Make Lunch, Not War

Whooee! Well friends an' foes, the new UN chief Ban-Ki Moon, is up on his hindlegs warnin' the world what's gonna happen if we don't get busy and feed the hungry folks who's sufferin' on accounta the high price of food. People will die. Governments will fall. Commodities speculators will get rich. That ain't so much a prediction as it is an assessment of what's already happening.

The UN World Food Program has said it needs an additional $500 million right now to avert catastrophe. The US came through with $200 million. Maybe that sounds like a lot of money. It ain't.

Every single day, 365 days a year, the US spends over $380 million on the war in Iraq. $200 million is what the US spends on the Iraq fiasco in about 13 or 14 hours. Every 13 or 14 hours.

If the US Iraq military spending was cut by less than 1% and the money was diverted to food aid, the threat to global security would be reduced considerably. Not only that, thousands and thousands of starving people would be able to eat enough to live. And, not least of all, the US would be hailed as saviours and heroes, instead of being damned as killers, occupiers and exploiters.

Us Canajuns ain't spending ourselves into bankruptcy quite as fast as our Merkin neighbours. We're spending $1 billion a year in Afghanistan. That's about $2.7 million per day. On war. Meanwhile, First Nations folks in Canada are rejoicing over a recent announcement of $330 million to provide clean drinking water on reserves. That's about the same amount of money that Bruce Power is over budget on refurbishing a couple of nuclear reactors; about the same amount we spend in the failed Afghan mission every 4 months.

I saw a bigass report on one of the big Merkin TV network news shows last night where they was all in a flap about the price of pizza goin' up. It's kinda tough to sympathize when we know that the poor bastards in Haiti are eatin' dirt just to get something into their aching bellies.

A couplafew days ago, I posted up a boog story entitled, McGuinty: "Let them eat dirt." In today's Trawna Star, I see my title is bein' reduced, re-used and recycled: Let them eat dirt?

I don't mind 'em usin' my paraphrase from Marie Antoinette's famous quip. Today's title, "Make Lunch, Not War", comes from an old hippie anti-Vietnam War slogan: "Make Love, Not War". The MSM is welcome to adopt it.

JimBobby