Rumble: How much is $700 billion really? A humanitarian perspective
The arguments for a bailout to avoid systemic collapse are of course genuine and persuasive, but so are the arguments for aid and against standing by and allowing a child to die every 3 seconds, or a woman to die in childbirth every minute.
To put the proposed Wall Street bailout into perspective. $700bn:
· Would clear the accumulated debt of the 49 poorest countries in the world ($375bn) twice over
· Is almost 5 times the annual amount of extra aid needed to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health, education etc ($150bn a year)
· Is about 7 years of current global aid levels ($104bn in 2007)
· Is enough to eradicate all world poverty for over two years (UNDP calculates it would take $300bn to get the entire world population over the $1 a day poverty line).
On the other hand it’s
· only a quarter of the cost of the Iraq war ($3 trillion on Joseph Stiglitz’ calculation )
· a half of annual global military spending ($1339 bn)
All about perspectives...
More posts on The Road about poverty
Source: Oxfam blogs. Picture courtesy Joakim Kembro (WFP)
Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order.
2 comments:
What does this demonstrate? Is there no heart left? We can easily watch the hungry, the poor and the desperate wither away... But never would we let the financial institutions feel a pinch of anything - they MUST be bailed out?! They're core to what???
What shocks the most is that I've read in pained silence when individuals have written that the earthquakes, wars, floods were nature's way of controlling population.
Then this manufactured entity has a semi-natural issue of evolution with its probelms - there are some of the most powerful and influential people around the globe scrambling to ensure that no harm comes to the financial instituions and markets..
I don't see how we could have any excuses left as humanity - we can rush in to salvage 'institutions.' Shame on us! We're blatantly neglecting our very own - these are people, flesh and blood.. No more excuses, I'm sad to realize...
The banking system the way it is built up is there to serve on master the Bankers. It unfortunately makes no sense to save lives in that relation, only to save banks. Saving banks mean we can all go back to paying ever growing loans and paying out even more bonuses. Well the big incentive is ofcourse that otherwise too many of citizens paying of the loans would be bankrupt and that would be a disaster. All good citizens would become like the third world citizens. Non loan-paying people who try to live on their land. But then the large corporations cant steal their land. Thus better let a few million people die;-)
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