Bill Clinton spoke on Friday at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Here’s the opening paragraph of an AP report on this event:
Former President Bill Clinton said Friday that disasters such as worldwide famine and an obesity
epidemic threaten the country’s stability unless politicians begin to
look ahead and cooperate.
I know that there’s a sensible spin to put on this pronouncement — persons in poor countries will starve to death while "poor" persons in America will kill themselves by overeating — but beyond the immediate irony of Clinton’s pronouncement is the frightening possibility that politicians and pundits are becoming even more fixated on the mistaken notion that Congo, Niger, North Korea, and other dirt-poor countries are mired in poverty only because the U.S. and Canada and the U.S. and France and the U.S. and Australia and the U.S. consume too much.
(HT: Roger Meiners)