B. TRANSFORM CONCEPT REMEDY

Of course, military power has a major role in putting down terrorism. But we need an improved system of providing aid to and re-building nations including those that have to be conquered, damaged, and/or overrun, in the interest of counter-terrorism (like Afghanistan and Iraq). Also needed is a vastly improved system for relieving abject, prolonged poverty, a cause of instability and terrorism—a system that preemptively attacks the causes of terrorism at its real roots. TRANSFORM can meet this need, and can help reduce the probability of the adoption of terrorist movements. TRANSFORM can reduce the frequency and extent of the need to opt for the more costly choice of a purely military solution.

The obvious solution is for the wealthy nations to share their excess production with the poverty-stricken third world. TRANSFORM is a system which allows this to happen at practically no financial sacrifice to the donor nations.

Although corporate America and many governmental and non-governmental organizations combine in generous giving of goods and services, the total amount of their giving is sharply limited by factors that the large-scale application of the TRANSFORM Concept would eliminate. By using the TRANSFORM system, much of the excess of the donor nations, now being disposed of in landfills at great expense to budgets and with damage to our environments, could be shared with those ultra-needy nations.

The system requires a few changes to what exists now, but the changes are EASILY IMPLEMENTABLE AND RELATIVELY CHEAP.

The biggest reason for the failure of the wealthy nations, especially the United States, to share fully their surplus goods with the poor peoples of the world, is not an unwillingness to give them--rather the reason is the unaffordable cost of transportation to ship those goods across the oceans. Often the worth of the goods shipped is exceeded by the cost of transportation of the goods.

The TRANSFORM Concept eliminates this weakness by providing the means to make available more affordable transportation. This is the key to a much more affordable counter-terrorism effort.

The affordable transportation system is based on offering to pay a reduced price for use of spare space aboard carriers whose cargo space is not full. The export-import imbalance by which many ships and planes depart the U.S. partly empty raises the practicality of the prospect of obtaining reduced shipping costs outbound from the U.S.