| Author | Message | ||
     sbenois Citizen Username: Sbenois Post Number: 12900 Registered: 10-2001  |
Once again the US is at the forefront of offering relief and it's our military doing most of the heavy lifting. Bush has done a great job so far. Certainly about 50 times better than anything coming out of the UN. So where is the praise on MOL? I'm not holding my breath. | ||
| Madden 11 Citizen Username: Madden_11 Post Number: 567 Registered: 12-2003 |
Yep, the wealthiest country in human history, coming in right behind Germany and Australia. And the way we got shamed into it...real praiseworthy. The Florida hurricane victims got far more attention from Bush. I wonder why? | ||
| sbenois Citizen Username: Sbenois Post Number: 12901 Registered: 10-2001 |
Yep, a HUGE response by our military and it counts for absolutely nothing. And are you suggesting that the Florida hurricane victims (presumably American citizens) didn't deserve the attention they got? | ||
| tjohn Citizen Username: Tjohn Post Number: 2841 Registered: 12-2001  |
I am with Sbenois. I was listening to the reports on NPR of how our military was helping out and it made me right proud. There is no substitute for some of the transport capability the military brings to the relief mission. | ||
| Dave Moderator Username: Dave Post Number: 4924 Registered: 4-1998  |
Bush has given more foreign aid than Clinton. To keep things in perspective, though, 165,000 people die every month from totally preventable malaria. Big wave hit you? Here's some money. Mosquitos killing your kids? Sorry, we can't save the world. | ||
| sbenois Citizen Username: Sbenois Post Number: 12908 Registered: 10-2001 |
The thing that really troubles me is that we've got signs all over saying Be About Peace, we've seen posts about a year and a half ago saying that instead of going to war we should be fighting for the peace, etc. etc. etc. Yet when we take on this enormous humanitarian effort - and Bush leads the way, because HE IS LEADING THE WAY - there isn't even a crumb of acknowledgement. Not a single way to go on the traditionally anti-Bush web sites. Nothing. And that is not fair. Let's give the man some credit when he earns it. And let's thank someone for making sure that we have a military that is capable of shuttling in unthinkable amounts of food and clothing and medical products on short notice. Damn right I'm proud. | ||
| jerkyboy Citizen Username: Jerkyboy Post Number: 3 Registered: 12-2004 |
I just heard that they want to nominate clinton for replacing kofe anon as head of the U.N.-reliable. | ||
| Phenixrising Citizen Username: Phenixrising Post Number: 268 Registered: 9-2004 |
Yep, a HUGE response by our military and it counts for absolutely nothing. sbenois, You could almost say the same thing for whats going on in Iraq. (Everyday the executions and terror continues in that country with the insurgents gaining strength.) Their are alot of people in the US and other nations who are against this illegal war (Iraq). Unfortunately, negativity weighs in higher than the positivity in helping with this disaster effort by the US. But yeh, give the guy credit  | ||
| Hank Zona Citizen Username: Hankzona Post Number: 1897 Registered: 3-2002 |
The U.S., led by George Bush, will come through, with plenty of federal and private support, because thats what we do often, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. The government will give support for reasons beyond the fact that it is a strategic locale in the "war on terrorism" (a legitimate reason)...reasons such as its the right thing to do and because people need our help and we are able to provide it, in some cases when noone else can. Now if we must give credit, give Colin Powell plenty of credit too for being the point person, for humanizing our efforts, for speaking candidly and directly. Now for my cynicism..I know Jeb Bush went along because he has experience with disaster relief being the governor of Florida (and has done a good job especially this past fall) and I dont doubt the sincerity of his reactions, but he is also probably there to give him some exposure on the global stage. Bush in '08? Also, we give vast sums of money in foreign aid...alot of it though is military aid, and although we probably give more in total $$, as a percentage of what we are able to give, I believe we fall short of other countries. And finally, its a tragedy of proportions we cant fathom and have never seen in our lives...do we need to hand out pats on the back for doing what we are supposed to do..helping people in dire need? | ||
| Phenixrising Citizen Username: Phenixrising Post Number: 270 Registered: 9-2004 |
Now for my cynicism..I know Jeb Bush went along because he has experience with disaster relief being the governor of Florida (and has done a good job especially this past fall) and I dont doubt the sincerity of his reactions, but he is also probably there to give him some exposure on the global stage. Bush in '08? I was thinking the same thing! | ||
| Strawberry Supporter Username: Strawberry Post Number: 4221 Registered: 10-2001 |
Jeb Bush is a friend of mine. He won't run for Pres in 08 which bothers me because he'd be fantastic. | ||
| Robert Livingston Citizen Username: Rob_livingston Post Number: 674 Registered: 7-2004 |
I agree with you, Hank. Belatedly Bush steps up to the plate and does exactly what he was supposed to do, and what any other president would do. Why does he deserve special credit? Are our expectations of him that low? (No need to answer that...) | ||
| cjc Citizen Username: Cjc Post Number: 2971 Registered: 8-2003 |
Two things. 1) US Military contribution. When figuring up money spent in comparison to other countries, figure in not just wages for soldiers and fuel, but if the other countries had to build the ships and procure all that hardware as well. I'm sure 21 ships come to at least 1B. 2) Malaria versus a tsunami and 'no' humanitarian assistance. Malaria can be prevented by a modicum of sane, not-too-corrupt government action with the existing money the US and the world pipes into these countries. Malaria is a natural phenomenon, but the problems with those governments are systemic. You could poor even more money into those places and still not rid yourself of the problem. Sudan, Congo, Haiti....big list here. A tsunami is a natural, one-time (hopefully) or extraordinary disaster. True -- Indonesia being one of the most corrupt major countries will have it's challenges in terms of making the aid work -- but still, once this mess is cleaned up, that particular job and aim of the aid is done. | ||
| Soda Supporter Username: Soda Post Number: 2293 Registered: 5-2001  |
Anyone remember the Marshall Plan? It was largely the U.S. military that carried out the "heavy lifting" there as well. If the world admires the U.S. for our efforts abroad, thanks should largely go to the humanity -- the one-to-one interactions -- between U.S. servicepersons and the displaced populations they were tasked with assisting. From WWII until fairly recently, our G.I.'s have reliably been our best emmisaries, and not just because of the chocolate bars and chewing gum they shared. They were, in the main, broadly representative of America, and the values of compassion and openness we and our leaders held dear. Our nation undertook humanitarian efforts such as the Marshall Plan because it was immediately recognized as simply the right thing to do -- not so that an Administration could beat its breast or claim righteous world leadership. If the US wishes to be recognized as benevolent, to be respected and admired by the rest of the world, it must be because of our leadership's humanity, courage, and will to LEAD, for the good of mankind. Our nation's leaders must do this without being prodded by other nations, or the press, or their political advisors. When the opportunity appears for our leaders to take political curtain calls for such good works, they should resolutely look whoever suggested it in the eyes, and say, "That is not what we do!" America SHOULD lead the world, even if only based on our wealth and miltary might. It's our duty to assist others in extremis. But we should not strut. Ever. -s. BTW: Ike didn't strut. Truman didn't strut. FDR COULDN'T stut. Who does George Bush think he is? | ||
| mjh Citizen Username: Mjh Post Number: 21 Registered: 5-2001 |
Beautifully said Soda | ||
| Madden 11 Citizen Username: Madden_11 Post Number: 568 Registered: 12-2003 |
And are you suggesting that the Florida hurricane victims (presumably American citizens) didn't deserve the attention they got? Yes, exactly. You've really hit the nail on the head. Playing dumb doesn't suit you, sben...please drop it. My observation was that when a minor disaster strikes a swing state in the middle of an election, you can't keep Bush away. On the other hand, when one of the greatest natural diasasters in history strikes a country full of "furriners" he takes his sweet time rather than interrupt his vacation. Yet when we take on this enormous humanitarian effort - and Bush leads the way, because HE IS LEADING THE WAY - there isn't even a crumb of acknowledgement. But that's just the problem. He is NOT leading the way. He had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, off his bicycle before he would even acknowledge that anything had happened. It took him days to cough up the initial paltry $15 million offer. Then, when he got embarassed enough, he doubled it, then after further embarassment, multiplied it by ten. Now, after all that, we're finally approaching respectability. Do you know how much good it would have done, both for the victims and for this country's (and Bush's) image, if he had made his current offer FIRST, on the day of the disaster, before anyone else got a word in? THAT'S called leadership. Now we're all supposed to drop to our knees and tousle his hair like he came in fourth in a kindergarten spelling bee? I'll hold my praise until he delivers the kind of representation on the world stage that this country deserves. Just once, please. We're all waiting. | ||
| overtaxdalready Citizen Username: Overtaxdalready Post Number: 318 Registered: 6-2001 |
Madden..maybe if the rest of us were as smart as you are we would have immdiately know the full extent of the catastrophe, the number of casualties (and laughed off those early claims of 20,000 dead as being woefully short) and amount of devestation and been able to peg a relief commitment that was just right. As it is, the rest of us mere mortals start out by pledging an amount based on the information currently available, and adjust it appropriately as the extent of the problem unfolds. That's called "prudence", and that trait is also a key part of leadership. And please, spare us the silly "kicking and screaming" dramatics. Thanks for your patience. | ||
| mantram Citizen Username: Mantram Post Number: 104 Registered: 8-2003 |
Just to put things in perspective.... In a major article for the New Statesman, John Pilger looks behind the facade of western governments' 'generosity' towards the victims of the tsunami and describes an enduring man-made tsunami far greater in scale and carnage than the natural disaster. : Pilger : 06 Jan 2005 THE OTHER, MAN-MADE TSUNAMI The west's crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week's bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush's coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of "aid" only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government's current "generous" contribution is one sixteenth of the ?800m it spent bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one twentieth of a billion pound gift, known as a "soft loan", to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers. On 24 November, one month before the tsunami struck, the Blair government gave its backing to an arms fair in Jakarta, "designed to meet an urgent need for the [Indonesian] armed forces to review its defence capabilities," reported the Jakarta Post. The Indonesian military, responsible for genocide in East Timor, has killed more than 20,000 civilians and "insurgents" in Aceh. Among the exhibitors at the arms fair was Rolls Royce, manufacturer of engines for the Hawks, which, along with British-supplied Scorpion armoured vehicles, machine guns and ammunition, were terrorising and killing people in Aceh up to the day the tsunami devastated the province. The Australian government, currently covering itself in glory for its modest response to the historic disaster befallen its Asian neighbours, has secretly trained Indonesia's Kopassus special forces, whose atrocities in Aceh are well documented. This is in keeping with Australia's 40-year support for oppression in Indonesia, notably its devotion to the dictator Suharto while his troops slaughtered a third of the population of East Timor. The government of John Howard - notorious for its imprisonment of child asylum-seekers - is presently defying international maritime law by denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth some 8bn dollars. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world's poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads or provide work for its young people, 90 per cent of whom are unemployed. The hypocrisy, narcissism and dissembling propaganda of the rulers of the world and their sidekicks are in full cry. Superlatives abound as to their humanitarian intent while the division of humanity into worthy and unworthy victims dominates the news. The victims of a great natural disaster are worthy (though for how long is uncertain) while the victims of man-made imperial disasters are unworthy and very often unmentionable. Somehow, reporters cannot bring themselves to report what has been going on in Aceh, supported by "our" government. This one-way moral mirror allows us to ignore a trail of destruction and carnage that is another tsunami. Consider the plight of Afghanistan, where clean water is unknown and death in childbirth common. At the Labour Party conference in 2001, Tony Blair announced his famous crusade to "re-order the world" with the pledge: "To the Afghan people, we make this commitment, we will not walk away... we will work with you to make sure [a way is found] out of the poverty that is your miserable existence." The Blair government had just taken part in the conquest of Afghanistan, in which as many as 20,000 civilians died. Of all the great humanitarian crises in living memory, no country suffered more and none has been helped less. Just three per cent of all international aid spent in Afghanistan has been for reconstruction, 84 per cent is for the US-led military "coalition" and the rest are crumbs for emergency aid. What is often presented as reconstruction revenue is private investment, such as the 35m dollars that will finance a proposed five-star hotel, mostly for foreigners. An adviser to the minister of rural affairs in Kabul told me the government had received less than 20 per cent of the aid promised to Afghanistan. "We don't even have enough money to pay wages, let alone plan reconstruction," he said. The reason, unspoken of course, is that Afghans are the unworthiest of victims. When American helicopter gunships repeatedly machine gunned a remote farming village, killing as many as 93 civilians, a Pentagon official was moved to say, "The people there are dead because we wanted them dead". I became acutely aware of this other tsunami when I reported from Cambodia in 1979. Following a decade of American bombing and Pol Pot's barbarities, Cambodia lay as stricken as Aceh is today. Disease beckoned famine and people suffered a collective trauma few could explain. Yet, for nine months after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, no effective aid arrived from western governments. Instead, a western and Chinese backed UN embargo was imposed on Cambodia, denying virtually the entire machinery of recovery and assistance. The problem for the Cambodians was that their liberators, the Vietnamese, had come from the wrong side of the cold war, having recently expelled the Americans from their homeland. That made them unworthy victims, and expendable. A similar, largely unreported siege was forced on Iraq during the 1990s and intensified during the Anglo-American "liberation". Last September, Unicef reported that malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled under the occupation. Infant mortality is now at the level of Burundi, higher than in Haiti and Uganda. There is crippling poverty and a chronic shortage of medicines. Cancer cases are rising rapidly, especially breast cancer; radioactive pollution is widespread. More than 700 schools are bomb-damaged. Of the billions said to have been allocated for reconstruction in Iraq, just 29m dollars has been spent, most of it on mercenaries guarding foreigners. Little of this is news in the west. This other tsunami is worldwide, causing 24,000 deaths every day from poverty and debt and division that are the products of a supercult called neo-liberalism. This was acknowledged by the United Nations in 1991 when it called a conference in Paris of the richest states with the aim of implementing a "programme of action" to rescue the world's poorest nations. A decade later, virtually every commitment made by western governments had been broken, making the waffle of the British Chancellor (Treasurer) Gordon Brown about the Group of Eight "sharing Britain's dream" in ending poverty as just that: waffle. Not one government has honoured the United Nations "baseline" and allotted a miserable 0.7 of its national income to overseas aid. Britain gives just 0.34 per cent, making its "department of international development" a black joke. The US gives 0.15 per cent, the lowest of any industrial state. Largely unseen and unimagined by westerners, millions of people know their lives have been declared expendable. When tariffs and food and fuel subsidies are eliminated under an IMF diktat, small farmers and the landless know they face disaster, which is why suicides among farmers are an epidemic. Only the rich, says the World Trade Organisation, are allowed to protect their home industries and agriculture; only they have the right to subsidise exports of meat, grain and sugar and dump them in poor countries at artificially low prices, thereby destroying livelihoods and lives. Indonesia, once described by the World Bank as "a model pupil of the global economy", is a case in point. Many of those washed to their deaths in Sumatra on Boxing Day were dispossessed by IMF policies. Indonesia owes an unrepayable debt of 110bn dollars. The World Resources Institute says the toll of this man-made tsunami reaches 13-18 million child deaths every year; or 12 million children under the age of five, according to a UN Development Report. "If 100 million have been killed in the formal wars of the 20th century," wrote the Australian social scientist Michael McKinley, "why are they to be privileged in comprehension over the annual [death] toll of children from structural adjustment programmes since 1982?" That the system causing this has democracy as its war cry is a mockery which people all over the world increasingly understand. It is this rising awareness, consciousness even, that offers more than hope. Since the crusaders in Washington and London squandered world sympathy for the victims of 11 September 2001 in order to accelerate their campaign of domination, a critical public intelligence has stirred and regards the likes of Blair and Bush as liars and their culpable actions as crimes. The current outpouring of help for the tsunami victims among ordinary people in the west is a spectacular reclaiming of the politics of community, morality and internationalism denied them by governments and corporate propaganda. Listening to tourists returning from stricken countries, consumed with gratitude for the gracious, expansive way some the poorest of the poor gave them shelter and cared for them, one hears the antithesis of "policies" that care only for the avaricious. "The most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen," was how the writer Arundhati Roy described the anti-war anger that swept across the world almost two years ago. A French study now estimates that 35 million people demonstrated on that February day and says there has never been anything like it; and it was just a beginning. This is not rhetorical; human renewal is not a phenomenon, rather the continuation of a struggle that may appear at times to have frozen, but is a seed beneath the snow. Take Latin America, long declared invisible and expendable in the west. "Latin Americans have been trained in impotence," wrote Eduardo Galeano the other day. "A pedagogy passed down from colonial times, taught by violent soldiers, timorous teachers and frail fatalists, has rooted in our souls the belief that reality is untouchable and that all we can do is swallow in silence the woes each day brings." Galeano was celebrating the rebirth of real democracy in his homeland, Uruguay, where people have voted "against fear", against privatisation and its attendant indecencies. In Venezuela, municipal and state elections in October notched up the ninth democratic victory for the only government in the world sharing its oil wealth with its poorest people. In Chile, the last of the military fascists supported by western governments, notably Thatcher, are being pursued by revitalised democratic forces. These forces are part of a movement against inequality and poverty and war that has arisen in the past six years and is more diverse, more enterprising, more internationalist and more tolerant of difference than anything in my lifetime. It is a movement unburdened by a western liberalism that believes it represents a superior form of life; the wisest know this is colonialism by another name. The wisest also know that just as the conquest of Iraq is unravelling, so a whole system of domination and impoverishment can unravel, too. First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk | ||
| Earlster Supporter Username: Earlster Post Number: 827 Registered: 8-2003  |
There is an industry e-mail list that I participate in. A Sri Lankan who is studying in the US wrote the following as part of one of his messages. This is kind of interesting:
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| Mark Fuhrman Citizen Username: Mfpark Post Number: 1078 Registered: 9-2001  |
Please, enough of this ••••! Yes, Bush should have been at the forefront--everyone watching on TV knew as soon as it hit the airwaves that this was going to be one hell of a disaster. He should have pledged whatever it takes, and then had a number later. Okay, so what! That is done, and now he is responding well, and the US military is doing a great job. And so what if he sent Jeb as a patently political move. BIG ••••! They are politicians, after all. Further, what better symbol to the world that W cares than to send his brother--same name, same family, carries big symbolism! And, sure, there is tons of corruption that will siphon off some of the money--no doubt about that. And absolutely it is hypocritical to support oligarchs who slowly strangle their own people while also pouring humanitarian aid into the Tsunami region. BIG WHOOP! In the face of this disaster, a massive response is required. Deal with the shortcomings later. Try to give your money to reputable humanitarian aid agencies that hopefully will minimize the corruption. Pressure your congresspeople on foreign tyrants AFTER you write your check--and don't forget about these tyrannies in future years when the tsunami disaster is in the distant past. Trumpet what is great and generous about America even if the aid recipients hate us and will support terrorists in a few years--perhaps we will win over some hearts and minds, and that is great, but the real goal is to be the best we can be, regardless. Let's focus on the critical problem in front of us--there will be plenty of time for carping at each other when this is stabilized. Rant over. |
