Monbiot: On the edge of lunacy

[T_i_B]

Interesting article about how overseas aid is used and abused by US & UK governments. Make of this what you will.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1116884,00.html

Spare a thought this bleak new year for all those who rely on charity. Open your hearts, for example, to a group of people who, though they live in London, are in such desperate need of handouts that last year they received £7.6m in foreign aid. The Adam Smith Institute, the ultra-rightwing lobby group, now receives more money from Britain's Department for International Development (DfID) than Liberia or Somalia, two of the most desperate nations on Earth.

It gets what it pays for. The institute's purpose is to devise new means for corporations to grab the resources that belong to the public realm. Its president, Madsen Pirie, claims to have invented the word privatisation. His was the organisation that persuaded the Conservative government to sell off the railways, deregulate the buses, introduce the poll tax, cut the top rates of income tax, outsource local government services and start to part-privatise the national health service and the education system. "We propose things," Pirie once boasted, "which people regard as being on the edge of lunacy. The next thing you know, they're on the edge of policy." In this spirit, his institute now calls for the privatisation of social security, the dismantling of the NHS and a shift from public to private education. It opposes government spending on everything, in other words, except the Adam Smith Institute.

To understand what is happening, we must first revise our conception of what foreign aid is for. Aid has always been an instrument of foreign policy. During the cold war, it was used to buy the loyalties of states that might otherwise have crossed to the other side. Even today, the countries that receive the most money tend to be those that are of greatest strategic use to the donor nation. But foreign policy is also driven by commerce, and in particular by the needs of domestic exporters.

A doctor working in Gondar hospital in Ethiopia wrote to me recently to spell out what this means. The hospital has none of the basic textbooks on tropical diseases it needs. But it does have 21 copies of an 800-page volume called Aesthetic Facial Surgery and 24 volumes of a book called Opthalmic Pathology. There is no opthalmic pathologist in training in Ethiopia. The poorest nation on Earth, unsurprisingly, has no aesthetic plastic surgeons. The US had spent $2m on medical textbooks that American publishers hadn't been able to sell at home, called them aid and dumped them in Ethiopia.

[GOPFighter]

1. How can people like Pirie live with themselves??

Have they no Goddamn shame? Are they inordinately proud of themselves for being able to divert monies need by impoverished countries into their own pockets? Are they smug? Do they brag about it to their friends? Do their kids know what kind of scum sired them?

[T_i_B]

4. I imagine he sleeps very well

after looking at that £7.6 million gift Tony Blair gave him sitting in the Adam Smith Institute coffers. :eyes:

And still some people try to claim Blair is not a neo-conservative.How come he seems to do very little other then pull this sort of stunt on us?

[Merlin]

2. These are extraordinary disclosures. Monbiot rules! n/t

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[Judi Lynn]

3. I HAD to find his photo to revile after reading the article

What a complete ass. What a waste of skin. In a better world, people like him, and his cohorts here would be kept from harming others.