The Daily Warning

I wasn’t a particular fan of Bush during his Presidency.  There was one thing he did that I thought was a much bigger deal than anyone gave him credit for was his efforts to fight AIDS in Africa .  I didn’t know about it during his Presidency, I only found out about it when reading his approval ratings in various other countries and saw that he had 67% approval in Tanzania, but it’s by far the best thing he did as President (which is probably why the media didn’t cover it at all).

Now the Global AIDS Alliance is saying that President Obama has missed four pledges he made to boost funds to fight AIDS in Africa, along with education programs and poverty reduction.  First, a pledge to dedicate about $6.7 billion under his own Emergency Plan to Fight AIDS has been cut back to just over $5 billion.  He had also promised to dedicate about $2.8 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, which he rolled back to $1.8 billion.

As a product of these cutbacks, an estimated 1 million people won’t receive treatment for HIV and 2.9 million women will miss out on the services to help prevent passing HIV on to their children.

Think about that.  1 million people.  In contrast, that’s like 9/11 over 333 times.  And that’s before you even start to count the children getting infected by their mothers.

I’ve typically stradled the fence between being an isolationist and an internationalist.  I’m a free trader in the idealist sense, but I think realistically a more accurate model would be regionalism 1st globalism 2nd (like we’ve seen in Asia and South America).  I’m not a neoconservative, for two reasons.  First, I think our military exists for our defense, and using it for the defense of others is inherently imperialistic in nature.  That said, I recognize that we have interests, security, trade, and other outside of our borders that we need to address, which leads to my second issue with neoconservatism, it’s not an economic use of our resources.  Which takes us to fighting AIDS in Africa.

In the developing world there is the overwhelming image of America being an exploitative force.  In Nigeria Shell worked with the corrupt Nigerian government to extract oil from under an oppressed minority group, which completely destroyed the environment there due to oil spills, and the Shell executives hired security guards which essentially killed members of that minority group with impunity.  That’s just one example.

And we have to do those things.  The only way nations develop is through their economy.  Look at our own industrial revolution.  If you’ve ever read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle you saw that horrific and corrupt seeming shit went down.   People worked 18 hour days for almost nothing in extremely dangerous conditions, children worked long hours, think of industrial machinery now and then imagine how dangerous they must have been 100 years ago.

Then compare the quality of life of someone living in poverty in the United States, having gone through that process, to the quality of life of someone in an unindustrialized nation.  A paper by the Heritage Foundation summed it up nicely with these statistics:

46% of all poor households own their own homes

76% of all poor households have air conditioning

Only 6% are overcrowded, more than two thirds have more than 2 rooms per person

Nearly three quarters own a car, 30% own 2 or more

97% have color televisions, over half have 2, 62% have cable or satellite

And there is ultimately access for everyone to a relatively advanced level of medical care, and no starvation.

In contrast, 8 million people die of starvation every year globally.

This isn’t to diminish the plight of the poor in America.  It’s making the relative statement that shows that rising tides eventually raised all of the ships.  This is how industrialization works, it’s really a pretty horrible process, but it’s necessary in the development of the economy.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t help.  It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s in our best interests.  The undeveloped world allows us to save literally millions of lives.  That helps global relations.  Under President Bush we spent about $650 billion in Iraq .  He spent no more than $30 billion in African aid, which represented a tripling of the amount of aid we sent to Africa.  Ultimately I think there is a victory in each, in Iraq we are seeing the development of an independent democracy in the middle east, but a lot of people died in the process and it has cost $670 billion so far.  In Africa President Bush was able to provide a lot of help to probably millions of people who are living in conditions most of us can’t imagine, for 4.6% of what has been spent in Iraq thus far or 3.4% of the stimulus package.  Spread out over 8 years.  We could spend all of what President Bush spent throughout his administration in 1 year, and it would represent less than one percent of President Obama’s proposed budget.  There are many projects I am all about nickle and diming them, aid to Africa is absolutely not one of them.

There are problems with African aid.  A lot of the AIDS medication gets stolen and put on the black market.  Also, there is an increasing problem with people crushing up AIDS medication and smoking it in spliffs to get high.  Apparently it could create a strain of super AIDS resistent to our medication, because smoking it doesn’t get enough into your blood stream to fight the AIDS, but it’s enough to expose the AIDS to the medication, allowing it to develop immunity.  It’s essentially giving the AIDS a vaccine to our medications.

And that is what happens when you have this kind of poverty.  Regardless of what we do, eventually Africa is going to get its shit together.  Maybe not in our lifetimes, but eventually it will, and when that happens, we don’t want to be answering to them why we were just extracting resources and didn’t really care enough to help them out when things couldn’t possibly be any worse.  I’m not a welfare state guy, I’m about as far from a bleeding heart as they get, but it is absolutely ridiculous how bad things are in a lot of Africa.

In fairness to President Obama, it does still represent an increase in our aid to Africa.  It’s over $6 billion, which is the most we’ve ever given.  The outrage isn’t about that.  The outrage is what he’s using his political capital for.  He got elected promising to dramatically increase the rate of aid to Africa, which may not have mattered much to a lot of people, but it meant a hell of a lot to some.  We can get into relativities like “Well he’s increasing it by 50%, that’s pretty dramatic”, but it’s still less than one quarter of one percent of the official budget.  This is one of the most significant things going on.  This is about saving lives and saving capitalism.  This should be one of the highest priorities in our foreign policy.  Poverty breeds theft, socialism supports theft, capitalism rejects theft, which do you think a starving person is going to choose.  A starving person can’t eat how good things will be in 30 years.  The places where socialism has thrived ideologically have been impoverished places that were really screwed up by colonialism.  Unless we play a vital role in getting Africa on track, there will be an increasing drive towards socialism, which will in turn hurt both us and them.

So for the love of God, don’t nickle and dime us on this Mr. President.

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