Originally posted by: rchiu
Originally posted by: Craig234
Perhaps the most important issue for humanity, we all but never see any construvtive discussion about it here.
So, let's see who has any good plan.
You can use whatever you want - tough anti-illegal immigrant enforcement, war, new political setups, you pick - but show it will be good for the people of the world.
Sadly, the real point of this thread is to show how bankrupt our political culture is on this issue - how we can bicker over every little bit of garbage, hundreds of posts about two acticvists who entrap a couple of people into helping with with advice on prostitution, somecrazy thing a pundits said, but all we get is 'it's not our problem' on global poverty.
Anyone who just says 'it's not our problem' and isn't concerned with looking for what can be done is IMO amoral at best, and not much of a member of the human race.
Has our culture degraded to that point, that there is no concer as the richest country in the world for the rest of the human race?
I know private charity provided a helpful couple drops in the bucket; if you want to push that, show how it can be increased by orders of magnitude.
Leading anti-poverty people talk about 1% from the advanced nations as making a huge difference. I don't see a problem with that approach.
So, let's see, who has a plan? Only plans are invited, not excuses why to ignore it, not arguments about what our current small foreign aid efforts do.
The last new big thing we did was the Peace Corps - helpful, if modest.
Some say we're on the verge of people becoming more expensive than what they contribute and that this will lead to policies letting many lose their lives to disease, etc.
Other - better IMO - tools include land reform, birth control, and encouragement of the development of local industries.
I work for an international development finance institution with the goal to help its developing member countries reduce poverty and improve the quality of life.
The organization provide loans, technical assistance, grants, advice and knowledge to developing countires. The organization provided over $11 billion in loans/grants and technical assistance in 2008, and in addition provided experts in economic, infrastructure, agriculture, finance, and environment to help member countries with project to improve their countries and reduce poverty.
Yes there is tons of politics here, just like UN, World Bank member countries from the developed countries are more interested in winning bids for those project than actully helping the poor. But the end results is the same, project gets done, infrastructure gets built, developing government gets advice, and poverty level gets reduced.
IMHO, you can b!tch about poverty or how all these organizatin are ineffective or full of politics, but until you actually do something about poverty you have no right criticizing those who actually give an effort. Those of us who are actually doing the work knows the system is not perfect, there are tons of politics, but at the end of the day, if some people got help, we've achieved something.