This guy from the U.N. is backing down from calling the wealthy nations (read "United States") "stingy" on their aid to Asian countries hit by the tsunamis.
Last I checked, the US was the #1 contributor at $15mil plus several teams of aid workers. The #2 contributor was the entire EU at $4mil.
I am sure he is only backing down because of the heat he is taking. I believe his original comment reflects what a majority of them really think about us.
Some Yahoo News article wrote: "If actually the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income, I think that is stingy really. I don't think that is very generous," he said.
The United Nations urged rich nations a quarter of a century ago to give away 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product every year in the form of development aid.
To date, however, just a handful of European nations, most of them in Scandinavia, actually meet that goal.
The United States, the world's largest economy, contributes about 0.13 a year of its GDP to development aid. But that figure excludes aid to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as food aid, where the United States is the world's largest donor.
How much aid did we get from other countries when three hurricanes hit the southeast?
Edit: And how much of our damages was actually lessened due to money spent on infrastructure: detection, warning, and evacuation systems? They didn't have hardly any of that setup which is why the devestation was so high. Our $15mil is paltry because their governments can't properly take care of their own people?
Gee I guess there is a downside to that cheap labor after all.
If the U.S. had asked for aid from other countries after the hurricanes hit, I'm sure some would have agreed to offer some kind of aid. The chances of our government actually asking for said aid is roughly that of a snowball's in hell.
And is it really fair to those countries to blame the death toll on them because they didn't have the financial resources to mitigate the consequences of such a massive natural disaster? I mean, if a tsunami caused by a 8.9 quake hit here in the U.S., there would be a ton of dead Americans too. We have so many seaside communites. Besides, do we even have any systems in place to warn Americans living in those communities about tsunamis? It's not like they're a common occurence.
We do? Interesting. I wonder how it works. I also wonder how effective it would be since I'm sure there's a lot of people (Americans and otherwise) that wouldn't be prepared for it or know what warning signs to look for if it happened here. I heard that when the waterline receded way out, many people actually went out on to the beach out of simple curiosity instead of running away or onto high ground as fast as possible. I'm betting there's a lot of people here that would do the same thing.
We have systems that A) Detect seismic activity that would definitely have picked up an 8.9 earthquake and B) Detect tidal waves (with bouys). We have the emergency broadcast system to distribute the warning to the populace. The people just have to get away from the coast and up a hill, not nearly as far inland as they do to avoid a hurricane.
The tidal waves were moving 700 kmh, which is fast but a lot of these places hit were between 1-2 hours away from the epicenter even at that speed.
If "billions of dollars" in damages were suffored as reported, then these countries aren't so poor that they couldn't have prevented this. And if they are so poor, why scoff at $15million in aid (although I know it was this guy from the U.N. doing the scoffing and not the victims)?
Well the tidals themselves weren't really moving 700kph, that was just the wave velocity (of the transmission wave, not the tidal waves). I would assume that these countries actually got pounded sixteen or seventeen times by the tsunamis from the quake.
But I watched this whole discovery channel special a few years back on this island off the coast of Africa where geologists calculated that some hundreds of thousands of years ago a mountain split and slid into the ocean and cast tidal waves over 75 feet high all the way across the Atlantic ocean. They said if it happened again, and that it could, it would annihilate the entire east US coast.
Yeah, my bad. It is the shock waves near the epicenter that move at 700 kmh. The tidal waves as they approached shores were around 30-40 mph.
Anyway, I was watching this documentary several years ago where a meteor hit the atlantic and the tidal wave wiped out a lot of the US East coast, including Tea Leone.
In the U.N. speakers rant he talks bout the scandanavian countries being some of the only countries meeting thier "goal". Yeah how much money are they giving up compared to the US, how much defecit do they have compared to us. I feel sorry for all the death and destruction, and I believe we should aid it what we can, emphesis on what. We have our own problems here which we should be taking care of, and a national debt thats almost as big as...well as big as Tea Leoni.
The only documentary I saw with Tasha Yar was the one where she is killed by Armus on Viagra II.
Recent news reports say that India decline aid, saying that they could handle it themselves and others need it more. That was might gracious of them, I would say.
