It Shames and Diminishes Us All
One reason why idealism alone will never really change the world:
"The $40 billion written off [from the G8 summit] in July 2005 still leaves Africa with over $200 billion shackling its future. There are unseemly comparisons to be made. If it's Iraq, and the United States decides the debt should be cancelled, then with a snap of the Pentagon's fingers, as a peremptory order to the members of the Paris Club, 80 percent, or $31 billion, is written off overnight. Africa never receives such treatment. It's great to cheer now, but what about the terrible harm that was inflicted, for more than a quarter century, by virtually enslaving whole countries to the bondage of debt [the brilliance that was the Structural Adjustment Program, Reagonomics gone berserk].
As was written for the annual UNICEF "State of the World's Children" report of 1989, by Peter Adamson:
Three years ago former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere asked the question "Must we starve our children to pay our debts?" That question has now been answered in practice. And the answer has been "Yes." In those three years, hundreds of thousands of the developing world's children have given their lives to pay their countries' debts, and many millions more are still paying the interest with their malnourished minds and bodies...
Today, the heaviest burden of a decade of frenzied borrowing is falling not on the military or on those with foreign bank accounts or on those who conceived the years of waste, but on the poor who are having to do without necessities...on the women who do not have enough food to maintain their health, on the infants whose minds and bodies are not growing properly...and on the children who are being denied their only opportunity ever to go to school.
In short, it is hardly too brutal an oversimplification to say that the rich got the loans and the poor got the debts.
And when the impact becomes visible in rising death rates among children...then it is essential to strip away the niceties of economic parlance and say that what has happened is simply an outrage against a large section of humanity. The developing world's debt, both in the manner in which it was incurred and in the manner in which it is being "adjusted to," is an economic stain on the second half of the twentieth century. Allowing world economic problems to be taken out on the growing minds and bodies of young children is the antithesis of all civilized behavior. Nothing can justify it. And it shames and diminishes us all.
The quote from UNICEF was talking of the 1980s. It got worse in the 1990s. Nothing we have done so far to this point begins to compensate for the harm, the sheer wickedness of yesteryear."
excerpt taken from Stephen Lewis' "CBC Massey Lectures Series: Race Against Time".
*for those of you still cheering hosannas about the Live8 concert and subsequent G8 summit of last year, please read this book. You'll come to truly understand (the most you can without actually knowing much about politics) about all the people whose lives have been torn from their moorings, and whose future is in the hands, at least in part, of those who have always pretended to care, and have never really cared.
*this book, however, suffers from having too much of a bleeding heart, and not enough of reality. Also refer to Jared Diamond's "Collapse!" The chapters on Rwanda and the latter chapters in that book are a perfect and necessary foil for this book, which is sorely lacking in ceratin areas of reality.
"The $40 billion written off [from the G8 summit] in July 2005 still leaves Africa with over $200 billion shackling its future. There are unseemly comparisons to be made. If it's Iraq, and the United States decides the debt should be cancelled, then with a snap of the Pentagon's fingers, as a peremptory order to the members of the Paris Club, 80 percent, or $31 billion, is written off overnight. Africa never receives such treatment. It's great to cheer now, but what about the terrible harm that was inflicted, for more than a quarter century, by virtually enslaving whole countries to the bondage of debt [the brilliance that was the Structural Adjustment Program, Reagonomics gone berserk].
As was written for the annual UNICEF "State of the World's Children" report of 1989, by Peter Adamson:
Three years ago former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere asked the question "Must we starve our children to pay our debts?" That question has now been answered in practice. And the answer has been "Yes." In those three years, hundreds of thousands of the developing world's children have given their lives to pay their countries' debts, and many millions more are still paying the interest with their malnourished minds and bodies...
Today, the heaviest burden of a decade of frenzied borrowing is falling not on the military or on those with foreign bank accounts or on those who conceived the years of waste, but on the poor who are having to do without necessities...on the women who do not have enough food to maintain their health, on the infants whose minds and bodies are not growing properly...and on the children who are being denied their only opportunity ever to go to school.
In short, it is hardly too brutal an oversimplification to say that the rich got the loans and the poor got the debts.
And when the impact becomes visible in rising death rates among children...then it is essential to strip away the niceties of economic parlance and say that what has happened is simply an outrage against a large section of humanity. The developing world's debt, both in the manner in which it was incurred and in the manner in which it is being "adjusted to," is an economic stain on the second half of the twentieth century. Allowing world economic problems to be taken out on the growing minds and bodies of young children is the antithesis of all civilized behavior. Nothing can justify it. And it shames and diminishes us all.
The quote from UNICEF was talking of the 1980s. It got worse in the 1990s. Nothing we have done so far to this point begins to compensate for the harm, the sheer wickedness of yesteryear."
excerpt taken from Stephen Lewis' "CBC Massey Lectures Series: Race Against Time".
*for those of you still cheering hosannas about the Live8 concert and subsequent G8 summit of last year, please read this book. You'll come to truly understand (the most you can without actually knowing much about politics) about all the people whose lives have been torn from their moorings, and whose future is in the hands, at least in part, of those who have always pretended to care, and have never really cared.
*this book, however, suffers from having too much of a bleeding heart, and not enough of reality. Also refer to Jared Diamond's "Collapse!" The chapters on Rwanda and the latter chapters in that book are a perfect and necessary foil for this book, which is sorely lacking in ceratin areas of reality.
posted by kathleentse at 2:14 pm
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