Missing the Point About Live 8
In the aftermath of Live 8, the cynics took center stage. Do any of these refrains sound familiar?
"Yet another self-promotional feelgood crusade by multimillionaire rock stars."
"Why does it seem as though we're always throwing money at these people and nothing ever comes of it?"
"They're so corrupt, the money all gets stolen before it reaches the people in need"
If people took the time to actually consider the message of the event, perhaps they'd change their tune to something a bit more hopeful.
Unlike Live Aid, which was an urgent appeal for famine relief, Live 8 was a much more sophisticated political effort to eliminate third world debt.
Why eliminate third-world debt? Nobody's campaigning to cancel my debt load!
Imagine this scenario: Someone mugs you in broad daylight on the square. You file a police report and cancel your cards. The next day, you learn that your bank, at the request of the thief, has raised your credit limit to one million dollars (in exchange for oil drilling rights on your property). If this happened to you, wouldn't you be just as angry with your bank as you are with the thief?
That's exactly what has happened, writ large, throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Without the complicity of Western financial and military interests, Mobutu and Abacha would never have ravished their people. We victimize them three times: First by enabling tinpot dictators, secondly, by keeping their economies prostrate as we collect interest accrued during tyranny, and finally, to add insult to injury, we look at their misery and chalk it up to moral failure or cultural deviancy.
The good news is that the G8 countries have agreed to write off the debts of 18 impoverished African nations. So there. Rock Stars 1, Cynics 0.
"Yet another self-promotional feelgood crusade by multimillionaire rock stars."
"Why does it seem as though we're always throwing money at these people and nothing ever comes of it?"
"They're so corrupt, the money all gets stolen before it reaches the people in need"
If people took the time to actually consider the message of the event, perhaps they'd change their tune to something a bit more hopeful.
Unlike Live Aid, which was an urgent appeal for famine relief, Live 8 was a much more sophisticated political effort to eliminate third world debt.
Why eliminate third-world debt? Nobody's campaigning to cancel my debt load!
Imagine this scenario: Someone mugs you in broad daylight on the square. You file a police report and cancel your cards. The next day, you learn that your bank, at the request of the thief, has raised your credit limit to one million dollars (in exchange for oil drilling rights on your property). If this happened to you, wouldn't you be just as angry with your bank as you are with the thief?
That's exactly what has happened, writ large, throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Without the complicity of Western financial and military interests, Mobutu and Abacha would never have ravished their people. We victimize them three times: First by enabling tinpot dictators, secondly, by keeping their economies prostrate as we collect interest accrued during tyranny, and finally, to add insult to injury, we look at their misery and chalk it up to moral failure or cultural deviancy.
The good news is that the G8 countries have agreed to write off the debts of 18 impoverished African nations. So there. Rock Stars 1, Cynics 0.
