Passing Off Debt To People Who Make Less Than Two Dollars A Day
Passing Off Debt To People Who Make Less Than Two Dollars A Day
Last year’s G8 summit was going to â€make poverty history,“ and world leaders agreed to cancel the debts of 18 impoverished countries in Africa and Latin America.
This year, with skyrocketing world oil prices, energy will top the agenda of the summit. But rather than working to build on last year’s promises, G8 leaders are undermining those efforts by pushing increased oil investment in developing countries, despite research showing oil production actually increases a country’s debt burden. (See American Progress’ comparison of debt savings to cost of oil here.)
And what about debt-burdened countries that don’t have domestic oil supplies? Spiking oil prices hit their economies the hardest — an estimated ten times as much as the United States. For many well-performing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the increased cost of oil in 2006 will exceed the budgetary resources freed by debt relief:
– Tanzania will save $140 million through canceled payments to the World Bank and IMF, but it will have to pay more than double that amount on the increased cost of importing oil.
– Sierra Leone will spend almost twice as much this year to cover the hike in its oil bill as it will on health and education services for the entire country.
Passing this burden off to people who make less than two dollars a day is neither a viable nor moral way to handle the energy crisis that the world’s poorest countries face. The G8 countries shouldn’t be spreading their oil addition to others. A better solution is making investments today in an affordable and clean energy future for these countries, a future that preserves their environment and natural resources and ensures a capacity to absorb the shocks of fluctuating global energy markets.
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Sounds good.
July 15th, 2006 at 4:33 pm…A better solution is making investments today in an affordable and clean energy future for these countries…
sad that this is still having to be considered… should’ve been on that road decades ago… some tried…
July 15th, 2006 at 4:39 pmhey! john stossell should be at the G8 summit – he has a great idea!
Stossell: Legalize Organ selling
By: John Amato @ 2:28 PM – PDT
John Stossell was on—-Drum roll please—Cavuto and tells us that organ selling should be legal.
sorry, rebecca…
July 15th, 2006 at 5:52 pmLook, I’m not arguing with all the report but some of these claims are extremely counter-intuitive. When you read the report, you see that it’s not the oil that’s the problem but fiscal mismanagement. It’s akin to saying “the lottery is evil because when poor people win they tend to blow the money on wild spending binges” … the problem isn’t the lottery, but the manangement of capital.
Here’s the first two claims of the report.
1) Increaing oil production leads to increasing debt.
2) Increasing oil exports leads to increasing debt.
So … if everyone is still with me … if a country has a valuable commodity with super high demand … that country will gain debt? Anyone else think this is ridiculous?
1) Given Iran, Venezuala, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, etc. are literally swimming with cash, how do the authors state the above? Remember, they’re establishing a relationship between debt and oil … I’d think they’d want to clarify by saying 3rd world country oil, but even Venezuala refutes that.
2) There’s a difference between correlation and causation. Fiscal irresponsibility and ignorance have nothing to do with the prevalence of oil … the authors note this by saying “fiscal folly” is partly to blame, but they instill insist that the oil and not the ignorance about managing capital is the problem.
Perhaps the authors could call for appropriate monetary structures and capital budgeting be put in place, but that doesn’t appear to fit into the environmental concerns of the authors. This entire report seeks to limit the VERY PEOPLE THEY SAY THEY’RE TRYING TO HELP by placing an arbitrary attack on the commodity and not the necessary skills to manage the commodity. HELLO … if the author’s are truly concerned about the Tanzania’s of the world, why attempt to deprive them of the opportunity to manage their oil and thus manage their debt?
I can only assume that this doesn’t fit into the progressive mindset of avoiding further development of fossil fuels. THIS is a very real danger of the “Global Warming is 100% caused by human activity crowd” … they can’t fix the real problem (and thus actually help the poor countries) because the “oil is the problem”.
Anyone else read the study and have a different take … please don’t flame me if you don’t read the study. If you think my conclusions on Global Warming are wrong, fine … but read the study and see if you disagree ….
- Cheers
July 15th, 2006 at 9:12 pmI know that I am gettinf off subject here but I need to type this comment where more people will readit.
Here is a question I have to ask that was brought up on both Alternet.org and tompaine.com:
Why is it that when we Liberals write books, we always write books that are sustained critics of a Conservative politician or a particular Conservative policy? Why is it that no Liberal author has written a book that is a sustained critiqe of the entire Conservative ideology itself?!?
I mean it! Conservative pundits and celebrities make a living writing books that attack the Liberal ideology as a whole as well as those that attack Liberal celebrities. I believe that it is time that we Liberals start writing books that attack the Conservative ideology in it’s entirety. We will have to start doing it sooner or later anyway. There is nothing stopping us.
Here are some good titles for such a book:
Conservatism is a form of Brain Damage
July 15th, 2006 at 9:48 pmConservatism: The Ideology of the Dark Ages
Right-Wingers: Ignorance is Bliss
Why is it that when we Liberals write books, we always write books that are sustained critics of a Conservative politician or a particular Conservative policy? Why is it that no Liberal author has written a book that is a sustained critiqe of the entire Conservative ideology itself?
Conservatives point this out as well. I’m of the opinion “liberalism” and “conservatism” are labels that generally define a person’s outlook … they neither “work” nor “fail” in and of themselves. There is a vast continuum wherein these two concepts sit oppositely. People fall all along the continuum … one can lean conservative but adhere to liberal social standards (e.g. like small government but be anti-death penalty).
Conservatives 1) tend to feel that liberals tend to lambast anyone out of “lock-step” (e.g Lieberman) which seems less than progressive of them and 2) usually attack liberal methodolgy and not ideology (at least, that’s what I’ve observed). Liberals can do the same … they haven’t tended to (they focus too much on ideology or the faults of the individual … which is what you’re calling for). Truthfully, the two sides are very necessary to keep a proper balance … this is the beauty of the system. When one side screws things up, the people tend to reward the other at election time. This back and forth has gone on for decades.
My two cents …
July 15th, 2006 at 10:09 pmThis is a place to discuss the minimum wage as well as any. Short term workers colect from $10 to $15 per hour in this section of FL, no FICA, no W2s – just a cash transaction. Raise the mininum wage to $20 and we could tax the poor!
July 16th, 2006 at 12:31 amWorldwide poverty is a terrible thing, but Bush will never do anything about it, since he is turning America into a poverty stricken third world nation too!
July 16th, 2006 at 1:13 amWorldwide poverty is a terrible thing, but Bush will never do anything about it, since he is turning America into a poverty stricken third world nation too!
You’re gonna have to add some stats to give that meme wings … what could you possibly be talking about? Taxes? Government Spending? What?
July 16th, 2006 at 12:26 pmThe main function of the World bank and the WTO is to exploit poor countries and make them servants of rich countries.
July 16th, 2006 at 3:27 pmSo its not enough that we lend these nations money and sort of forget to ask for it back. Now we should install solar panels on their huts. Why not rid the poorest nations of their number one enemies–the socialist or otherwise corrupt regimes which allow no freedoms, no rights, steal all of the money and keep entire populations in poverty. Leftist regimes and dictatorships fail every time they are tried. Freedom and capitalism work. If the left should ever realize this, all of these nations would benefit.
July 16th, 2006 at 4:58 pmi’m nothing if not stubborn… this infor was posted yesterday at #7, evidently deleted (?)…
in answer to Comment by Matthew J. Price — July 15, 2006 @ 9:48 pm
the oped piece needs to be bookmarked…
How Conservatives Have Become Authoritarians and What it Means
by John Dean
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_john_dea_060710_how_conservatives_ha.htm
Conservatives Without Conscience
July 16th, 2006 at 6:25 pmby John Dean
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670037745/ref=ase_httpwwwfutuor-20/002-9693123-0115214?redirect=true&s=books&v=glance&n=283155&tagActionCode=httpwwwfutuor-20
We’re making a living off their continuing interest payments, not their repayment of the principal – just like feudal lords did from peasants and American plantation owners from sharecroppers. That’s the Conservative system that kept people in poverty in most of the world for thousands of years. Yet “freedom and capitalism” in the form of American military aid and coups have supported feudal lords and plantation owners in these countries:
Guatemala – hundreds of thousands of peasants murdered out of a small population.
South Vietnam – a Catholic minority of 10% of the population (according to a booklet distributed by our military to our GIs there) supported the killing of over a million non-Catholics who spurned their rule.
Philippines – under US domination and a pro-US dictator, the Philippines went from the 3rd highest GNP in East Asia to near the bottom, down with those Commie countries.
These examples largely apply to El Salvador, Indonesia, Zaire, all supported by the US, all anti-Communist, with tens and hundreds of thousands murdered. And all but Indonesia have just as much poverty as they did before America got involved there.
So either there’s something very wrong with America’s belief that feudal landlords are friends of freedom and capitalism, or maybe, just maybe, our leaders have no intention that these populations ever get out of poverty. Why, after all, would that be in the interest of the corporations whose money controls both American political parties?
I heard a story that makes far more sense than right-wing cliches. Seems that when the Philippines was a US colony, FDR not only granted it limited self-government with a scheduled independence in 1947, but he allowed that government to restrict foreign, even American, ownership of its corporations. The Filipinos thus remained loyal to us against the Japanese invaders at a horrible cost, over a million dead. By 1947 the country was still ruined, and only US aid could fix it. But through the Bell Act, Truman’s government forced the Filipiinos to amend their constitution to allow Americans to own whatever they pleased in the new nation and restricted its sovereign right to restrict trade – or it woudn’t get that reconstruction money. As an independent country, the Phillipines was more of a colony than it had been under FDR. Was this not intentional? Is it surprising that the same landlord families still rule the same peasant families there today?
Yet in West Germany, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, we faced the imminent threat that the poor would turn to Communism where it would really hurt us, so we let them operate by a completely different set of rules than we use in Latin America. Believe it or not, there was extensive foreign ownership of industry in Japan before the fascist era there. Ford made cars there, and there were more foreign names on Tokyo billboards than now. Then Herbert Hoover’s party destroyed the Japanese economy with a tariff act, the fascists claimed that Western capitalism had shown its true exploitative face, and it was on to war. But under the American occupation, American businesses were kept from seizing the economy. No post-war Japanese car company had American ownership until the 1970s. The Japanese were encouraged to confiscate and redistribute land and raise food for their consumption, not export as the IMF and World Bank and cash-hungry landlords demand elsewhere. They were encouraged to manufacture anything they could export. That’s called “value added”. They were also allowed to cheat massively on free trade. In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-Shek was forced to learn his lesson and it became one of the most economically egalitarian societies in the world. South Korea was given US aid to build factories and produce weapons to fight Commies. Instead they made cars and TVs. I always wondered about that. Note that in both Taiwan and Korea the old Japanese landlords had fled, creating de facto land redistribution.
It’s these countries that created the model of “capitalism” that other East Asian states imitated. But by the strict religious dogma of neo-Victorian capitalism now preached by Washington, those states were the worst of heretics and blasphemers.
Why did we not offer this deal to Latin America? Because our corporations knew that a dozen more successes like Japan would mean the end of our empire? Now it’s China’s turn, and America is scared.
Here’s the statistical truth which cannot be denied by anyone: everywhere in the 3rd World outside of East Asia, the number of people living on about one dollar a day has increased. Communist China is the only place where large numbers of people have progressed to making two dollars a day. We rule all the 3rd World, thru the Pentagon, IMF and World Bank, except East Asia. I dare you bastards to say that the delay is because two billion poor people are contaminated by socialism (but not in Red China?) and must be cleansed from the gene pool.
Maybe the answer is much simpler. The benefits of capitalism go where the rich want them to. If everything of value in your country is owned by a feudal landlord class or foreign investors, then you’re screwed. Because I guarantee you the landlords in the Philippines and Latin America despise their own poor citizens, think of them as animals, and think that Americans are some kind of master race who should be imitated in all things. Would foreign owners be any better than that? It’s treason. Wherever America takes the side of those groups, it helps them suck money out of the country for Swiss bank accounts, imports of Mercedes, and US stock purchases. In those rare countries where capitalists are true nationalists, as in Japan and Germany and Korea, it looks very different.
Now it’s becoming America’s turn to be owned by soulless foreigners and treasonous aristocrats. Poverty rates are growing, our public goods are decaying, and no one has even begun to grasp the speed at which our debt is growing to keep us afloat. Hope you enjoy our Filipino Century.
July 16th, 2006 at 7:27 pmSo it is somehow a bad situation for poor countries without oil to be importing it at high prices driven by supply-side restrictions, but developing oil supplies in other poor countries to increase supplies is also bad.
You got an email address for the Tanzanians we can use to tell them to stop using oil or do you maybe want to figure out WTF your point is before posting ?
And no, suggesting poor and technologically backward countries develop alternative industrial energy resources which are not viable even for first world countries doesn’t count, especially when not even you are willing to suggest this seriously.
July 17th, 2006 at 6:46 amSherri Myers
In some academic fields, most journals now offer the reviewer the option of remaining anonymous or not, or a referee may opt to sign
March 27th, 2008 at 5:09 pmdebt leads
Good post. I am looking into these issues on my blog.
April 5th, 2008 at 6:20 ampay off debt
As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment spam now exist in many weblog publishing systems.
April 10th, 2008 at 10:03 amAaron
You weave a web of lies! Lies I say.
April 11th, 2008 at 8:17 pm