US Foreign Aid Greatly Exaggerated, Says New Study

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/actaidusa/11172229941.htm

The world's richest nations greatly exaggerate their aid to poor countries – with the US, the worst offender, giving only 0.02% of its income in real assistance, says a study released today by ActionAid International.

The report, which can be downloaded at http://www.actionaidusa.org/Action Aid Real Aid.pdf says that some two-thirds of the money donated by the world’s wealthiest countries is in actuality “phantom aid” that is not genuinely available for poverty reduction in developing countries.

Phantom Aid is aid that is diverted from poor nations for other purposes within bureaucratic aid systems. This includes aid that is, among all G7 donations:

• not targeted for poverty reduction, estimated to be worth US$4.9 billion

[central scrutinizer]

1. and even that has strings attached

so that the money has to be spent on US contractors who just happen to be big supporters to Bushco.

[jayfish]

2. Bill Maher Has Been Saying This For Years.

And he is always dismissed.

Jay

[ClintonTyree]

3. WRONG.....

look at all the foreign aid we're pushing into Iraq! Over $300 Billion and counting! And they're not the least bit grateful. Of course we had to destroy the country to save it, correct? :shrug:

[MountainLaurel]

13. You're right on target

I recall reading several years ago that a huge chunk of U.S. "foreign aid" -- something like 80 percent of the total -- actually consisted of military equipment and training to Israel.

[sintax]

4. Foreign Aid can be a dangerous weapon

More on this:

In measuring US compassion towards other countries, I will take the more lenient view, not listing the invasions launched, regimes changed, the bombs dropped, coups instigated or sanctions imposed against the ‘salt of the earth.’ <22> Instead, I will compare the funds allocated to ‘foreign aid,’ the index by which Americans most of-ten measure their generosity towards poor countries. The total funds allo-cated by the United States to ‘foreign aid” amounted to 0.11 percent (note the position of the decimal) of its gross national income. That is easily the lowest ratio for the twenty-four members of Development Assistance Committee of the OECD. <23> On the ground, matters are much worse. Nearly one-third of this aid goes as grants (no ob-ligation to pay back) to another developed country, Israel, to buy the most advanced weaponry in the US arsenal.

So the United States is not the greatest country in the world, better than all other countries in every possible way. Why have I la-bored to establish this rather obvious result? There is a deep, two-way con-nection between these claims of superiority, of uniqueness, and the efforts by the American establishment to obfuscate the inequities inside the United States and to justify the inequities it helps to create and sustain outside its borders.

Every time America’s ‘leaders’ speak of the “world’s greatest country,” behind the backs of their constituents, many, perhaps most of them are scheming to build more prisons and fewer schools, to hire more policemen and fewer teachers, to train more secret agents and fewer scientists, to fund more WMDs and fewer life-saving drugs; they are being wined and dined by Corporations who are monopolizing the media, denuding our rights, placing their profits before our lives, our children, our safety, and the natu-ral beauty of the world we live in. In their myopic pursuit of power, these politicians would rather build the “world’s greatest country” (if only they could) but populated with an impoverished, uneducated and unhealthy population, supine and undemanding of their rights.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0403/S00269.htm

[laheina]

6. Hello sintax!!

Welcome to DU :hi:

Great post, btw.

[sintax]

11. Hi Back

Thanx and salut.

:toast:

More on spiritual assistance as 'given' by the white man-A quote from Arch Bishop Desmond TuTu...
"When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the bible and we had the land. They said...Let us pray. We closed our eyes...When we opened our eyes, we had the bible and they had the land."

[Vogon_Glory]

5. Exaggerating Foreign Aid A Right-Wing Propaganda Staple

Exaggerating the amount of foreign aid the US gives other countries has been a right-wing propaganda staple for over fifty years. The Radical Right has successfully bamboozled the average American citizen-voter into thinking that the US spends over a quarter of its budget on economic and infrastructure assistance to other countries. Right-wing hacks routinely sail into office on the basis of this and other continuing right-wing mythology, largely because of the laziness of corporate media and also because of the envy and the zero-sum game mindset common to all but a very few genuine altruists..

Most American voters don't want to believe the unflattering truth--that the US gives far less per capita for foreign aid than most other industrialized countries, and that even former US foreign aid recipients like South Korea and Spain provide relatively more international assistance than we do. The older right-wingers still parrot the myth that the US is the most generous country in the world, using the Marshall Plan and other progressive aid programs that they fought tooth and nail since their inception and have since successfully dismantled.

I'm a cynic; I believe that foreign aid benefits the metroples as well as the recipients. I've noted from observation in Latin America that foreign aid seems to have some little-noted advantages than right-wing "Amurrican" sooper-dooper "patriots" are too clueless to notice: that the folks providing the foreign aid to poorer nations get to set the prevailing engineering standards and dimensional specs by default. And should these countries need to buy new machinery to replace worn-out stuff in upcoming years, they're likely to deal with the outfits that made the stuff in the first place, and NOT at Uncle Sam's.

[laheina]

7. Cynic

"I'm a cynic; I believe that foreign aid benefits the metroples as well as the recipients."

There's nothing cynical about that perspective. I'd like to believe that giving always benefits the giver, even if the results aren't tangible. However, the benefits to the US in these arrangements is not only tangible, but often directly measurable in terms of $$$.

[Vogon_Glory]

8. Infrastructure: US Old vs. European/Asian New

I noticed the effect while playing tourist in Central America and while noodling around Cuba after delivering medical supplies. If you looked carefully, you could see a lot of aging US-design bridges, elevators, appliances, etc. But you also saw a lot of much newer European-design and Asian-design elevators, plumbing fixtures, bridges, heavy construction equipment, etc.

It's little things like these that help determine where the foreign aid recipient is likely to go shopping for replacement parts. Price isn't everything; compatability plays a very big, if understated part. Foreign aid is also a good sight cheaper than fighting wars and prolonged military occupations, which is something else clueless right-wingers never thought about.

[Judi Lynn]

9. This is so important. Here are the links which got snarled in the article:

http://www.actionaidusa.org/realaid.php

The PDF report:
http://www.actionaidusa.org/Action%20Aid%20Real%20Aid.pdf

It's startling to see this actually written anywhere! Thank you.

[olddad56]

10. most of our foreign aid comes in the form of bombs.

[Vogon_Glory]

12. Actually, Olddad's Right

Most of the US's foreign aid actually is in the form of some sort of military assistance in one form or another. During the middle Cold War years. economic foreign aid had dropped off precipitously. Most of the remaining foreign aid programs seem to have been fazed out, yet right-wing politicos and poo-bahs continued to polemicize as if all those guns, bombs, and aircraft were "wasteful" "boondoggles" that could actually help the citizens of Third World countries.

The despicable pattern still continues today with Gee Dubya's Duck Soup Posse and the Banana Republicans holding our country by the throat.

[iverglas]

14. and now what is USAmericans' *perception* of the situation?

http://www.worldviews.org/detailreports/usreport/html/ch5s8.html

Interestingly, it seems that one of the most important reasons that so many Americans say they want to cut foreign aid is that they drastically overestimate the amount of money that is being spent on it (see Figure 5-9). When asked what percentage of the federal budget they think goes to foreign aid, the median estimate is an extraordinary 25% of the budget, more than 25 times the actual level of just under 1%. Only 2% of Americans give a correct estimate of 1% of the budget or less. When asked how much of the federal budget should go to foreign aid, the median response is a remarkable 10% of the budget, or more than 10 times as much aid as is currently being given. Only 13% of Americans say that the appropriate percentage would be 1% or less.



Another reason for the desire to cut foreign aid in general terms could be that people associate it more with types of aid that they support less—such as aid for strategic purposes to countries that are not necessarily poor as well as military aid—as opposed to aid for the humanitarian purposes that they most roundly endorse.

http://cfrterrorism.org/policy/foreignaid.html

Do Americans support increasing foreign aid?

Yes. A University of Maryland poll, which was conducted in July 2002, indicated that 81 percent of Americans support increasing foreign-aid spending to fight terrorism. According to the poll’s findings, the typical American would like to spend $1 on foreign aid for every $3 spent on defense; the real ratio in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2003 is $1 on aid for every $19 spent on defense.

Tell 'em the truth, and you never know what they might say.

But then, that applies to just about everything. ;)