From: Democracy Now!, 10/31/08
AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your sixth presidential decree for the next president’s first ten days is to feed al-Qaeda and the next generation of America-haters by building wells.
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, there’s over a billion people on this planet that don’t have access to clean drinking water. You know, what if we made it an American mission to make sure that the entire third world had clean drinking water? One of the statistics I read was it would cost about $10 per person in the third world of people who don’t have the clean drinking water right now. So, that’s—geez, that’s $10 times a billion people? $10 billion. That’s just October in Iraq. For the money that we’re spending in Iraq in October, we could provide clean drinking water to most of the people that don’t have it. And I, as an American, would rather be known by the people who are struggling to survive in the third world as the country that gave them clean drinking water or gave them other things that they need to help them in their daily existence to survive. I think most Americans would rather be known for that. Instead, we’re known as the invaders and the occupiers and the people who prop up the regimes in these countries, and I’m tired of that. I’m really tired of it.
Bradley Steffens
Or….we could take about one-tenth of what the federal government spends on education and training ($89.9 billion) in one year and use that money solve the world’s water shortage. Surely there is 10% waste in those programs. Even if a 10% reduction in educational outlays poses a hardship to students, at least they will not be enslaved by a tyrannical dictator or slaughtered by fanatical terrorists the way the Iraqi people will be if we withdraw from Iraq immediately. I would rather Americans be known as frugal in their educational spending than as self-centered cowards without the resolve to see through their commitments to the incipient democracies they helped found.