yet our generation, in the US and abroad, can choose to end extreme poverty by the year 2025,' he writes."
What's that, you say? Profits and power? That's the problem? Oh, yes: ending poverty would not contribute to the profits of the Haliburtons and Exxons of the world would it? It also wouldn't contribute to protecting "American interests" (read: U.S. governmental/corporate control) of resources around the world, would it? In fact, it would probably hurt "our" power and profits: healthy, empowered people generally prefer domestic, democratic control of their natural resources. Ah, see, now we're thinking like George Bush's Jesus! Easy choice - war.
