There's been so much coverage about Obama and McCain, but what's the president been up to?
Today, President Bush attended the White House Summit on International Development in which various topics including disease, hunger, illiteracy, and development were discussed. These main concerns pointed towards the current global financial crisis and its major impact on developing nations. Decreased aid towards these developing nations is likely to result in decreasing funding for the numerous programs, such as those fighting against HIV/AIDS, working for development. Yet, President Bush and Secretary of State Rice strongly urged for nations to avoid cutting the aid budgets going towards these developing nations.
Why?
1. The U.S. and industrialized nations have power to help the less fortunate, so thye must use this power.
2. Stopping investments in the international order would affect all and make everyone poorer.
Bush also mentioned his support for free trade as "the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known." He appealed that trade is essential to economic prosperity for bad times like now.
By making it clear that he believes the US and other industrialized nations should commit to their aid obligations, Bush is trying to show the world that the US isn't completely falling downward with the economic crisis that it is currently dealing with. It's an attempt to show that the US is still powerful enough to be also paying attention to those "less fortunate countries"
I'm thinking the US people and government are pretty busy with the numerous economic problems and that some other "richer nations" are going to have to scale back aid due to the economic crisis. It's true that aiding developing countries is important, but will the US and other countries be able to continue to commit to it? How badly will the economic crisis affect global development?
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6 comments:
We might want to, you know, fix our own country first.
Also why is the government aiding developing countries important? I wouldn't mind charity support, but we have too many problems in our own country to be wasting even more money.
The current political crisis in the United States began with the fraudulent election of GWB, a nefarious attack to democratic principles, as endorsed by the US Supreme Court, so no wonder there is both a political and a financial crisis now.
If the US government (at least the incoming administration soon after taking office) doesn't incarcerate a significant number of white collar criminals in the US and impounds their assets (both from the private and the public sectors; entrepreneurs and politicians alike, at the highest levels, whether members of the Illuminati clan or not) who are to blame for unfair business practices, political corruption, insider trading, favoritism on juicy war and other public contracts, self demolition of buildings and institutions, abusive secrecy about relevant information and technology that should be made public for the advancement of mankind (i.e. the Disclosure Project), including all sorts of tax / financial simulation and manipulation schemes, which combined blatant crimes have led the US to this collapse, and whose conduct is legally sanctionable by law and in equity, so as to demonstrate that there are rooted solid principles in the US legal system, sufficiently strong and valuable to shelter those main street citizens who abide by decent standards of living, and to punish wrongdoers until they repair the damage, with punitive and decisive action, the conclusion is simple: NO MONETARY BAILOUT WILL EVER BE ENOUGH FOR THE US TO REGAIN CREDIBILITY, because it is conducted at the expense of innocents and for the shared benefit of criminals. That is abuse of power … pure and intolerable injustice. If the Judicial system remains a silent puppet, just as the two other branches of government have clearly become noisy ones, the free fall of this crisis will not end, because what is being done is simply immoral, no matter how it is labeled or justified.
THE WORLD URGENTLY NEEDS A MORAL BAILOUT, and both the US Executive branch and the Legislature (composed of politicians mostly interested in their selfish careers, and not in the common good as public servants) don’t seem to have a clue of what that means or how to implement it, except with more of the same which wont solve the roots of the problem.
It is the Judiciary (not composed of biased politicians but by persons of allegedly good moral character with standards of ethical behavior), through the Supreme Court, the branch of government that is constitutionally in charge of administering Justice, so IT IS ABOUT TIME FOR THE JUSTICES TO DO THEIR JOB and save us all from what is coming.
Regardless of the merits, the US achieved international respect when President Nixon was impeached, which led to his removal from office after Watergate. During the last few administrations all kinds of lies and deceit by Presidents in the US have not been sanctioned and have not only been tolerated but continue to be even applauded, with a much worse component of dishonesty than the Nixon era, including shameless ridicule, so the outcome is exactly what we have and where we stand right now: economic, political and moral decay.
If a country has the government it deserves … there's no more time to waste and the US as a country should regain worldwide credibility, because further delays in taking effective action with a principled bailout will unfortunately turn over governmental leadership to others abroad, just to save those few liable criminals in-house (politicians and bankers), and that will be at the expense of freedom and international peace, let alone the continued bankruptcy trends of the US economy and its political system, fundamentally due to more than obvious moral insolvency from the top down.
Eric Coufal, Esq.
Attorney and Counsellor at Law
admitted to practice in Mexico,
and in the United States by the
New York and New Jersey Bars
I do believe that we should fix our own nation first, but i also believe that we should still send aid to "less fortunate countries". If we all of a sudden stop giving aid, those countries will be in more and more trouble with no help. And by that time, it might take a lot more to help than if we continued sending aid now.
I agree, but although it is a good idea to help other countries in need, the U.S. needs to first worry about themselves. I mean, what will happen if the U.S. continues to give aid in this current financial crisis? What will happen to our already dwindling economy? We can't help anyone if we can't help ourselves.
Most people seem to feel that we need to fix our own country first, before we worry about fixing other countries, but to me that just seems short sighted and, quite frankly, pretty selfish.
We have to face the fact that we are a global society now, there's no returning to the days of isolationism. This latest economic crisis is a good example: it began in the US and very rapidly spread around the world. If the US has that much negative influence, we should be able to have much more positive influence if we try. Aid to other countries serves to create stable, economically viable nations who can serve as trading partners and political allies.
Also, to say that our country is "broken" is an extremely spoiled way of looking at things. I'll admit that I used to have semi-frequent bouts of despair as to the declining state of our nation, but to say that we're "broken" is quite frankly ridiculous. Zimbabwe is a broken nation. Pakistan is rapidly approaching broken nation status. America is nowhere close to broken.
This is exactly why we need to continue committing aid to other nations, because we CAN be a force for good and right in the world in a time when there are very few other countries that can.
Nicely said, Garret.
The economic crisis is indeed a great problem that the US is dealing with now, but we're not the only ones being affected by it. It's a global crisis. And who else besides the US is powerful enough to deal with its own problems, yet also encourage others to continue aid? If the US stopped paying attention to the developing countries that it has been helping, other countries would most likely do the same. I mean, they've got their own problems that they want to deal with too. Then, the countries needing aid would be left with nothing-not a good way to go.
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