[thechat] Censorship

Ashok Hariharan listman at hazard0us.org
Mon Oct 13 10:32:38 CDT 2003


Another good (but slightly outdated) read is 
"The Lords of Poverty" by Graham Hancock...

But, I see stuff like this all the time.  We get a lot of 
business from international NGOs -- one of them that I am 
quite familiar with has been doing "water resource mapping" 
for a certain country in East Africa.  Not a bad thing.

Except for the fact that they have been doing it for the last
15 years, and every couple of years the source of funding 
changes, which means they change programme officers *and* 
software (arcview to dynamicmaps to something new....and 
so on...in a never ending loop) and they also tend to "lose" 
data during these transitions.

After many years and millions of dollars, they have 
fantastic water resource maps -- yet, nobody in the 
country still has access to water (leave alone safe 
drinking water...)

Aid is in many ways like a modern version of the gold rush.
Instead of mining picks and basins nowadays they use shiny 
land-cruisers and GPS.... 

>Riders like the one Ron's mentioned are fucking the planet. 
>Martin lent me a great book by Greg Palast (The Best Democracy 
>Money Can Buy) that details how the IMF, WTO and World Bank are 
>using more extensive riders to fuck over country after country. 
>"You can have a loan to get your country out of its current 
>debt, but only if you allow our mega-corps to

--Ashok


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