Saturday, January 08, 2005

The Other, man-made Tsunami

The west's crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week's bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush's coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of "aid" only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government's current "generous" contribution is one sixteenth of the ?800m it spent bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one twentieth of a billion pound gift, known as a "soft loan", to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.
This and a whole lot more here from John Pilger

1 comment:

Myk said...

Tell me about it. It's so amazing that the whole world can see that the U.S. government are arseholes and that they seem to think that they are the world's saviours. They are truely deranged.

P.S. Good blog Simon.

(I'm another ex-pat in London btw, except I use to do the odd flyer for you, back in the day.)