31 May 2006
Commentary on ‘Where We Send Money’
In my earlier Where We Send Money post, I collected some facts about where the US government is sending aid, but didn’t say too much about those facts. Here are a few thoughts.
USAID says that we are sending out foreign aid in order to further US policy interests and improve the lives of people in the developing world. However, the effect (and I believe the intention) of much of our foreign aid is really to subjugate developing countries to US business interests. There’s much more on this subject in the excellent book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In this book, John Perkins describes how he and others created totally fake economic analyses and used covert threats to convince developing countries to accept loans from the US. They spent the money hiring US companies to build unnecessary infrastructure, and the countries ended up with these “improvements” in exchange for large quantities of debt. The vast majority of very poor people in these countries received no benefit at all from the “aid”, and became even worse off when their governments were later forced to adopt new policies (such as cutting budgets for education and public health care) in order to put more money into paying off their debts.
I do not want to say that none of our foreign aid is going towards helping people — certainly, if we send food to hungry people in Africa, some of the food will likely go to people who would otherwise have nothing to eat. However, I believe that not much of the foreign aid money is actually helping people, and that this trend needs to be reversed.
So, I will continue with my research and see if I can more fully substantiate my beliefs. Stay tuned!
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