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'how extraordinarily wealthy people created philanthropies to promote the welfare of extraordinarily wealthy people'...,
2005-05-31 20:12:15
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somehow the United States is a violator of human rights...,
2005-06-01 10:48:20
"phantom aid", or, "I want to be an international consultant when I grow up":
month or two ago Naomi Klien had a pretty thorough denunciation of the tsunami aid effort, which makes many of the same points as this report. It also attempts to account for how much aid money ends up back in the donor country and finds that:
Compared with a UN target of spending 0.7%, rich countries were ostensibly spending 0.25% of their national income on aid each year. The figure came down to 0.1% when "phantom" aid was stripped out.
The G7 countries - Britain, the US, Germany, Italy, France, Canada and Japan - spent only 0.07% of national income on real aid and would need a tenfold increase to hit the UN target, ActionAid said.
Economically inefficient, politically expedient. The only way any povety relief programs get through congress at all is if you sell it off to their political donors, who are probably advocating the deranged idea that privatizing your bureaucracy makes it more efficient. Part of the miracle happens when they fire the accountants and make up numbers they can't, when eventually pressed, account for. It's a very impressive enterprise. If I remember right the World Bank still can't account for anything they did for Zaire/Congo for three odd decades (i.e. they gave it to Mobutu, who trickled it down to supporters, who in return kept him in power). Previous policies wrapped in new patterns. It's really something that we can account for how much is going where now. A success, you might say.
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-06-01 01:59:44 CST |
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