Help Improve 3rd-World Lives

5. When offering help, ask the possible recipients of that help what they want and need; do not assume you have any idea what that might be. Far too often in the past westerner businessmen and government representatives have come barreling into poor nations placing blame in the wrong places and insisting that things be done their own way. Invariably such ignorance and self-righteousness is no help at all, further impoverishing entire countries, trying to overlay the maps of the American dream onto cultures for which that dream is completely unsuited.

4. Insist that the World Bank and the IMF repudiate all loans to poor nations. There are very few, if any, examples of success stories resulting from the massive amounts of money these two organizations started loaning poor nations earlier in the 20th century. In fact, it is quite clear that a long line of organizations (the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc.) were planned for in the wake of the Bretton Woods Accords after WWII, organizations whose sole purpose was to ensure the further impoverishment of most of the world and, in so doing, ensure the global domination of the west we see all around us now. Meanwhile, all the tractors loaned collect rust, with no fuel or maintenance available; millions upon millions of "peasant" farmers were displaced by the "Green Revolution" and they and their families now beg on the streets of big cities; atomized, disconnected models of human community have been appropriated from west to east. Just to mention a few deep-seated wrongs we all have to pay for one way or another.

3. Do not render 3rd-world people helpless by making them dependent on the oil (and oil technologies) which will soon be too expensive for any of us to get to. Part of the plans for global hegemony mentioned in #4 above included making sure that the 3rd world became more and more dependent on oil at just the right time: right when rich nations are beginning to compete with each other for what little oil remains accessible, leaving, of course, poor nations out of the loop, with yet more machines destined to rust away. And worse, no way of pursuing renewable-energy technology, the only reasonable choice for poor people, and a choice that the rich nations made in absentia decades ago for poor folks the world over: no, you can't have any support for renewables because they don't have the potential to make money for anyone in the west.

2. Mandate education, especially for women. It has been shown over and over, possibly most famously in Kerala state, India, that improving even just literacy rates alone in a given society/culture improves the well-being of all people within that society, men, women, children, the elderly, everyone. In particular, related to #1 below, when women become more and more literate and more and more aware of their own natural rights, improvement is seen in every aspect of society, from commerce, to healthy children, to participation in social and political undertakings of real import.

1. Allow women total control over their own reproductive rights. Again, over and over and over in the last 50 years, it has be shown, without question, that when women are allowed (what should be seen as rights as natural as the right to an opinion) to make their own decisions about whether or not to have children, how many children to have, whom to have children with, etc., the lot of society as a whole improves by leaps and bounds. When men make those decisions, either personally or by way of government and religion, every member of society suffers for it, in too many ways to count. Check out Care for more information on this critically important topic.