I just bought "Confessions of a Economic Hit Man" and after just

[rainy]

the first chapter, all other discussions seem irrelevant. This is the most important issue, and, until this it fixed, this method of controlling the natural resources of poor nations, the world will be hell on earth. This makes me so sad and leaves me with a feeling of such hopelessness as the problem is so large and our of sight. Anyone here think this can be turned around in our lifetime?

[knowbody0]

1. reality sucks, huh.

there's a pattern all over the globe, mostly white people taking non-white people's stuff for centuries.

[rainy]

2. yea, now when I hear the common Repubs vs Dems talking points

it seems so irrelevant and it is just too much to try to explain to people. I feel like they will just look at me like I'm crazy.

[knowbody0]

3. the worm is turning

by the year 2020 the USA will be only half white. All of Latin America is uniting, we've turned the entire Arab world against us, and Asia owns us.

[calimary]

5. Speaking of talking points -

This is something we usually take an economic hit for. We need to figure out how to meet this challenge also:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2918082&mesg_id=2918082

humbly submitted...

[Jcrowley]

4. A comment

This is my sig line:
If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the systems for wealth creation which create poverty by robbing the poor of their resources, livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty history, we need to get the history of poverty right. It’s not about how much more we can give, so much as how much less we can take.

See this two-minute video:
&t=OEgsToPDskLIYneljw8nkoBrNzN32IaO

The days of cheap energy are long gone and this means much more than can be covered in any talking points.

We have seen expressed in innumerable ways over the centuries but it comes down to stealing vast amounts of other people's stuff and thusly their lives in order to prop up the western development model of economics.

Sure America's the most heinous of agents here in the early 21st century but all Western nations are gobbling up the planet at breakneck speed and other nations outside the West are emulating (Being forced in some instances) the same omnicidal patterns of growth.

The current system has already begun to collapse under the weight of its ecological excesses, and here's where we can help. Having transferred our loyalty away from our culture's illegitimate economic and governmental entities and given it to the land, our goal must be to protect, through whatever means possible, the human and nonhuman residents of our homelands. Our goal, like that of a demolition crew on a downtown building, must be to help our culture collapse in place, so that in its fall it takes out as little life as possible.

Discussion presupposes distance, and the fact that we're talking about what is appropriate tells me we don't yet care enough. There's a kind of action that doesn't emerge from discussion, from theory, but instead from our bodies and from the land. This action is the honeybee stinging to defend her hive; it's the mother grizzly charging a train to defend her cubs; it's Zapatista spokesperson Cecelia Rodriguez saying, "I have a question of those men who raped me. Why did you not kill me? It was a mistake to spare my life. I will not shut up. ... This has not traumatized me to the point of paralysis." It's Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Nigerian government at the urging of Shell, whose last words were, "Lord, take my soul, but the struggle continues!" It's those who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. It's Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and Geronimo. It's salmon battering themselves against concrete, using the only thing they have, their flesh, to try to break down that which keeps them from their homes.

Do you sufficiently feel the loss? So long as we discuss this in the abstract, we still have much to lose. If we begin to feel in our bodies the immensity and emptiness of what we lose daily - intact natural communities, hours sold for wages, childhoods lost to violence, women's capacity to walk unafraid - we'll know precisely what to do.

Actions speak louder than words.

[rainy]

8. What should be my first step?

[applegrove]

6. For 30 years people have been screaming that aid should come

in the form of grants (not loans) and multi-laterally (no tied aid..where the USA gives irrigation systems bought from American corporations). For 30 or 40 years people have been complaining there are hidden or obvious costs to that wrong type of aid.

Buying aid products locally creates capacity in terms of local business. It also infuriates American business. One of the reasons why the USA has been so upset with the UN for 20 years. Because the UN is a multilateral aid agency that started to make the changes and tried to hire and buy from third world countries with local procurement first policies.

The aid game changes year after year. New catch phrases inspire and then are tweaked again if they fail. In the late 1980s it was "girl child education" that was put up as the most important thing. Then micro-banking. Now local & on the ground expertise sites for farmers that train and monitor communities in their area on how to best farm the land (or run a business).

As with everything...what matters most is the productivity of farmers and if they have a well and perhaps a cell phone to actually make a living off of farming above subsistence (actually many farmers in many places are below subsistence levels).

I haven't read the book. But there is not one thing that is wrong about aid. There are many things. Just as there are many things that work. Grants for instance, with accountability policies to match. Scientific study into the diseases and crops grown in certain regions.

I think the reason why I haven't read the book is because there is so much out there ..written by people who were never undercover operatives like this guy claims. Give "The End of Poverty" a chance. That is a great book. So too the stuff written by De Soto.

[rainy]

7. I'm coming back to read all of this. I have to walk the dog now.

Thanks for all the above. I can't wait to get into it.