shiva

Where aid helped pay for the palm jumeirah

Millhouse

several times over. The amount of wasted aid is amazing.

My favourite example is solar panels just outside the airport in the car park. They have never generated a thing but as they do not want them damaged you can't use the car park either. brilliant.

weasel decentral

Or donate it through the likes of the Red Cross/Unicef or some similar organisation.

shiva

You're better sticking to people like msf or my current favourite shelter box. The bigger the organisation the more beurocracy and the less aid that reaches those in need.

Irishbeekeeper

x 1

the bigger they are, the more overheads they have

weasel decentral

True, but I was only commenting on depoliticising the donation so people would at least be confident it wasn't supporting a space program.

Imo we should not make any charitable donations at all, it has never helped any of these countries as far as I can see. Disaster assistance is fine but I haven't yet to see one handout model that proved to be sustainable.

mentalist

Back on topic, I personally cannot believe that the Saudis have the intelligence to create a workable nuclear weapon. Like the man said, Riyadh is probably at greater risk than Tel Aviv if a nuclear missile was ever launched.

flares

Does BAE Systems have a nuclear arm?

Bahtatboy

They don't, but their allies do.

nonthaburi

or give directly to those in need .

shiva

Seldom possible but I agree its eat to when you can

I'm not entirely convinced the best solution to aid wouldnt be to just hand out piles of cash to those in need. Given the billions spent annually that achieves little surely 1 year of handing out the cash would be worth a try.

Boomhauer

India has had tens of thousands of farmers commit suicide because of poverty. Large swaths of Indian children are malnourished, which is setting them up for failure as their cognitive ability , resistance to illnes and stature are all severly affected.

I just read the below news article which Global media has been featuring recently. 1 Indian woman dies every hour at the hands of her in-laws because her family could not cough up dowry money.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3859820.html

Many years ago I saw a Western Documentary about a poor Indian family who searched rat holes, looking for grains of rice. Some documentaries have the ability to move a person, this was one of them (for me)

There are no doubt umpteen other stats and facts on just how unimaginably mserable life is for vast swaths of Indians.

Some weeks ago I read a recollection by Norm Chomsky about a trip he made by car through populated Northern India . He was looking at the people when his Indian host who was with him told him not to look outside . The reason being that he would feel better if he didn't have to see the state of India's poor. Chomsky understood that Indians prefer to ignore / turn a blind eye to what goes on around them.

The point is that while every country has its share of poor, India's case is a special kind of FUBAR, it's like a country that has been through a genocidal war and faced massive enviromental disaster at the same time, yet the elites piss money away on ego boosting projects. It takes a special kind of selfish and Antihuman thinking to do this; which I have come to expect as the norm for SubCons.

What would one say if Ethiopia or Sudan or Zimbabwe did something similar.

Indian poverty rate is incomparable to Western poverty rate plus the Indian government fudges the poverty rate just so that they can then claim how many people have been uplifted from poverty.

I see nothing wrong in anyone criticising Indians on just abysmal they treat hundreds of millions of Indians; it isn't arrogance, it is speaking out/pointing how just what assholes their elites are. Ofcourse they will come up with all sorts of excuses to absolve themselves but then so do many dictatorships and the GCC locals when confronted on their ways.

weasel decentral

To be fair I wasn't trying to compare India's poverty like for like against the US or UK, what I was trying to say was that the logical end to your argument was that no country can pursue goals while they have poverty/inequality issues.

Bear in mind the US space program in the sixties was set against a country which at the same time had segregation laws against blacks (similar to India's caste system maybe), extreme poverty in the south for blacks, leaders of movements being assassinated, and a war in Vietnam.
Under these circumstances should they have spent all they did putting a man on the moon?
I would imagine the situation in Russia was similar economically, with a large percentage of the population in poverty.

scot47

Foreign Aid is a system of transferring resources from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.