In the face of such enormous external influence the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless. As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.

There is an overwhelmingly religious mandate, often ignored by fundamentalists, to alleviate the plight of those who are in need. Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, reports that he and a group of other seminary students searched the Bible to find every verse that referred to wealth and poverty. They were impressed to discover that one out of every sixteen verses in the New Testament, on in ten in three of the Gospels, and on in seven in the Gospel of Luke referred to...

In the face of such enormous external influence the governments of poor nations and their people are often powerless. As a result, in the global context, a few get wealthy while the majority struggle.

There is an overwhelmingly religious mandate, often ignored by fundamentalists, to alleviate the plight of those who are in need. Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine, reports that he and a group of other seminary students searched the Bible to find every verse that referred to wealth and poverty. They were impressed to discover that one out of every sixteen verses in the New Testament, on in ten in three of the Gospels, and on in seven in the Gospel of Luke referred to money or the poor. In the Hebrew scriptures, only idolatry was mentioned more times than the relationship between rich and poor.
One of the Professors who had George Bush at his class in Harvard wrote, "At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that "people are poor because they are lazy." He was opposed to labor unions, social security, enviromental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to "free market competition". To him, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was "socialism".