A. THE TRAGEDY

Half the world lives in luxury and half in miserable poverty. This tragedy is unnecessary and in recent years has become a contributing factor to terrorist activity. It has been truly established that extreme poverty causes social and political instability, presenting breeding grounds for terrorism.

Peoples having suffered centuries, even millennia, from abject poverty are susceptible to be recruited as terrorists. The Mid East is not the only area with a large human pool of this kind of potential recruits.

Especially this is true when the recruits can be persuaded to believe that the other half of the world is living immorally, exports that immorality into the recruits’ nation’s culture, and is rolling in luxury with surplus goods much of which it wastes, destroying or disposing of it at great cost rather than give it to the desperately needy peoples. Terrorism has blossomed in this age partly because the communications revolution has provided the means for these slanted persuasions to be copiously applied, producing the required degree of hatred.

Of course many terrorists are well educated and some quite wealthy, but they are the organizers not the foot soldiers, and they need many recruits to form a political and military base for over-throwing existing governments, and need an environment of empathetic humanity which will tolerate, cover for, contribute money to, and generally support the terrorist organization. Without bribes that the organizing group gives to their families, there would not be as many willing participants in suicide missions. And without extreme poverty these bribes would be less compelling.

Likewise, illegal drug trafficking would be less attractive if there were less extreme poverty and more remunerative jobs, both of which TRANSFORM promotes.

Terrorism and wars with weapons of mass destruction increasingly become more likely the longer this situation exists.

Beyond the terrorism issue, the world’s overall economy is unnecessarily limited from progressing toward its full potential because of half the world’s people remaining unproductive and permanently dependent on foreign aid. Humanitarian considerations alone justify an effort to relieve the tragic situation.