Money down the drain while people starve

At least 80 per cent of humanity lives on less than US$10 a day in countries where income level and urban-rural gap discrepancies are ever widening. Over 20,000 children die annually due to poverty and malnutrition. Wouldn’t the billions spent in 2012 to buy favour have been better spent on a universal humanitarian effort to start to bridge the chasm between the haves and have-nots? 

According to GlobalPost.com, President Barack Obama and pretender Mitt Romney spent a combined $30.33 every second of this election campaign, with a relentless barrage of photo-ops, pestering phone calls, hate mail and mass-media attack ads. The total spent for the election will exceed $5.8 billion. 

 USA Today reports that, in addition to Obama’s 4 million online small donors, the five largest sources of donations to his campaign came from, in order, employees of the University of California, Microsoft, Google, the federal government and Harvard University. Big donors have their own vested interest payback agendas, most notably bank behemoths. Mitt Romney’s five biggest donors were, in order, employees of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse Group – five of the largest and most influential banking corporations. More than $10 million received from Super PAC benefactors Sheldon Adelson and his wife was earmarked for the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Bottom line: a less timid approach to Wall Street would add transparency and regulation to previously opaque derivatives markets, which worsened the global crisis. Fair legislation should extend and expand the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Big banks continue to grow bigger and more powerful, their profits fatter than ever. Cash is king. So why not teach literacy and communicative competence to the nearly billion inhabitants of our planet unable to read a book or write their name?

Charles Frederickson                     

Bangkok