Sunday, August 03, 2008

Perspective from John MacIntyre for the San Jose Mercury News

I didn't find a link for this. The column is called Figuratively Speaking, August 3, 2008. How novel it is, I don't know, but it bears repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and repeating, and .......

A picture of a starving African baby in its mother's arms tops the column; the caption is, "What's wrong with this picture?" Then:

$30 billion
The amount of money needed annually to eradicate world hunger, relaunch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food, according to the Director-General of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization, Jacques Diouf.

$1.2 trillion
The amount of money spent on arms in 2006.

Given our capacity to run up an annual deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars of deficits (and that's just the US) with seeming impunity, why don't we just tack this on and get the job done? If we're going to run up credit, why not spend the money to improve the planet and the human condition? (But then, the demand for armaments might diminish, and then where would we be? Who was that Eisenhower fellow, anyway?) What then must we do?

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