[alphamale]

[/quote]
You may not agree with the choices, but sickening? Please.

As far as Bono, IMHO the guy does publicity work for an important cause. Leaving aside the fact that you'd be surprised how little taxpayer money actually goes to Africa, the issue is largely one of scale and coordination. Western governments generally provide economic aid to the developing world in small, politically palatable, chunks. These small portions of aid are not enough to bootstrap the developing nations out of crushing poverty to the point where they can begin to grow their economies on their own, so of course that money just vanishes down a sinkhole. Bono's goal, essentially, is to popularize the cause of the developing countries to the point where aid packages large enough to get the job done (one estimate I've read is 134 billion dolars from the developed world to the developing world over the period from 2005-2016) are politically palatable in the West. You can question his effectiveness, and I personally don't think he's had a large enough impact to be person of the year, but his goal is both necessary and noble.[/QUOTE]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's sickening because he is an emotional, ego-tripping amateur. The small portions of international aid often end up in the bank accounts of dictators (e.g. food-for-oil/ Saddam). The forgiveness of debt has a down side, because it is roughly like an individual declaring bankruptcy - it makes them a bad credit risk in the future. The worse thing about the forgiveness of debt issue, imnsho, is that it diverts attention from the REAL issue - that african states are largely ruled by corrupt authoritarian thugs. Take e.g., Zimbabwe. By driving out white farmers whose families had worked the land for seven generations, Mugabe changed that country from a food exporter to a den of starvation. If anyone REALLY wanted to help that country, they would execute an Iraq-style invasion of the country, and drive out the facsist element. Likewise for many african states. The problem is not outside their resource-rich countries, it's inside them.