So I was watching tv ... by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

So I was watching tv ...

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Monday, February 28, 2011 15:36
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Saturday, February 26, 2011 4:56 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

... and there was a commercial on for 'Child Fund'. For less than a dollar a day, they say, I can sponsor a child and get them clean water, food, basic medicine, and schooling. So, they're begging people like you and me to dip into our hard-earned money to fix the problem. Back of the envelope calculation, let's call it over $2 day - - $1,000 per year. How many children does the roughly $21 trillion US tax dollars spent to bail out the obscenely wealthy over 1 year work out to? 21 billion children. .... There aren't even that many children on the planet. That would be every child on the planet for the next 7 years. Of our tax money, given to really, really rich folk, while children die of bad water, not enough food, no medicine - and continue the cycle of no education and poverty.

ARE WE A FUCKED UP SOCIETY, OR WHAT?

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Saturday, February 26, 2011 5:23 PM

DREAMTROVE

Worse than that. Even Africa produces more food than it consumes. The problems for these people are being created by our fucked up society with its constant meddling.

Look at Haiti. We deforested the entire country, enslaved the population and periodically overthrow their govt. To make sure they never escape our claws of debt and death.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 1:59 AM

CANTTAKESKY

The causes of starvation and poverty are almost always political, not financial.

Meaning, you can't throw money at it and fix it. All money does is make their stay in prison or slavery slightly more comfortable.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 5:30 AM

KANEMAN

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
... and there was a commercial on for 'Child Fund'. For less than a dollar a day, they say, I can sponsor a child and get them clean water, food, basic medicine, and schooling. So, they're begging people like you and me to dip into our hard-earned money to fix the problem. Back of the envelope calculation, let's call it over $2 day - - $1,000 per year. How many children does the roughly $21 trillion US tax dollars spent to bail out the obscenely wealthy over 1 year work out to? 21 billion children. .... There aren't even that many children on the planet. That would be every child on the planet for the next 7 years. Of our tax money, given to really, really rich folk, while children die of bad water, not enough food, no medicine - and continue the cycle of no education and poverty.

ARE WE A FUCKED UP SOCIETY, OR WHAT?

Send em a fucking dollar then. Jeeze. Shit send ten and buy yourself a place in heaven. I'd send em a dollar but have you seen the price of gas? Obama has got to get gone.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 6:05 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Did the same back-of-the envelope calculation here too, along different lines.

Bill Gates, $50 billion. That would be enough to pay 1 MILLLION teachers $50,000 for one year, or 35,000 teachers $50,000 a year for 30 years. Each state would get an additional 700 teachers, on average.

Warren Buffet, $47 billion. Enough to upgrade critical areas of the Northeast power grid.

Jim and Christy Walton, $43 billion between them. Enough to replace about a quarter of our structurally deficient bridges.

Now, these people made their money off of an educated population with a more-or-less reliable power grid and transportation system. PCs would be worth dick without education. Walmart would be a nickel-and-dime store without being able to run their trucks over the many bridges between their centralized warehouse and their destination bigboxes. And all those "buy" and "sell" orders would go nowhere if the electricity was on only a random percentage of the day. The ones paying for all of this is US. But we're not benefiting.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 9:13 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Take that one step further, Kiki.

Consider the cost of these stupid wars, just on a purely financial level...
And then ponder how MUCH cheaper it would be to feed that whole damn country for a YEAR.

Think what might happen if we "bombed" them with food, clothing and clean water, while asking them to help stop all the bloodshed ?
But that doesn't finance the war machine, and those who profit from it.

Just as I repeatedly point out that Hamas, Likud, and so many over there are being exploited by their so-called leaders who don't WANT the violence to stop cause it keeps em in power, so too are we, although we like to deny it and pretend otherwise.

The real enemy isn't "over there", it's right here, in our so-called leaders, using fear and force by proxy to get what they want, which if you ask me, is the real source of terrorism.

-Frem

I do not serve the Blind God.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 9:25 AM

DREAMTROVE

Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
The causes of starvation and poverty are almost always political, not financial.

Meaning, you can't throw money at it and fix it. All money does is make their stay in prison or slavery slightly more comfortable.

Yes. Just about exclusively. Even when there is an economic angle, the economic situation was brought on by political agenda monkeys.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 9:32 AM

DREAMTROVE

Sig

Bill gates has given 28 billion to charity. Obama spends somewhere around that every week on war.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 12:19 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Sig

Bill gates has given 28 billion to charity. Obama spends somewhere around that every week on war.

Frem and DT, thank you.

Instead of bitching about the rich, what they don't pay ain't nothing compared to what we are wasting in war.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 2:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Then TAKE CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT. It's not hard. You HAVE a vote... or you would, if you lived here.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 2:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

dbl

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 2:54 PM

QUESTIONABLEQUESTIONALITY

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Then TAKE CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT. It's not hard. You HAVE a vote... or you would, if you lived here.

Fuck off. Send in your dollar and shut the fuck up.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 3:45 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Oh yeah, I see about the QQ troll.

You can give it a new name and try to put a fancy wrapper in it - but it still is a piece of shit and it still stinks up the board like a piece of shit.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 3:51 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Well, what I was casually muddling through was this: we have an economic and political system that not only allows this extreme inhumanity, it exists to enforce it, continue it, expand it. Since we can't really throw out the ultra-rich the only handle we can touch is government. And since we have the vote, the only reason it continues is because at heart we want it.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 4:03 PM

CANTTAKESKY

Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
Then TAKE CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT. It's not hard. You HAVE a vote... or you would, if you lived here.

Yes, it IS hard to take control of the government. Taking it over requires a HUGE number of people to agree on how to take it over and what to replace it with. This is, as you know, an insurmountable task when you are talking about 150 million voters amongst a population of 300 million people.

(I can vote through the American Embassy; living abroad is not a problem for voting.)

I don't vote. I don't think it is right for me to try to force you to live under my laws if you don't agree.

-----
I believe in voluntary governance, that everyone should live under exactly the kind of government they want to have.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 7:32 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

Yeah, I've always wanted to do that, sponsor a child somewhere, a good friend of mine did it when we were in high school.

DT: I'm not trying to change the subject here but you said that _we deforested Haiti, did _we really? I assume you mean we as Americans? Or do you mean we as something else? I need this point clarified because that has always irritated me how Haiti is a rutting wasteland environmentally while the Dominican Republic has rainforest and trees, what's up with that?

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Sunday, February 27, 2011 7:46 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Haiti was treated as an economic slave: large plantations were established and people had to strip-mine-plant the remaining and mostly unsuitable land for crop production to avoid starvation. Oddly enough, the DR had a completely despotic but highly resource conscious ruler who made conservation the law of the land, who also set up large forest reserves where no one could plant or poach - or else.

From various websites:

"The heavy deforestation of Haiti for the coffee and sugar plantations exposed the country to immense erosion turning much of this formerly fertile country into a wasteland. The damage can be clearly seen by aerial photographs. The boundary between Haiti and the Dominican Republic used to be called the green line as the deforestation literally followed the border. Today it is only a little less evident."

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Monday, February 28, 2011 5:18 AM

DREAMTROVE

Riona,

Depends on your definition of "we"

When Columbus took the land of Ayeti, (spelled Haiti in french) representing the western two countries of the island* and turned it into a slave colony, he brought in Africans to add to the local Taino Arowak population. He worked his slAves to death so many times over that there were no Taino in the country by the time he was through. Probably none of his original Africans either.

* Ayeti was actually the name used by the western kingdoms for the whole island, which had two other names in the east, but it became the name for that portion of the island under European rule.

Under the treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Haiti was given to France on account the people there spoke French, which was largely a result of pirates, not of really any serious French colonialism. The French held the idea that all Haitians were slaves, even through the revolt of 1802?

At any rate, the condition of haitian freedom was that the new country was to assume a debt to France equal to the cost of the slave value for all of the citizens. This debt would later be paid off by american corporations interested in farming the island. While not "slaves" technically under unofficial american rule, the nation of Haiti was perpetually in debt, and all work in Haiti was done to pay off the interest on the debt for their price as slaves, so it's fair to say they were never emancipated a such.

The US has done far worse than just continuously overthrow any govt. That the hatians set up and replace with another US puppet govt, which we have done for ages, and are still doing, but also, the banks of the US federal reserve have exploited the "debt" situation to destroy the island, under the auspices of the World Bank and IMF, which are not really banks, but global agencies for use by banks, in this case the members of the US Federal Reserve.

Payment was given to hatian peasants for charcoal, which they could exchange through a World Bank/IMF program to get money and/or food necessary for survival. The charcoal was gotten by burning down the native rainforest of the island under the direction of Rene Preval, puppet for Bill Clinton.

The NWO types really hate rainforests. Perhaps as a result of Vietnam, they can't see the ants on the surface, perhaps.

Anyway, this is what destroyed the island, much more than the agriculture, and it was done largely in the late 1990s. Sure, there had been deforestation going on for decades as a result of agriculture, largely the US sugar industry, but not this scale of wholesale destruction.

The fallout from this in part is Haiti's succeptibility to natural disasters now, due to the lack of stable food and water systems, and landslides from deteriorating topsoil.

To make matters worse, international agencies came in to build "housing for the poor" oh, so generous of them. This housing was small concrete cell blocks, stacked on top of one another, as a residence for the "workers." workers is a euphemism here, because these people will never actually be paid, and cannot opt not to work, as they have no food and water if they refuse (another reason the NWO might hate rain forests, they provide food, water and shelter, and in a climate like haiti's you can skip the whole urban labor world, or could, not anymore of course.

Anyway, during the earthquake, a lot of this housing collapsed because it was not built to withstand anything, and so the concrete just pancaked.

As set up by Obama, Under the administration of the Clinton charitable trust for Haiti, administered by the former president and with help from George W Bush (yeah, right. Seriously, I don't think Bush has done anything but wave to the people.) Haiti has switched control back to Rene Preval, the man who destroyed the country in the 90s, and has fallen into a system of even more exaggerate rule by the elites of Haiti, being those who supported US economic occupation in the past, who now are the only ones with access to medical care, etc.

Under this new system, over 300,000 people have died from famine and disease, in addition to the initial catastrophic losses of the natural disasters. Not that the last administration was anything to write home about, Bonafice Alexandre installed by George W. Bush ran death squads that slaughtered children. The US govt, under Bush, had demanded that Haiti "clean up crime" probably a directive from the World Bank, as crime is bad for business. Alexandre simply put a bounty on any fresh bodies killed recently, at $500 a head, and told his people to bring him 50,000 bodies, for which he paid, and then edited police records to make them posthumous criminals.

Anyway, the whole stunt with the return of Baby Doc was as I suspected a way for Preval to stay in power, by creating a false choice between his lawn hand picked successor celestine, and duvallier, who he knew his people would never be dumb enough to vote for. As a result, chaos ensued and Preval himself is still president.

If the Haitian people, their land taken from them, their environment destroyed, are forced to live in concrete prison cell blocks and tent cities, and work in exchange for food and the promise of medicine which really never comes except for the ruling elite, and they cannot leave, all because they, as a nation, have to pay off the debt which is now not technically called the slave debt, but is owed to the US banks for the money that said banks paid to France for the purchase price of the population as slaves... How are they not still slaves?

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Monday, February 28, 2011 3:36 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

That's rutted up, I knew the way-back-when stuff, with Columbus and the French, but I didn't know what role America had played in it. What a mess. I guess that Dominican dictator did something right, keeping the forest etc.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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