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<DIV>"Jack Parkinson" <<A href="">isthatyoujack@icqmail.com</A>>
Wrote:<BR><BR>> there is no country on earth where 7 cents an hour<BR>> is
sufficient to meet a person's basic needs.<BR><BR>That is true, it is also
true that is no country on earth where 7 cents an<BR>hour will not get you
closer to fulfilling a person's basic needs than ZERO<BR>cents an
hour.<BR><BR>You claim to be a great friend of the poor but you say I should
fire 99 out<BR>of 100 of my employees and give all their salary to the
survivor. You say<BR>Wal-Mart and its customers are villainous for
encouraging sweat shops, so<BR>let me propose a little experiment; go to
Bangladesh or some other such<BR>hellhole and tell a worker there that you are
lobbying to have sweat shops<BR>such as his shut down and see if he really
thinks of you as a friend. On<BR>second thought it would be better not to go
there personally because they<BR>will try to lynch you.<BR><BR>> I
didn't suggest dividing the wealth of the world.<BR><BR>Well why not?! You said
before that there was already PLENTY of wealth in<BR>the world and that the only
problem was that rich people were just too<BR>stingy, I said the basic problem
was there was not enough wealth in the<BR>world and we should concentrate on
making the pie bigger not squabble<BR>about how to cut it up; are you conceding
that I was right and you were<BR>wrong?<BR><BR>> $25 billion is adequate for
basic food, water and medicine for everyone.<BR>> This is not a lot of
money<BR><BR>Forget 25, 250 billion couldn't provide just medicine for 300
million<BR>Americans for just one year, much less food AND water AND medicine
AND for<BR>all 7 billion people on the planet. However I have nothing against
charity,<BR>I think it's fine, but to suggest that's all that is needed to solve
the<BR>problem is crazy. World poverty will be eliminated someday and
probably<BR>sooner than most people think, but when a full accounting of that
glorious<BR>achievement is made charity will amount to little more than a
rounding<BR>error.<BR><BR>> If terrorism (and rioting for that matter) are
the radical extremes of<BR>> massive discontent - eliminate the
discontent.<BR><BR>Making nice to Islam will not reduce their anger one iota
because the root<BR>cause of that anger is not any specific action committed by
the west. They<BR>are angry at us for what we are not what we did. They would be
less angry if<BR>the foundation of the west was dogma, even some dogma they
didn't like,<BR>instead it is based on free markets and pragmatic problem
solving (the<BR>scientific method) and that frightens and angers them. They
would be less<BR>angry if our system just didn't work very well, but we're rich
free and<BR>powerful and they are poor oppressed and weak.<BR><BR>800 years ago
Islam was the most advanced civilization on Earth but its been<BR>straight
downhill since, today they are not even second or third but dead<BR>last; we
have the word of The Profit so it can't be our fault, it must be<BR>due to those
evil westerners, our only mistake was embracing too many<BR>new 16'th century
ideas, we should go back to the good old 13'th
century<BR>ideas.<BR><BR> John K
Clark<BR><BR><BR></DIV></BODY></HTML>