'STOLEN CHILDHOOD' on Aaron Brown Newsnight (CNN)

[AirAmFan]

Anyone watching? Bueller? Kathy Lee? What do you think?Brown is focusing on a film that took 7 years of surreptitious work to make, all over the world. A mere $8 billion dollars a year would suffice to educate ALL the children of the world through primary school. Meanwhile, 250 million children are being exploited, some being sold to owners for as little as $5.A film website just was mentioned: http://www.stolenchildhoods.org

[bufffbison]

1. watching it now

saddens my heart to see this... we're in a country fighting for oil, while children in other countries are forced to work with no pay, and no life.... where are the christian morals in that?

[AirAmFan]

4. Too bad the filmmakers' webmaster evidently is squandering much of

tonight's publicity. I've verified at google that I typed in the URL correctly in the lead-in, but I keep getting "Service unavailable". Probably not enough bandwidth was arranged for tonight's surge of interest.

[bufffbison]

6. gee

perhaps someone could knock on bill gates door asking for 8 billion dollars to pay for these children's education..

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MSFT

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=MSFT

[canuckforpeace]

2. Just finished watching it.

A very powerful piece. The best part was when Brown was interviewing the filmaker and he said (paraphrased) "they way to fight terrorism is through education and eliminating poverty "

8 billion dollars a year to give every child in the world a primary education. A drop in the bucket compared to what is spent on WAR!

[AirAmFan]

3. Good point--education is key

Just think what a well-funded UN Primary Education Fund could accomplish, by setting and enforcing minimal world standards for primary education programs that would get continuing UN funding every year.

There would be many fewer madrasas and other schools teaching only hate and superstition. Meanwhile, President Stupid has the US moving in just the opposite direction, with "vouchers" for teaching hate and superstition at US taxpayer expense.

And I was taken with what one of the panelists said about not just banning products in developed countries that were made by poor children in the third world. Sure, in 10 years the garment industry has made child labor unprofitable in the rag trade. But children have just shifted into other trades, or into something worse (like prostitituion). Banning the fruit of child labor has to be accompanied by education funding to end child exploitation for good.

[deadparrot]

5. It's not even that much.

$6 or $8 billion dollars to give every child a primary education.

Not bad, when you consider America alone is spending $86 billion in Iraq.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. True about the Islamic fundamentalist schools

They have stepped in in Middle Eastern countries where the government doesn't provide free schools or doesn't provide them in all towns and neighborhoods.

[AirAmFan]

8. This is the kind of work Bill Clinton reportedly wants to do, as UN chief

Just imagine the positive imprint Big Dog would leave on the world by raising trillions of dollars for the UN and using them to implement research-based antipoverty and antiwar solutions like this one.