U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid

[ODShowtime]

Originally posted by Cathedral
STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES!!!!

B-3, OD and Nickfresh on the same page?

No need to dispute, this guy's a cocksucker. He already apologized apparently:


UN Official Backs Down: Rich Nations Not 'Stingy'

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The international response to a catastrophic tsunami in Asia has been quick and generous, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday, playing down his earlier comments that wealthy nations were stingy.

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland rowed back from statements he made on Monday after an annoyed Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was "the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world."

"The United States is not stingy," Powell told CNN's "American Morning" program.

Egeland told reporters on Tuesday: "I've been misinterpreted when I yesterday said that I believed that rich countries in general can be more generous."

"It has nothing to do with any particular country or the response to this emergency. We are in early days and the response has so far been overwhelmingly positive," he said.

"The international assistance that has come and been pledged from the United States, from Europe and from countries in the region has also been very generous," Egeland added.

God damn right tulip boy.

[Mezro]

We should just give the 15 million to Thailand.

Mezro...the U.S. needs to keep a strong pimp hand on the hooking action...

[Cathedral]

Originally posted by ODShowtime
No need to dispute, this guy's a cocksucker. He already apologized apparently:


UN Official Backs Down: Rich Nations Not 'Stingy'

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The international response to a catastrophic tsunami in Asia has been quick and generous, a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday, playing down his earlier comments that wealthy nations were stingy.

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland rowed back from statements he made on Monday after an annoyed Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was "the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world."

"The United States is not stingy," Powell told CNN's "American Morning" program.

Egeland told reporters on Tuesday: "I've been misinterpreted when I yesterday said that I believed that rich countries in general can be more generous."

"It has nothing to do with any particular country or the response to this emergency. We are in early days and the response has so far been overwhelmingly positive," he said.

"The international assistance that has come and been pledged from the United States, from Europe and from countries in the region has also been very generous," Egeland added.

God damn right tulip boy.

ROTMFFLMMFAO @ "tulip boy"...I was not ready for a belly laugh of that magnitude.
I have a respiratory infection right now and that just plain hurt, lol.

[ODShowtime]

Yeah I thought that would go over well. It's fun when we're all on the same page sometimes.

[Cathedral]

Yeah it is, it's a shame we cannot run our country like that more often.
Ya know, when you look at the big picture here at home, we all aren't far from a common ground.
It just seems like our desire to compromise and come closer together gets clouded by ideology and an over bearing need to be right while proving the other side wrong.

We lost touch as a Nation, only i cannot figure out exactly when we drifted off the path of unity.
Tragic as it was, 9-11 gave us a taste of what we lost for a short time.

I'll admit that the Bush Admin wrongly took advantage of that when the Patriot Act was drafted, but dammit we have got to learn how to work together without constant bickering and conspiring or we're all going to be fucked.

[ODShowtime]

that's a nice sentiment, but we already are fucked. I just want some lub so it goes down easier.

[Cathedral]

Happy B-Day, OD!

I got news for anyone planning on fucking me...my ass has teeth.

I respectfully disagree that we are already fucked, we haven't elected a woman president yet, lmmfao.

[DrMaddVibe]

Give till it hurts bitches!

http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=13638489

[Angel]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
Offers of aid have poured in from around the world in the past two days, with the European Union's executive arm releasing $4 million in emergency aid and pledging an additional $27 million. Canada and several European nations — including Spain, Germany, Ireland and Belgium — each pledged about $1 million yesterday.

Actually B3, due to the public's bitching, Canada has changed their donation from 4 million to 40 million. That's just the federal govt. The provincial gov't of BC has donated 2 million, I believe. I don't know what the other provinces have committed to yet. As of this morning, Canadian citizens had donated 8.7 million through various agencies.

Has the US increased it's initial 15 mil yet?

[Big Train]

PLEASE, you know 15 mil doesn't even BEGIN to say how much we are gonna give before it's over...it will be billions with a B.

[Nickdfresh]

Yet Maybe He has a Point?

December 31, 2004

CATASTROPHE IN SOUTHERN ASIA
U.S. Aid Generous and Stingy
It depends on how the numbers are crunched -- total dollars or a slice of the overall economy.

By Sonni Efron, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Americans think of themselves as the most generous people on Earth. So to many, it came as a shock to hear that the U.S. response to the southern Asian tsunami this week was considered stingy.

But views of American generosity depend on who is doing the measuring and how.

By total money, the United States by far donates more than any other country in the world. This is the gauge preferred by most U.S. officials.

But when aid is calculated per U.S. citizen or as a percentage of the economy, the United States ranks among the least generous in the industrialized world.

As U.S. officials and foreign aid experts debate which measure is more apt, the issue is another example of how Americans' views of themselves differ from those from around the world.

"I don't take kindly to comments from the U.N. calling these miserly responses, when we're the ones who generally foot the bill, and we will in this one," said Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), referring to comments this week from U.N. aid officials questioning initial U.S. aid offers.

The Bush administration now is pledging much more, at least $35 million, up from $15 million, and said the amount would rise further. Still, others in Washington sympathize with the view held outside U.S. borders that Americans can afford more.

"It's embarrassing," said Tim Rieser, an aide to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) who works on foreign aid issues in the Senate and was in the Sri Lankan capital when the tsunami struck. "Nothing illustrates this more vividly than that out of a trillion-dollar budget, we provide less than 1% for foreign assistance and far less than 1% for humanitarian aid.

"Our ability to give far exceeds what we do give," Rieser said.

Critics of U.S. giving often cite statistics from the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, which each year measures overseas development assistance as a percentage of gross national income for the 22 leading industrialized nations.

In 2003, the United States ranked dead last on OECD's list, spending only 0.15% of its national income. Other Western countries contributed more. Norway spent 0.92% of its national income; France 0.4% and Britain 0.34%.

Officials in both the Bush and the Clinton administrations have argued that the OECD statistics are misleading. The OECD does not measure many forms of assistance provided by the U.S. government other than formal foreign aid, officials said.

Although the OECD measure puts U.S. spending on foreign aid at $16.2 billion last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development counts U.S. giving differently. USAID officials point to its report on aid in 2000 saying government assistance to developing countries totaled $22.6 billion. Further, private assistance — including giving by individuals, religious groups, foundations, corporations, universities and others — was an additional $33.6 billion, said USAID, for a total of more than $56 billion.

Still, many outside the U.S. government believe that aid spending should not include some military expenditures or funds to promote democracy.

Even using the American view of largess, the United States comes up short compared with other nations, said Patrick Cronin, a former assistant administrator for policy and program coordination at USAID under President Bush.

"We have to do more," said Cronin, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think-tank. "But we have to do it smart, and we have to change the debate away from a simple redistribution of wealth to a discussion of … aid effectiveness."

A different key measure of international generosity was devised by the Center for Global Development and Foreign Policy magazine. It ranked rich countries' contributions to the poor in terms of contributions through aid, trade, investment, technology, security, technology and the environment. Countries got points for the quality as well as the quantity of their aid and contributions.

On that scale, the U.S. ranked seventh out of 21 nations, behind Canada, Britain, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Japan, which is one of the world's largest aid donors but collects huge interest payments on its development loans, ranked last.

The scale found that U.S. contributions of pure foreign aid was relatively much lower than other countries'. The U.S. scored higher on immigration and trade. Allowing foreigners and foreign products into the country are considered measures of how much a rich country is willing to help poorer ones.

But the study upended the commonly held view that shortfalls in U.S. government aid for the global poor were made up by private American contributions.

It found that U.S. government foreign aid in 2002 worked out to 13 cents per American a day. Private donations from U.S. citizens amounted to 5 cents per person a day.

But in 16 other countries, governments gave more. And in three other countries — Switzerland, Ireland and Norway — private citizens gave more.

The Norwegian government gave $1.02 per citizen a day while private giving came to 24 cents a day.

Cronin said that U.S. per capita giving would never match that of Norway, a nation of 4.5 million. On the other hand, the United States makes many other contributions that are hard to quantify in dollar terms, he said, including using its military prowess for worldwide peacekeeping operations that benefit others, or airlifting tsunami relief supplies to remote areas and sending in ships that desalinate water.

"We're not going to hand out the Nobel Peace Prize, but we are going to go into harm's way and provide international security in a way Norway won't, even though they are a staunch U.S. ally," Cronin said.

David Roodman, one of the architects of the Center for Global Development study, argued that no wealthy country was giving enough to the poor.

"Stingy, of course, is a relative term," Roodman said. "I wouldn't say the entire world is stingy. But helping the rest of the world is clearly a low priority in making our policies, and that's true in every country to a greater or lesser extent."

U.S. overseas assistance aid declined in the late 1990s but has increased under Bush from $10 billion in 2000 to $16 billion in 2004. That represents about a quarter of total aid from all the industrialized countries.

At the same time, without another large spending hike, U.S. commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan and now the 11 tsunami-stricken nations are expected to strain the budget for aid to other parts of the world.

Some critics compared Bush's $35-million pledge for the tsunami victims with the roughly $1 billion a week the U.S. was spending in Iraq.

Although the American left has traditionally lobbied for more foreign aid, it is the Christian right that is credited with convincing the administration to spend more on fighting global AIDS and on hunger in Africa. Christian groups also pressed Bush to increase relief efforts for the tsunami victims.

Given the war in Iraq, political efforts in the Muslim world are especially sensitive. Some critics have argued that the administration should have jumped at a chance to show its generosity over a natural disaster that hit Asian Muslims.

In an interview with ABC News' "Nightline," outgoing Secretary of State Colin L. Powell defended the administration's efforts on behalf of Muslims. He said the U.S. had played an important role in Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, where he maintained Muslim populations were freed from oppression.

"So we have nothing to apologize for with respect to what we have tried to do to help Muslims over the years," Powell said. "And this [tsunami aid] is another example of our willingness to help."

The Bush administration has tried to focus its aid on key goals such as economic and political reform. And its Millennium Challenge Account aid program is designed to give assistance to countries that use it most effectively toward those ends.

Some applaud those goals, saying Americans should insist on productive use of aid. Others, like David L. Phillips of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the Bush administration "sees development assistance through an ideological prism."

"Its approach to foreign aid is based on a democracy and freedom criteria," Phillips said. "There's nothing wrong with linking aid to democratic development, but that shouldn't preclude countries that are just starting on the path to democracy from benefiting from foreign aid."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writers Paul Richter and Peter Wallsten in Washington contributed to this report.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Foreign aid

Government aid and private giving, per person, per day in 2002: Country Government Private
Norway $1.02 $0.24
Denmark 0.84 0.01
Sweden 0.61 0.01
Netherlands 0.57 0.04
Switzerland 0.35 0.07
Belgium 0.28 0.02
Ireland 0.28 0.06
France 0.25 0.01
Finland 0.24 0.01
Britain 0.23 0.02
Japan 0.20 0.004
Austria 0.18 0.02
Canada 0.17 0.02
Australia 0.14 0.03
United States 0.13 0.05
Italy 0.11 0.002
Spain 0.11 0.01
Portugal 0.9 0.001
New Zealand 0.8 0.01
Greece 0.7 0.001
Sources: Center for Global Development, Foreign Policy magazine

Los Angeles Times

[Wayne L.]

The U. N. is a joke who shouldn't be taken seriously by anybody while the U. S. gives more money privately by its own citizens & by its own goverment whoever the president is at the time when a tragedy like this earthquake & tsunami occurs so the stingy comment is ludicrous.

[LoungeMachine]

Originally posted by Wayne L.
The U. N. is a joke who shouldn't be taken seriously by anybody while the U. S. gives more money privately by its own citizens & by its own goverment whoever the president is at the time when a tragedy like this earthquake & tsunami occurs so the stingy comment is ludicrous.

No, what's ludicrous, besides your run on sentence, is the FACT that your statement is pure bullshit.

But don't let facts get in your way.

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by LoungeMachine
No, what's ludicrous, besides your run on sentence, is the FACT that your statement is pure bullshit.

But don't let facts get in your way.

NO. Wayne was pretty much correct. Grammar excluded.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by BigBadBrian
NO. Wayne was pretty much correct. Grammar excluded.

Wayne's an idiot that talks out of his ass with no information to back up what he says; Grammar is definately NOT excluded!