G8: Pony up the effing money already, dammit!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt8osdUQypE
“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
— Frederick Douglass

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

With less than a month to go before the leaders of the Group of 8 nations gather at a Baltic Sea resort in Germany for their annual summit meeting, Bono, the rock star and antipoverty campaigner who helped sweet-talk, cajole and otherwise persuade them to make commitments to double aid to Africa, says most of them have fallen behind on their promise.

Falling behind on a commitment to double aid Italy, France and Germany have what the report by Bono’s advocacy group, DATA, called “a particular crisis of credibility.” Bono said in a telephone interview yesterday that their failure to increase aid has been masked behind artificially high debt-relief write-offs.

Excluding debt relief and adjusting for inflation, DATA, which stands for Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa, calculates that Germany’s aid to Africa has grown only 2 percent since 2004, France’s has fallen 1 percent and Italy’s has decreased 30 percent.

France praised the group’s detailed report in a statement, but disagreed with its exclusion of debt relief. “The freeing up of resources previously dedicated to debt service allows developing countries to increase spending to reduce poverty,” it said.

Spokesmen for Germany and Italy in Washington said yesterday that they would reserve comment until the report is formally released at a news conference in Berlin today.

In its country-by-country analysis of aid to Africa, DATA found that the seven wealthy nations in the G-8 — the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan (the other member is Russia) — have increased aid by less than half of what would be expected to reach the goal they set in 2005 to double aid to Africa by 2010.

Japan and Britain have increased aid enough since 2004 — 62 percent and 40 percent, respectively — to be on the right path to achieving the goal, DATA said. It said the United States had fallen behind in 2006, but seems to have gotten back on track since the new Congress, controlled by Democrats, adopted a 2007 budget that gave President Bush even more than he requested for Africa — at least an extra $1 billion, mostly to fight AIDS and malaria.

FOR THE FULL STORY (NYTIMES.COM) CLICK HERE

FOR A RELATED REPORTER FROM REUTERS, CLICK HERE

FOR DATA’S STATEMENT ON THE G8, CLICK HERE