Let them eat cake!

BBC: The UK Chancellor Gordon Brown has put forward a bold plan to tackle poverty in Africa ahead of the G8 Summit of rich countries in Scotland next month.

But the plan is facing opposition in the US - and particularly from President George W Bush.

The UK is one of six European nations who have pledged to increase their aid target to 0.7% of GDP by that year, a figure which only five countries have managed to reach so far.

However the US has said that the target is not a realistic one for it to work towards.

The gops are outraged when a vegetable is taken off a feeding tube, but when a whole continent is starving, who cares?

I'm not quite sure what the logic is behind their lack of support for debt relief. I mean, if you put it in their terms, if a government has more to invest, the country will develop. A whole new cheap labor force for outsourcers and a fresh market for foreign direct investment appears. The countries right now are paying out more money for loans than they are taking in revenue. It's pretty difficult to collect taxes from people who live on less than a dollar a day. I guess it's that whole gop aversion to helping people. I mean, it's not like we need the money, right? We can just borrow theoretical money and plunge the US further into debt.

It is interesting that the world democracy movement seemingly going on right now may actually come to backfire on the Bush administration. Strangely enough, calls for democracy in the Middle East have woken people who are already living in democracies. The no votes against the EU Constitution are one example. The rise of grassroots politics in the US is another. Despite my criticism of the rise of the religious right in this country, I am still fascinated by that rise. The left, too, has seen a drastic increase in grassroots participation, epecially in the form of Meetup.

The world's people have grown tired of the elites. (Well, some of them.) Despite the fact that a bunch of coddling rock stars are putting on a concert, the feeling is not one of those Don-Henley-plants-a-tree-at-a-school moments. With the exception of a select few, rock stars are normal people, only wealthier. The fact that they are putting together a concert to raise awareness rather than money is a huge development in rock star causes. Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaigns will have a different effect on the cause, meaning they will have an effect. The first Live Aid raised $200 million, not even enough to pay off a day's debt payment in Africa.

The voice of the people has shaken the political structures of Europe. The US is still behind the times because its citizens have the false belief that American democracy is not suffering serious problems, but they are waking up, especially since oil prices continue to climb. The last few months of American politics have shown that Bush is not infallible, and the power-at-all-costs attitude of the gops is vulnerable. Americans are not a stingy people. If you explain to them the basics of the problem, they will jump on board to help, and with people like Brad Pitt as a spokesman, there has already been a lot of curiousity and interest. Fox and ABC have agreed to play the commercials for free, oddly enough.

If the US wants to continue to be a world leader, it needs to lead. Bush would be wise to take this opportunity to do it.