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May 18, 2004
The background picture
People ask me about the background picture. Those are school kids in Wamale, Ghana and the picture was taken during the relatively heavily publicized trip to Africa by AIDS activist Bono and former treasury secretary O'Neill.
At the time of the visit Ghana's debt burden was about $3.9 billion. About 19.3 percent of its export revenues went to the never-ending servicing of that debt -- all the while one child in ten died before her fifth birthday.
According to my rough calculations O'Neill was trying to collect roughly $215 from each and every one of those kids. (Per capita income in Ghana was around $290 at the time).
I put that picture up not simply because those kids are sweet, like all kids everywhere, but because I think we all need to be reminded who we're demanding payment from. Read all the economic analysis, World Bank papers, Financial Times articles and what-have-you regarding the debt crisis you want -- and I do read them. It all comes down to something this simple and this uncomfortable: we are loan sharks and those are our victims.
I wrote a short bit about the media coverage of that trip in Extra!, the media criticism mag published by FAIR, but I see that it's not online. I'll dig it up and put it up.
Posted by zeynep at May 18, 2004 02:37 PM
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