Watch this guy get called "racist"... it'll happen

But the goal of aid is NOT to help Africans...it is to make us feel better.

Aid to Africa is just like our own current welfare and other social support systems. Why should people work for anything if they can get it for free. The "war on poverty" in America has been a 40-year long fiasco, the only way to make it worse would be to turn it over to the UN.

I wonder ... has anybody tried microloan programs?

--|PW|--

"Help as betrayal." Mr. Shikwati is a courageous soul finally to come out and say it. I hope his cry for self-determined survival spreads far and wide within Africa and to the rest of the world.

Another example during the cold war years in Africa - the West poured in money while the USSR and China poured in guns and false hope... more African countries turned to communism than democracy. The people's hopes for a better life betrayed again.

In 1997 I went to Kenya with 5th Special Forces Group and we conducted a Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) in the northern part of the country. We set up clinics and treated the bushpeople and their livestock for 30 days.

During this trip I spent hours talking with people from all walks of life in Kenya, and I was amazed at the rampant corruption, beggary, and tribism that pervades the entire society. The country is led by 3 tribes that own every business, are educated, have every well paying govt. job, and controls all of the financial institutions. At the time I was there, the president Daniel Arap Moi's picture was on every denomination of Kenyan currency. There are also 3 tribes that are either unemployed or getting by on the fringes of society.

The consensus attitude of the Kenyans in the "power tribes" is, "I got mine." Period. We performed a minor surgery on a woman at a clinic that was managed by a man who was like a nurse (power tribe job). Before we left to go to a different location we stocked the clinic with supplies and showed the nurse how to care for our surgery patient. As soon as we left, we got word that the nurse closed the clinic, loaded up all of our supplies and drove straight to Nairobi to sell them. The truck drivers with us were saying, "We could have told you that would happen." They didn't bat an eye.

I tried to suggest the same things, generally -- depose despots for starters rather than collect more money for them -- but my site was then trolled by someone "channeling" a false Dr. Martin Luther King under the guise of bringing "healing" to my site.

I'll never understand the futility that occupies many among liberals. Poverty is a problem of the mind and spirit and from the looks of things, poverty just got a lot of encouragement from a lot of spiritually impoverished entertainers (some aren't, I realize, and the WHO comes to mind here).

We should all be generous -- that's not my point otherwise and the live8 events at least helped bring this issue of poverty to the forefront -- but the issue of poverty isn't a trendy one, and is difficult to challenge and solve and the worst thing that can and often does take place is that entertainers make the issue trendy and then like trendy people everywhere, it's quickly abandoned when another trendy thing comes along (and the same entertainers then log onto).

And, DER SPIEGEL is (again) proven to be a great source of editorial content...has become a weekly read of mine.