Michael Parenti Quotes

Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country.

It is more difficult to fight poverty in a rich country than in a poor one.

A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts.

Foreign aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

Is this Nation stating it cannot afford to spend an additional $600 million to help the developing nations of the world become strong and free and independentan amount less than this countrys annual outlay for lipstick, face cream, and chewing gum?

People from the world's richest countries should be prepared to accept the burden of debt reduction for heavily indebted poor countries, and should urge their leaders to fulfill the pledges made to reduce world poverty, especially in Africa, by the year 2015.

While other countries may espouse the liberal utopian dream of a global community, it's usually only to get the richer countries to pay more money for the world's problems.

Global inequality is such an abstract concept, simply because there is no global government. Telling people in rich countries who have had no increase in real incomes, stagnant median wages and so on, that on the other hand global inequality is going down because people who are much poorer than them are getting richer - it's something that maybe they would like in an abstract sense, because everyone is happy there are fewer poor Chinese, but you may not be as happy if these Chinese are taking your job.

We are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.

In a system of free trade and free markets poor countries - and poor people - are not poor because others are rich. Indeed, if others became less rich the poor would in all probability become still poorer.

If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.

Where do people earn the Per Capita Income? More than one poor starving soul would like to know. In our countries, numbers live better than people. How many people prosper in times of prosperity? How many people find their lives developed by development?

Poverty is not inevitable. It is a human ill that we can fight if we decide to do so together.

It's well proved economics that if a country which is rich and a country that is poor come together in global trade, sooner or later the standard of living of the poor country will go up towards that of the rich country.

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

What must a poor nation do when its very sustenance depends on the remains and bits that the nations gracefully throw them, once they have had their fill…. Our planet is rich enough to provide for all of us, so why this tragic war for life which has been clouding our lives for generations?

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.

The developing world is poor. It needs capital.

What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries?

When the World Economic Forum was established in 1971, the global population was four billion, of which 50% lived in poverty.

Same way we have enough money to bail out Wall Street, we need to put a down payment on Main Street.

Foreign aid, though less than 1% of the annual federal budget, is often a hard case to make to constituents who are rightfully worried about domestic and economic issues.

Countries are poor not because their people are lazy; their people are 'lazy' because they are poor.

More paper money cannot make a society richer, of course, – it is just more printed-paper. Otherwise, why is it that there are still poor countries and poor people around? But more money makes its monopolistic producer (the central bank) and its earliest recipients (the government and big, government-connected banks and their major clients) richer at the expense of making the money's late and latest receivers poorer.

We pay billions - hundreds of billions of dollars to supporting other countries that are in theory wealthier than we are.