Wednesday, January 05, 2005

A bit of a detour but a a fascinating essay, showing the depth of US participation that can bordre on, if not support corruption, sponsored by the army says (note  the way the word corruption slips in.)  Corbin Lyday, an analyst who spent 9 yearswith the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), “couldn’t think of a single meeting in 9 years” between principal actors in State, USAID, and Defense to coordinate regional or country programs. He notes that “no one crosses bureaucratic lines; we spend in isolation,” and believes that military assistance money, critical to gain basing access in Central Asia, can nonetheless undermine years of work toward anticorruptionand good governance programs. In any case, he advises to “zero in on the money. That’s most important—there’s an enormous amount of money here. If we don’t know where it is, we can’t even ask if we’rehelping.” General Zinni provides the example for these analysts: counterdrug programs in Uzbekistan. “CENTCOM ran a program, CIA ran one, [former Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright drops $2 million—why not coordinate resources and efforts?”   from http://www.ndu.edu/inss/books/Books_2004/Essays2004/CJCS_Essays_2004.pdf Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Strategy Essay Competition An annual event since 1981, the CJCS Strategy Essay Competition is managed by NDU Press on behalf of the Chairman to select the best essays written by the students of the staff colleges and war colleges of the U.S. Armed Forces College of Naval Warfare, etc.. Posted by douglass carmichael 5:12:27 PM    comment []

The NYT in an editorial It's instinctive in humans to search for the meaning of an event like this, once shock and grief have begun to subside. And there will be plenty of meanings to find in the ways that humans reacted as this disaster struck and in its aftermath as the relief effort begins. But except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth's surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. Whenever those forces punctuate human history, they do so tragically. They demonstrate, geologically speaking, how ephemeral our presence is.  Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/27/opinion/27mon-tsunami.html> This is an amzing exoneration of the rest of us, and corporations, from the details of the economy of the area, the development of Exxon's natural gas fields in Aech, and all the use of military power to move people off land, extort them and kill. The presence of so many people on hte edge may be linked to major land clearing and other economic factors that are exploitative.   the divergence with the image of the culprit mother nature is vast. That people live where they do, fish as they do, are realted to world resource and population problems, not to mere acts of nature. The emerging question in the Indian Ocean tsunami aftereffects is whether the awareness of the conditions of real lives, so many, so fragile, will have any impact on the direction the leadership, the press, and economics will take. Governance and the media live ion a  self serving narrow partial illusion. Can we expect this to get better? What can we do? That is, is there an emerging alternative that has a chance of creating a coherent society we, humanity, could actually step into, out of our current ways, without capsizing in the attempt? To put it in yet another perspective, The total deaths are less than the monthly birthrate for india alone, at 23/1000/year, and the annual death rate for children and malaria I think is about 5 million. The visual TVable power of the Tsunami is probabaly what makes this so powerful as a representative event of our time. It can be compared to   Grand Death Auto March/April 2004 Grand Death Auto By 2020, traffic fatalities will be the world’s third leading cause of death after heart disease and tobacco smoke and ahead of HIV/AIDS, according to a recent report by the Global Burden of Disease Project (GBD), cosponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. More than 1 million people are killed on the world’s roads each year, and nearly 90 percent of these deaths occur in low to middleincome nations. In 2000, Southeast Asia alone bore one third of...   http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/login.php?story_id=2497&;URL=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2497   For a report on Exxon in Aech see http://www.laborrights.org/projects/corporate/exxon/ Posted by douglass carmichael 4:29:07 PM    comment []