Checking in on our New Millenium Resolutions

Not sure if you knew that in September 2000 189 governments (including the USA) gathered at the United Nations to write The Millennium Development Goals (MDG). The MDG outline steps to create a more just world by 2015.

On September 25, the United Nations hosts a High-level Event on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) during the General Assembly. We’re now at the midway point to the 2015 deadline set to achieve the MDG. High food and fuel prices and the global economic slowdown threaten progress on the goals now. Will the MDG go the route of my New Year’s resolutions? [Did I even make a New Year's resolution?]

The Millennium Development Goals intend by the year 2015 to:

1. ERADICATE EXTREME HUNGER AND POVERTY by cutting in half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. Update: 1.2 billion people still live on less than $1 a day. But 43 countries, with more than 60 per cent of the world’s people, have already met or are on track to meet the goal of cutting hunger in half by 2015.
2. ACHIEVE UNIVERSAL PRIMARY EDUCATION by ensuring all boys and girls complete primary education. Update: 113 million children do not attend school, but this goal is within reach; India, for example, should have 95 per cent of its children in school by 2005.
3. PROMOTE GENDER EQUALITY AND EMPOWER WOMEN by eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education. Update: Two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women, and 80 per cent of its refugees are women and children. Since the 1997 Micro Credit Summit, there is progress in reaching and empowering poor women.
4. REDUCE CHILD MORTALITY by two-thirds for children under five. Update: 11 million young children die every year. That number is down from 15 million in 1980.
5. IMPROVE MATERNAL HEALTH by reducing the rate of maternal mortality by three-quarters. In the developing world, the risk of dying in childbirth is one in 48. But virtually all countries now have safe motherhood programs. Will there be progress?
6. COMBAT HIV/AIDS, MALARIA AND OTHER DISEASES by halting, and beginning to reverse, the spread of these diseases. Update: Killer diseases have erased a generation of development gains. Countries like Brazil, Senegal, Thailand and Uganda have shown that we can stop HIV in its tracks.
7. ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY by reducing by half the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, reversing the loss of environmental resources, and improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers (by 2020). Update: More than one billion people still lack access to safe drinking water; however, during the 1990s, nearly one billion people gained access to safe water and as many to sanitation.
8. DEVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT. Too many developing countries are spending more on debt service than on social services.

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.
Everybody’s crew.
Marshall McCluhan

A global chorus of voices is calling to make poverty history. We have the resources, we have the knowledge, but do we have the will?

What would it take to make them a reality?

photo caption: Bolivian friends, among the world’s poorest people, pose with me–their (nerdly!) North American visitor–on their patio.

Crossposted at Border Explorer’s place.

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Did you celebrate Colin Powell Day?

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council to push for war with Iraq. Powell’s speech, as we now know, was full of lies. His speech was entitled: Iraq, failing to disarm. He even had a nifty slide show for the attendees. Behind him sat George Tenet, then head of the CIA.

No one fact-checked Powell, no one bothered to ask questions. It was accepted as fact by pretty much everyone. Bush had been beating the war drums for quite some time prior to Powell’s speech and the MSM fell right in line. The MSM did their job by selling us the war, and they did it very well:

CNN’s Bill Schneider said that “no one” disputed Powell’s findings. Bob Woodward, asked by Larry King on CNN what happens if we go to war and don’t find any WMD, answered: “I think the chance of that happening is about zero. There’s just too much there.” George Will suggested that Powell’s speech would “change all minds open to evidence.”

The Washingotn Post’s liberal columnist, Mary McGrory, wrote that Powell “persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” She even likened the Powell report to the day John Dean “unloaded” on Nixon in the Watergate hearings. Another liberal at that paper, Richard Cohen, declared that Powell’s testimony “had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool-or possibly a Frenchman-could conclude otherwise.”

For the skeptical, Powell’s speech was the turning point. It was a slam dunk and BushCo was quite happy with the fact that even moderate and liberal pundits fell right in line after hearing Powell’s speech at the UN. The week prior to Powell’s speech, more than two-thirds of the nation’s leading editorial pages, E&P had found, called for the release of more detailed evidence and increased diplomatic maneuvering. After the 80-minute speech, there were no more doubting Thomas’s. Powell’s speech filled with lies changed our lives and those of all Iraqi’s forever.

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