Gigantic undersea earthquake

[M. Beaux-Eaux]

I'll bet loonies to Tim-Bits that US aid would have been an order of maginitude greater if a significant number of corporate America's sweatshops in the region had been affected by the disaster.

Some aid is better than no aid, though.

[blaise]

I can hardly wait to hear Mr. Bush's State of the Union address. Fortunately, it will be simulcast in English. ;D

[MC Habber]

By Refusing Tsunami Aid, India Made Me Proud

Pacific News Service, Commentary,
Raj Jayadev, Jan 07, 2005
Editor's Note: When India refused aid from foreign governments, some called the move foolish and arrogant. But PNS contributor Raj Jayadev was filled with pride.

When I read in an Indian newspaper that India refused aid from the United States for disaster relief, at first I thought something got lost in translation. Later, as an Indian-American, I felt proud.

Apparently, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told President Bush by phone, "Thanks, but no thanks." Polite, yet definitive. Seems more like something you would say when offered an extra slice of pie rather than millions of dollars of resources for your ravaged country.

After initially denying all foreign assistance, India has decided to take relief from international aid agencies. But the country still says it will not take money from foreign governments.

Most of the international community has seen the action as short-sighted and arrogant. When asked to remark on the refusal, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan stressed, "This disaster is too much for one country to handle by itself."

But to me, it is a refusal aimed not at the United States, but at the condition of victimhood. Aren't survivors of trauma taught to heal, at least psychologically, by refusing to accept their situation as powerless victims? Instead, they assert control amid the chaos.

I am used to seeing the country my parents immigrated from portrayed as a constant victim. I'm used to images of grief-stricken village women using their colorful saris to wipe away tears. Earthquakes, poverty, hunger, a giant wave -- they all result in the same CNN pictures. We in the privileged part of the world always have the impulse to save the less fortunate. But people must become their own saviors.

- more

[MC Habber]

Another theory is that foreign aid, in particular American aid, comes with too many strings attached. The strings typically connect to American companies hoping to establish themselves in other countries, at the expense of local jobs, traditions, health and saftey regulations, and so on.

[MC Habber]

As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was lost. Although hotels and industry have already started reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, governments, corporations and foreign donors are teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed money.

lookout by Naomi Klein

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale reconstruction operations in different countries "at the same time," each lasting "five to seven years."

Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.

Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch list" and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to "mobilize and deploy quickly" after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks--some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have "pre-completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could "cut off three to six months in your response time."

The plans Pascual's teams have been drawing up in his little-known office in the State Department are about changing "the very social fabric of a nation," he told CSIS. The office's mandate is not to rebuild any old states, you see, but to create "democratic and market-oriented" ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off "state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy." Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means "tearing apart the old."

Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate--that was colonialism's seductive promise: "discovering" wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, "the newest and most beautiful words can be written." There is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to rubble, whether by so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God). And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans.

"We used to have vulgar colonialism," says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. "Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'"

It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and international financial institutions. And from the people living in these reconstruction sites--Iraq to Aceh, Afghanistan to Haiti--a similar chorus of complaints can be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. Expert "democracy builders" lecture governments on the importance of transparency and "good governance," yet most contractors and NGOs refuse to open their books to those same governments, let alone give them control over how their aid money is spent.

Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that "almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding." The dispatch could easily have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all of Bechtel's allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in an endless litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently blasted "corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable" foreign contractors for "squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid." Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. "The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims," he wrote. "Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced."

- the rest