this makes me so angry i want to cry

[sophabaubles]

'the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day's spending in Iraq. The money the UK has given equates to five and a half days of our involvement in the war.'

taken from this article which if you give a sh*t about any of this, is worth a read imo.

Totally obscene isn't it?

Isn't it appalling? All that money... and it's not just the tsunami, I'm thinking of James on Child of our Time, being moved to that hovel of a flat with his mother.

Sandra Bullock however has just donated $1 million to the appeal and it seems she did the same after 9/11

Leonardo DeCaprio has donated a sizeable sum

(sorry not meaning to be a Pollyanna but I can't take any more bad news ATM)

I agree they should just wipe all debt for good, and that goes for our own too, as we still owe the USA a sizeable ammt I believe.....

I cannot believe how much they'll happily spend blowing things up. It's all wrong. Bloody men in charge - it's all war games and strutting, isn't it?

Message withdrawn

I saw gordon brown last night too KS and thought the very same.

Politics really aren't my thing by how hard can it be to just tear up the paperwork and say "Right this counrty owes us nothing now"

We're obviously not missing it if we can afford to spent billions murdering people elsewhere.

I've emailed that article to freinds and family as I'm disgusted TBH.

But even if the govts of the desperately poor Third World countries were permanently relieved at a stroke of all their debts, would they then spend the money saved feeding their starving and investing in their countries' health services/agriculture/infrastructure? It would have to be "policed", wouldn't it, and who would decide who would do it, pay for it and organise it?

The UN should be the organisation to do it but it needs shaking up a bit. Maybe something really good will come out of this disaster in the end...

I thought that the history of debt cancellation was fairly good, though admittedly where it is policed. Have a look at the Make Poverty History campaign .

That link didn't work, lm - will this one?

I am a guardianista on many topics, but debt cancellation is a trickier topic than many of its advocates admit. One problem is that, if lenders see debt being cancelled, they will not be prepared to lend in future, so there will be a one-off benefit, but the long-term problem of getting access to finance may be worsened. The history of conditional lending programmes also suggests that getting governments to comply with conditions put on debt cancellation would be very difficult, since the cancellation would precede the spending of the resources released.

This is all depressing reading

I just heard on the T.V this morning how spending more in Asia will obviously effect funds over here, amazing to read then how much was and is spent in Iraq and no bigging that ammount up for us

The bit about the homeless guy made me cry!

They can't just pull out of Iraq now though, can they? They've got to see the elections through at the very least. I mean, if they just let the insurgents take over now it would be a pretty awful insult to all the troops that have died. Andit wouldn't be fair on the Iraqi people.