NEWS: Tsunami Aid Pours In While "Tsunami A Week" Africa Is Forgotten

i think maybe we should pour all that aid back into america. we have homeless kids,starving families,crappy minimum wage,and old people with no means to live quality lives because health care sucks. why must america jump in and give out funds that we don't even really have? i think if all countries were responsible for their own people first,may in a few centuries the world would be right. just a thought.

This is sort of a touchy moral subject. I have a fairly thick-skinned pragmatist side; I just finished saying the what Africa needs is years of war and genocide. All the same as a half-way decent human being I'm always at least a little conflicted when it comes to a choice that somebody is going to suffer for, or which pits to things I believe in against one another.
I do believe as you say that we have a right and a responsibility to provide for ourselves, and we do have needs still. On the other hand, I think that if there was anything we could do for Africa that would really make a difference, we would have to think very hard about doing that before we worried about raising the minimum wage for Americans who already have food, homes, and relative safety as compared to conditions in Africa.

My way of thinking is that Africa's best REAL bet isn't for us to dump money into them anyway- we just need to be willing to pay a little more for certian resources in the name of fair play.
Africa has the oil and mineral assetts including diamonds, they have the fertile ground, they've got everything they need, but it's not all under one economy. Nobody is growing food because most of the world will only pay for luxuries like coffee, tobacco, and opium. So they farm luxury items and sell for cash so the rich few can buy imported foodstuffs while the people starve. Then because theirs no real food to buy in the area the oil and mineral resources get sold for cash so that those people can buy imported foodstuff for the rich while the majority starves.
Suppose that somebody helped organize a viable African economy though, and the West stopped throwing money and firepower at anyone who threatened to rock the boat. Now the same economy controls both the farmland and the oil. They grow the food and tell the outsiders to sod off on the luxury crops and they can sell the oil for the cash they need. On top of that they can trade good produce to neighbors now for more resources to trade to the outside world. Now of course people in the area who have been cut off from fresh perishables before are gonna want a piece of that, and now you're looking at the development of a shared transportation infrastructure among the African nations and maybe even the middle east.

Bottom line, all we have to do is stop raping them and maybe help them consolidate a little and the economy there will grow. Of course we're not going to tollerate that. If they tried it we'd make sure that mad-cow found its way into their countries post riki-tik, if we didn't just flat out sanction them or invade them under false pretenses.