From this week’s report by the World Food Program, as reported by Relief Web :
It goes on and on and on – pages and pages covering, this week alone, 16 countries whose people are lurching from crisis to crisis, dependent for their very survival on international volunteer agencies and the United Nations. Perhaps if Fratboy Deserter and his cronies were forced to spend a year working with the front lines of the NGOs that do all this desparate, last-resort, endless and thankless work, they’d realize why the world thinks there are more important priorities than bombing Iraq. Some other news that won’t make the front page (or in some papers, any page) so that mainstream media can focus on ratcheting Americans up to new levels of fear, xenophobia and isolationist and unilateralist fervor:
And that’s the news. |
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Immoral, isn’t it? We’re unable to care for all the starving yet we can spend the equivalent of multiple nations’ GDP on weapons? Unable to care for the sick and diseased, but unwilling to spend a dime on reproductive planning to stabilize or reduce those in need of healthcare? Disgusting.
It is kind of amazing. You’re probably too young to remember Vietnam, but this is giving me a terrible sense of deja vu (oops, that’s French isn’t it)
No, not too young at all. Remember watching Cronkrite and the body count on the evening news every night. I have a sneaking suspicion that GWB learned what I was taught in economics: war is great economic stimulus – stuff gets consumed and goes away. How pathetic.
The irony is that this ‘economic stimulus’ is illusionary (illusory?): short term employment and production increases, leaving behind an empty hole. In the longer term, aside from spin-offs from scientific advances, there are no winners in war, even economically. That’s the subject for my next essay.