Chancellor Of The Duchy Of Besses O' Th' Barn

Go Fig <[email protected]> wrote:

[]
    > Appreciated yes, but it does little good sitting on a Bangkok runway.
    > It is helicopters that are making the difference... or so say the UN.
    >
    > Do you differ with the UN on this critical point ?

No, but you don't have one form of aid without the other in this kind of
situation.

--
David Horne- www.davidhorne.net
usenet (at) davidhorne (dot) co (dot) uk

Padraig Breathnach

Go Fig <[email protected]> wrote:

    >In article <[email protected]>, nitram
    ><[email protected]> wrote:
    >> Where do the F15,
    >> F17s etc. fit into this?
    >Well in the case of Europe, they were conned into bombing Yugoslavia to
    >keep undesirables out of Western Europe.

WHAT?

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED

Padraig Breathnach

Doug McDonald <mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote:

    >The wau to prosperity for third world countries is clear
    >and simple: capitalism. ...

Fair trade rules help.

--
PB
The return address has been MUNGED

Markku Grönroos

"Padraig Breathnach" <[email protected]> kirjoitti viestissä
news:[email protected]...
    > Doug McDonald <mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
    > >The wau to prosperity for third world countries is clear
    > >and simple: capitalism. ...
    > Fair trade rules help.
Aren't they out of reach anyway.

Chancellor Of The Duchy Of Besses O' Th' Barn

ardeedee <[email protected]> wrote:

    > Cheers to the UN man who called the initial aid announcements as
    > "stingy" - - there were and then the picture changed dramatically.He had the
    > guts of his convictions.

Which is why he was just on BBC 2's Newsnight just _now_ (literally a
couple of minutes ago, and he's still on) saying he didn't say that. He
was pressed (the interviewer had the text of his comments, and unlike
interviewers in many other countries, BBC interviewers are usually
non-deferential and persistent) and then admittted that he said stingy,
but in the context of the "west's" response to the third world in
general. He claimed he wasn't actually referring to the response to this
disaster. Well, whatever. Make of that what you will, but "guts" and
"convictions" don't quite go with what I just heard, which looked more
like squirming.

--
David Horne- www.davidhorne.net
usenet (at) davidhorne (dot) co (dot) uk

Earl Evleth

in article [email protected], Padraig Breathnach at
[email protected] wrote on 4/01/05 22:08:

    > Doug McDonald <mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
    >
    >> The wau to prosperity for third world countries is clear
    >> and simple: capitalism. ...
    >
    > Fair trade rules help.


I think the expression is "Socialism for the rich, Capitalism for the poor"

Judging how both the US and Europe protect its domestic sugar industry
from cheap foreign sugar, it is clear that fair trade is a one way street.

Earl

*

On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 12:46:00 -0600, Doug McDonald <mcdonald@SnPoAM_scs.uiuc.edu> wrote:

    >The wau to prosperity for third world countries is clear
    >and simple: capitalism. ...

Just like Bush getting no-bid contracts for Halliburton ...

On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 04:45:37 GMT, "Calif Bill" <[email protected]> wrote:

    >I doubt if the US GDP is 40% of the world's GDP, let alone 40% of the major
    >countries!

So?

On 3 Jan 2005 10:40:16 -0800, "Tchiowa" <[email protected]> wrote:

    >... nonsensical drivel....

Do you ever post anything else but that?

    > Of the approximately 4 billion
    >dollars of relief and humanitarian aid given by all the nations of the
    >world last year, approximately 40% came from the US.

You figure someone with a hundred dollars
who gives you one would be more generous
than someone with ten dollars who gives you
one, but you're not aware of the context.

    >"The Guardian"???

Ad hominem is fallacy.

Wouldn't you rather become educated and honest?

    >"State obligations"???? What makes these "State obligations". Acts of
    >charity SHOULD be private.

You didn't read what I provided for comprehension.

Perhaps you can't.

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:26:01 +0800, "ardeedee" <[email protected]> wrote:

    >Inflates the figures it donates compared to the other countries who did not
    >include private philanthropy.

So what?
    ><* US *> wrote in message news:[email protected]...
    >> On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 01:31:05 +0800, "ardeedee" <[email protected]> wrote:
    >> >I think Singapore includes such private philanthropy as part of Singapore's
    >> >donation.
    >> So what?


Not only is the USA notoriously stingy, both in public and private
levels of philanthropy, but the 'help' only comes with strings attached:

"Now Bush wants to buy the complicity of aid workers"

http://society.guardian.co.uk/disast...983243,00.html


"What Mr Egeland said about international aid for disasters was that
rich nations had become stingy in helping poor nations in times of
calamity, which, for most of them, is all the time. As the records
show, he was absolutely right..."

http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley01012005.html


"Private donations, especially large philanthropic
donations and business givings, can be subject to
political/ideological or economic end-goals
and/or subject to special interest."

“Private charity is an act of privilege, it can never
be a viable alternative to State obligations...�

"Makes you wonder who the real beneficiary
of charity is here."

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRel.../USAid.asp?p=1


"...a Johns Hopkins study shows that the United States lags behind other
countries in terms of private philanthropy..."

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/508690/


Ponder the factors involved in US "foreign aid":

Quality ...
GNI per capita ...
Percent of GNP or GDP ...
Compared to agricultural subsidies which further impoverish agrarian nations ...
Compared to military aid ...
As distributed ...


"USA's aid, in terms of percentage of their GDP is already lowest of any
industrialized nation in the world. ...

Among the big donors, the US has the worst record for spending its aid budget on
itself - 70 percent of its aid is spent on US goods and services. And more than half
is spent in middle income countries in the Middle East...

The estimated annual cost of Northern trade barriers to Southern economies is over US
$100 billion, much more than what developing countries receive in aid...

Aid has been a foreign policy tool to aid the donor not the recipient...

The US has also cut back monetary obligations to the United Nations, which is the
largest body trying to provide assistance in such a variety of ways to the developing
countries. Furthermore, the US has often reduced or held back its required
contributions to the U.N., even though it is already the "stingiest" of all
industrialized nations providing aid...

...two-thirds of US government aid goes to only two countries: Israel and Egypt. Much
of the remaining third is used to promote US exports or to fight a war against drugs
that could only be won by tackling drug abuse in the United States...

"Many in the first world imagine the amount of money spent on aid to developing
countries is massive. In fact, it amounts to only .03% of GNP of the industrialized
nations. In 1995, the director of the U.S. aid agency defended his agency by
testifying to his congress that 84 cents of every dollar of aid goes back into the
U.S economy in goods and services purchased. For every dollar the United States puts
into the World Bank, an estimated $2 actually goes into the U.S. economy in goods and
services. Meanwhile, in 1995, severely indebted low-income countries paid one billion
dollars more in debt and interest to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than they
received from it. For the 46 countries of Subsaharan Africa, foreign debt service was
four times their combined governmental health and education budgets in 1996. So, we
find that aid does not aid." -- Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Eyes of the Heart; Seeking a
Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization, (Common Courage Press, 2000), p. 13
..."

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp

As for food humanitarian aid, too often it's contaminated food unacceptable
to anyone else.

"Highly mechanized farms on large acreages can produce units of food cheaper than
even the poorest paid farmers of the Third World. When this cheap food is sold, or
given, to the Third World, the local farm economy is destroyed. If the poor and
unemployed of the Third World were given access to land, access to industrial tools,
and protection from cheap imports, they could plant high-protein/high calorie crops
and become self-sufficient in food. Reclaiming their land and utilizing the
unemployed would cost these societies almost nothing, feed them well, and save far
more money than they now pay for the so-called "cheap" imported foods.

World hunger exists because: (1) colonialism, and later subtle monopoly capitalism,
dispossessed hundreds of millions of people from their land; the current owners are
the new plantation managers producing for the mother countries; (2) the low-paid
undeveloped countries sell to the highly paid developed countries because there is no
local market [because the low-paid people do not have enough to pay] ... and (3) the
current Third World land owners, producing for the First World, are appendages to the
industrialized world, stripping all natural wealth from the land to produce food,
lumber, and other products for wealthy nations.

This system is largely kept in place by underpaying the defeated colonial societies
for the real value of their labor and resources, leaving them no choice but to
continue to sell their natural wealth to the over-paid industrial societies that
overwhelmed them. To eliminate hunger: (1) the dispossessed, weak, individualized
people must be protected from the organized and legally protected multinational
corporations; (2) there must be managed trade to protect both the Third World and the
developed world, so the dispossessed can reclaim use of their land; (3) the currently
defeated people can then produce the more labor-intensive, high-protein/high-calorie
crops that contain all eight (or nine) essential amino acids; and (4) those societies
must adapt dietary patterns so that vegetables, grains, and fruits are consumed in
the proper amino acid combinations, with small amounts of meat or fish for flavor.
With similar dietary adjustments among the wealthy, there would be enough food for
everyone.

- J.W. Smith, The World's Wasted Wealth 2, (Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994),
pp. 63, 64....

The United States lent governments money to buy this food, and then enforced upon
them the extraction and export of their natural resources to pay back the debt...

Not only is much U.S. food exported unnecessary, but it results in great harm to the
very people they profess to be helping. The United States exported over sixty million
tons of grain in 1974. Only 3.3 million tons were for aid, and most of that did not
reach the starving. For example, during the mid-1980s, 84 percent of U.S.
agricultural exports to Latin America were given to the local governments to sell to
the people. This undersold local producers, destroyed their markets, and reduced
their production.

Exporting food may be profitable for the exporting country, but when their land is
capable of producing adequate food, it is a disaster to the importing countries.
[Note that many of the poor nations today are rich in natural resources and arable
land.] American farmers would certainly riot if 60 percent of their markets were
taken over by another country. Not only would the farmers suffer, but the entire
economy would be severely affected.

Imported food is not as cheap as it appears. If the money expended on imports had
been spent within the local economy, it would have multiplied several times as it
moved through the economy contracting local labor (the multiplier effect) ...

This moving of money through an economy is why there is so much wealth in a high-wage
manufacturing and exporting country and so little within a low-wage country that is
"dependent" on imports. With centuries of mercantilist experience, developed
societies understand this well.

... [S]ubsidies, tarrifs and other trade policies eliminate the comparative advantage
of other regions to maintain healthy economies in the developed world. ... The result
of these First World subsidies [for export] are shattered Third World economies.

- J.W. Smith, The World's Wasted Wealth 2, (Institute for Economic Democracy, 1994),
pp. 66-67...."

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRel...ping/Intro.asp

"As Western countries have got richer in the past ten years, the proportion of their
wealth spent on humanitarian aid has gone down by 30%. ...

Humanitarian assistance should not substitute for effective political and economic
responses to non-strategic areas of the globe where some of the worst humanitarian
crises occur. Sustained international action is necessary to address the underlying
causes of conflicts and to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters. Furthermore,
humanitarian aid by itself is rarely solely responsible for saving lives, but rather
a vital complement to people’s own efforts to help themselves. The wrong kind of aid
can sometimes do more harm than good. At times, warring parties’ action to deny
people access to humanitarian assistance is a more significant factor than lack of
funds. ...

The plight of civilians in Afghanistan was ranked by the 1999 World Disasters Report
as the world’s worst emergency, yet only once in seven years has the CAP been more
than 50 per cent funded. Similarly, Somalia has averaged only 40 per cent funding
over five UN Consolidated Appeals. Other countries have fluctuating fortunes in the
funding stakes: the 1994 appeal for Angola was 87 per cent funded, by 1997, barely 50
per cent of the requested amount had been received. Liberians in need did relatively
well in 1995, but in 1998 received less than half what they needed according to the
revised CAP. The average response to the Great Lakes crisis was 80% of requirements
over six years, although this obscures the disparity between high levels of support
in the wake of the genocide and a fall to 42 per cent funding in 1998. At a donor
meeting in Tokyo in December 1999, pledges of support for the appeal for East Timor
reached 75 per cent of the requested amount. The average of the responses to CAPs for
complex emergencies each year between 1992 and 1999 never rose above 75 per cent, and
are actually in decline. If this broad trend continues, 'forgotten emergencies' will
be even more neglected. ...

Despite the increasing demand for international engagement and assistance, over the
last decade, there has been a steady decline in the flow of official development
assistance to developing countries from the world’s richest countries. This has
knock-on effects on levels of humanitarian assistance. An increase in development aid
through the 1980s reached its peak in 1992 at US$60.8bn, 0.33 per cent of the GNP of
the world’s richest countries forming the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development, the OECD. From then on, Official Development Assistance (ODA) has
declined, reaching 0.22 per cent of GNP in 1997. G7 donors - the world’s largest
economies - were disproportionately responsible for this, accounting for practically
all of the real fall in ODA in recent years. Although there was a slight upturn in
1998 to 0.23 per cent of GNP spent on ODA, this falls far short of international
commitments to devote 0.7 per cent GNP to official development aid. It also contrasts
starkly with real terms growth in GNP in OECD countries from US$11,000 per capita in
1960 to nearly $28,000 in 1997, while ODA per capita grew very slowly – US$47 in 1960
and US$59 in 1997. Increasing affluence has not brought increasing generosity, and
the richest countries have been the meanest....

The USA also falls down on this burden-sharing measure. Although the USA is the
largest single donor of humanitarian assistance, contributing US$900m in 1998 and 30
per cent of the bilateral total, this falls short of the 38.6 per cent that is the
USA share of DAC GNP. ...

Once an undisputed symbol of solidarity with those struck down by misfortune and
adversity, humanitarian assistance is now vilified by many as part of the problem:
feeding fighters, strengthening perpetrators of genocide, creating new war economies,
fuelling conflicts and perpetuating crises..."

http://www.pcpafg.org/news/NGOs/index.shtml

"A report by the Washington-based arms-control group, Council for a Livable World
Education Fund asked ''does the United States invest more in militarisation than in
development globally?'' In its findings, the report ''Foreign Aid and the Arms Trade:
a Look at the Numbers'' declares the answer is a resounding 'yes'.''

At a time when Washington spent only about 1.25 dollars per U.S. citizen on
development and humanitarian aid and peacekeeping abroad, it exported weapons worth
more than two dollars per citizen to foreign countries, often the same nations to
which it provides the bulk of its aid.

The United States accounted for roughly half of all arms exports worldwide from 1993
through 1995, the last year for which reliable estimates are available. Most US
weapons exports went to U.S. allies in the eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East,
and East Asia.

''We sell weapons; we give weapons away; we provide financing to buy weapons,'' says
Joan Whelan, the report's author. ''And then once the weapons are used, we spend
billions of dollar to try to clean up the aftermath.'' ..."

http://www.indybay.org/news/2002/02/115761.php