Headline Aug27,2012 /

"YOUR PLANET.YOUR COUNTRY.
YOUR FUTURE.YOUR CHOICE!"

The difference between Great and Ordinary students is less formal intellect than Insight and Courage.

A great student understands the essence of the problem; the ordinary student grasps only the symptom. I have a growing sense that the Students of the World are slowly coming along and are working themselves into the mental frame of understanding the present and planning for the future. The odds favour the students prevailing we played our cards well, if we remained focused and firm. Then every single student of the world will have a platform, a voice, and a great democratic model for the world to follow, and maybe, and maybe, build a better world for the future students!

Just over forty years ago, the rich world took to shame, and began in earnest to figure out what it could realistically take to help the poor world. A commission set up and led by the former Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson came up with the number 0.7. Here is what it means and how they arrived at this decimaled figure. They reasoned that there should be a transfer of about One percent of GNP from the Rich to the Poor. That's one dollar out of every Hundred.

They said the public sector will do some, and the private sector needs to do some, and that it should be about a seventy-thirty split. So that's where the seventy cents came from. And this formula then was proposed to be adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in 1970. The U.S. resisted this for a very long time. The U.S. didn't want to sign on even when the rest of the world did. Now fast forward to March 2002,  and the world's leaders met in Monterrey, Mexico, at a conference, that President Bush attended. And this conference adopted something called Monterrey Consensus, which upheld the 0.7 target.

This time, the United Sates signed on to it. But the American signature came after a long, detailed negotiations. The U.S. finally said, Okay, it's only seventy cents anyway. And the agreement it signed said this, in paragraph 42: "We urged developed countries that have not done so to make concrete efforts towards the target of 0.7 percent of GNP as official development assistance." All students please, check it out, paragraph 42.

Then in the fall of few years later, at the United Nations, the American President said that it is dangerous to American Security when countries are not achieving economic development. They become unstable; they become seedbeds for terror, for violence, for every single major ills of the world. The whole U.S. a national security doctrine says that "development is one of the pillars of national security. There's actually nothing wrong with what these tough, self-interested  types in foreign policy have been saying, because what they have been saying is that it is completely within America's national interest to be helping in these circumstances!

So important is this post that SAM Daily Times will display it for two consecutive days. Please share and link forward.

Good night and God bless.

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless