We Have the Resources to Defeat World Poverty
Although I read The Times’ Commentary section daily, I cannot remember a more important piece than “If We Cared to, We Could Defeat World Poverty” (July 9). The writers are in positions that give them inside knowledge of the subject -- the world’s poor. Yet without naming names or politically slanting their opinions, their message is blatant. Voters here and in affluent nations abroad need to question the billions of dollars spent on military intervention rather than on food and medicine.
Was President Bush’s aid to Africa to fight AIDS a timely curtain to hide the lingering war in Iraq? We citizens of the rich countries need to be paying attention before casting our votes. We need to ask where our tax money is being spent.
Mary Meyer
Pasadena
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In the commentary there was not one mention of Third World overpopulation or high fertility rates, which are inextricably connected to poverty. How can anyone take this piece seriously? We can flood the world’s poorest countries with billions of dollars and all our good intentions, but until they stop inundating themselves with children, we might as well just dump our money down a rat hole.
Our current administration won’t deal with overpopulation because it kowtows to its fundamentalist ideologues, but what is The Times’ excuse for running a litany of articles and op-ed pieces about poverty, desperate human migrations, ecological degradation and other dire conditions in which the writers never even mention, much less discuss, the biological engine that drives these world miseries?
Jim Dawson
Hollywood
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This commentary seems right on the mark! We as a country must keep our promises and agreements to and with these poor countries as well as with the wealthier nations if we are to have credibility in the world. We as a nation have so much. How can we not give them a hand up? What better way is there toward peace, justice and prosperity for the world?
Gwendolyn Fyke
Anaheim
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The problem is not how much money the Western democracies contribute. The problem is how to keep the Third World despots from absconding with the money.
Jim Norvell
San Jose