Today's Guardian on the Disaster

what have they done for third world debt?

doubled it

 

US and its instruments of exploitaion WTO, World Bank and IMF are responsible for much of Third World debt.

Conditons attached to the loans meant that money lent, got piped backed to the corporates in lending countries. Projects drawn up by the World Bank and these corpoartes had little chance of becoming a success.
Whilst corporates profited, projects failed often uprooting communities and causing enviornmental damage in the process.

World Bank then force these countries to cut budgets for education and medical care so that loan interest can be paid.

Modern day Shylocks on a gigantic scale?!

More about IMF and World Bank at
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wbimf/

 

It has already been mentioned more than once on this forum but clearly needs stating again...

Even if the Third World Countries had no debt and no interest payments to make and even if there were no wars involving these countries, they COULD NOT compete on the world stage as long as the richer nations have unfair subsidies which allow them to dump their crops on the Third World and which prevent them from exporting and developing their own crops.

The most well known example is the EU Agricultural subsidies, which the French have refused to review for another 6 years but there are equally damaging examples of subsidies in place in the USA and Japan.

In general Third World countries will take charity because they have to. They would far rather pay their own way. We should let them.

End unfair trade subsidies now.

 

It's interesting but unsurprising that the focus should be so much on how much the USA does or doesn't donate to the countries that have fallen victim to this disaster, including the worst effected country which, as has been said, is the most populous Muslim country in the world, Indonesia.

Should we also examine the contributions made by the oil-rich Muslim countries in helping their Muslim brethren? Of course Iraq is concerned with other issues at this time and perhaps relatively poor countries like Jordan, Egypt and Syria should not be expected to contribute heavily but are Saudi Arabia only good for $10m and can oil-rich Iran afford less than $1m?

Is this because Iran and Saudi are dictatorships and thus tend to be less generous than democracies or should we apply different criteria when judging contributions from the wealthy Middle Eastern countries compared to those from the West or East Asia?

 

Interesting speculation about political motives and implications for funding aid and relief for the region so far. BlueMax's point about nation's propensity to deliver against their promises is something worth looking into further, certainly something I hadn't considered 'till now. There is an article in today's Age quoting an Oxfam person that '...only 54 per cent of the promised 32 million dollars coming in for the Iranian quake...' was delivered. This article also touches on some of the geo-political posturing currently going on.

Lets hope the politics don't start to obscure the fact that much of the region is seriously farked. Whole towns/villages in regions such as Aceh simply no longer exist.

 

personally, I think the reason its been so well supported is the publicity.

I dislike publicity immensely, but how much do you think would have been given if there wasn't media beaming all those dead bodies into our lounges every hour of every day? very little.
I think its very bad taste, worse, I think the media is fundamentally sick, sick to the core, white middle class BBC executives with false credibilty, especially when kids can see it, all the time, over tea time.
And I think they take pleasure in it.They take pleasure in knowing they can manipulate us with their power, their rhetoric, images.
They do indeed enjoy it in a perverse way.

best thing to do is not to give cash, it goes on the executives stays in hotels, conferences and coffee, justified by leigitimate expenditure giving corporate direction, they just talk a lot about nothing, getting nowhere fast, spend it on goods that are needed, or even help out.

I actually wrote an essay on coverage of disasters as they happen back in 1991, looks like I was correct, we will be like the yanks, soon, having images of fleeing motorists from helicopters live. I bet they have tried to get a news camera on a police chopper.

 

It's well worth continuing to read the news from the ground as written by the guys at The Diplomad.

In an item headed almost fUNnny ..., they write:

The relief effort continues to be a US-Australia effort, with Singapore now in and coordinating closely with the US and Australia. Other countries are also signing up to be part of the US-Australia effort. Nobody wants to be "coordinated" by the UN.

They are also disparaging of the EU effort so far. Under More UNreality ... But the Dutch Get It, they report:

The EU could copy the Australian-American model of acting quickly and effectively to save lives, or they could copy the UN model of meeting at a leisurely pace to plan for the possibility of setting up a coordination center that will consider making a plan for the possibility of an operations center to consider beginning to request support for the tsunami's victims. Ah, my wise friends, guess which model of "action" the EU chose?

In the same piece, they site a January 2 report, written by local Dutch diplomats who traveled to Aceh and saw the reality on the ground. This too is worth reading.

It's clear that to provide help to the regions devastated and traumatized by this disaster, requires far more than money alone.

In an excellent article by By Paul Reynolds, the BBC's World affairs correspondent, on the BBC News website, the BBC say: History teaches that disasters can make or break governments and shift international alliances.

I wonder how history will view this one.

 

a very cynical view of the world! but i totally disagree that the best thing is NOT give cash.(its clearly a personal view though,so i respect that,but politley disagree with it).Turn the TV off instead and send some money?

 

Absolutely right. If you type "tsunami charity donation" into Google, you'll get some sponsored links on the right hand side. These will include reputable organisations such as Oxfam which are pretty efficient. Just a few per cent goes towards the charity's administration and the rest goes to the relief effort.

These charities will take an online credit or debit card payment and rest assured the money will be unseen by the nasty white middle class BBC executives (or Kofi Anan ).

Get your wallets out.

 

unfortunately i just caught the start of chanel 5's news tonight. it made me sick, a poor mother had been searching for her daughter and had finally lost all hope - all captured on camera with some bought in bhuddist monks (paid for by chanel 5 as they proudly boasted) to perform a ceremony. it's sickening - god forbid that i never have to go through the loss of my child but if it ever did the last thing i;d want is a bunch of news vultures sticking their noses in.
this is a tradgedy that needs careful humane and balanced repporting not the sensationalist shite that turns a disaster into a soap opera.
sorry - i'll go and soak my head now to cool off..
but i fcuking hate the news media
breathe, gotta breathe....
cheers


julian

 

rough with the smooth

that poor Swedish chap has an improved chance of finding his kidnapped son with help from the media

what a distressing tale that is

 

...and with today's pathetic obsession with fame for fame's sake, I wonder if it even occurs to some of the news reporters that many people would rather not have the publicity.

 

I did enjoy this one though ...

Tribe shoots arrows at aid flight

An Indian helicopter dropping food and water over the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been attacked by tribesmen using bows and arrows.

There were fears that the endangered tribal groups had been wiped out when massive waves struck their islands.

But the authorities say the attack is a sign that they have survived.

Those authorities are as sharp as ... as ... er ... arrows, don't you think?

 

steve,
i was praying that the mother had been taken advantage of by the news programme, the alternative is just too depressing. maybe boris had it right.

what is happening to the world? i went past my old middle school today and it looks like a prison now with the entire 'campus' enclosed by pointed steel fencing. has the world really got that bad?
cheers


julian

 

yes it is Julian,when you read stories of children being kidnapped after this tradegy,taken into a life of slavery,sexual torture and even death,it beggars belief we are in the 21st century.I struggle to comprehend the lack of humanity in these people

 

saab,
surely these things happened 20, 50, 100 years ago but they are now more out in the open thanks to the media. now i could be wrong but it seems that the media goes out of its way to sensationalise and play up these horrors for either ratings or a more sinister agenda - depending on your level of paranoia.
my main problem though is that the powers that be seem to be putting US in cages to 'protect' us rather than those perpetrating the horrors.
cheers


julian

 

This has been something I can't help but think with the coverage of this disaster.

The coverage has been hard hitting and graphic. It's hard to know where the line is between "sensationalist shite" and trying to show the true scale and reality of the disaster?

As said elsewhere, the coverage will no doubt have helped with getting people to contribute. But the alMOst casual way in which dead bodies and suffering is being shown can be quite sickening.

 

most certainly,but if that increases the coffers its entirely acceptable imo

 

I think showing dead bodies in the aftermath of war or natural disaster is no bad thing. That is the reality. Not to show it amounts to telling a big lie.
We live in what is for the most part an over-sanitised world.
How many people on here have actually been up close to a corpse?

 

Are you kidding? I once carried a leg in a yellow 'biohazard' bag. Bloody heavy it was..