[The] idea of $25 billion for Africa suddenly doesn’t sound like so much after a $700 billion bailout in the United States or $2 trillion in bank guarantees in Europe. We’ve just been making choices to ignore the poor rather than calculations based on real resources available. We made a choice to let millions of people die and not honor our commitments. The crisis doesn’t change our quantitative ability to follow through. And now, I think everyone is more of a macroeconomist than they were before. They can evaluate for themselves that it’s just not a lot of money compared to the amounts mobilized in recent weeks.
In that argument, Jeffrey Sachs makes a fantastic point--we always offered excuses that we didn't have $25 billion to help out the poor in Africa. Anti-malarial medication, mosquito nets, TB medication, .... any of these was met with the same argument that we can't keep throwing money in Africa.
Well, hello, and we now have consensus that Uncle Sam is ready to spend 800 billion dollars to bail out banks and their bankers? The hypocrisy is too damn evident. But, as Ralph Nader likes to point out, as long we play a game of going back and forth between tweedledum and tweedledee, there will be only one message for the poor, whether they are in Africa or anywhere else: so long, suckers :-(
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