POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY FRANK CHING IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
Frank Ching, this piece represents little thought and no analysis.
A waste of your keyboard time, I'd say.
It's the kind of nonsense one expects to hear from an American Secretary of State blubbering about the behavior of other countries.
China has a per capita income a small fraction of America's despite its new wealth in limited regions.
It has all the immense headaches of looking after 1.3 billion people, many of them still very poor.
Besides, Haiti, as one comment has noted, is America's "backyard."
America has worked for two hundred years in countless ways to keep Haiti at arm's length. It does not want hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees.
That is the reason for its large assistance, not compassion or caring or anything else. Just power politics.
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Actually, while people seem to be dazzled by the size of American assistance to Haiti, it is not a reaction which could follow from America's overall level of giving.
On a fair comparison basis with the rest of the world, it is simply a fact that America actually comes out rather stingy.
It gives far less than many others, and much of what it does give has nothing to do with helping people.
It gives its largest single assistance to the relatively advanced state of Israel, about $3 billion a year, mostly for military purchases.
It gives another roughly $2 billion to Egypt to keep it friendly towards Israel and prop up the dictator-president of thirty years there.
And so it is down the list.
Also, much of its foreign assistance to other poor countries is just a subtle way of buying votes in the UN and other international institutions.
Relative to its wealth, American foreign assistance is rather paltry.
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Further, have readers noted that part of America’s “assistance” is a large landing of heavily armed troops? There are ten thousand the last I read, and this was expected to rise to twenty thousand.
Can you imagine, just in terms of displacement of Haiti’s very capacity for landing supplies and distributing them, what a burden this must be?
How many Haitians did without fresh water or food or beds while this massive operation took place?
Ten thousand troops who expect hot pizza and Budweiser and showers each day, to say nothing of ammunition and technical gear?
The intention is clear to anyone who bothers to think about it.
