RE: [Futurework] Gone with the Water

[Harry Pollard]

Lawry,   Death is an individual experience. The number is unimportant beside the fact that a loved one has died.   AIDS could be stopped tomorrow if Africans stopped sexual intercourse. The present victims would die, but there would be no more. So, that the way to stop it.   Promiscuity is a problem. If Africans kept to one partner that would help. You’ll remember that post about the activist in Africa interviewing prostitutes at a truck stop. They charge more for intercourse without a condom.   Present HIV would not affect AIDS much – if at all. Until several years ago, the hundreds of thousands of research papers on HIV/AIDS had not shown a link between them.   I heard that at last (after 2-3 decades) a paper had been published showing a connection, but I’ve never seen it. However, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.   The definition of AIDS has become pretty much any serious disease with HIV. You are dying of pneumonia with HIV - you have AIDS. You are dying from pneumonia without HIV – you have pneumonia. That’s the way they define AIDS – any disease in an HIV patient.   There is money for AIDS – little or none for pneumonia. So, you are a doctor with a seriously ill patient, What does he have – pneumonia or AIDS?   On the other hand, you couldn’t be blamed. I would act the same way.   I haven’t looked at this situation for a long time. Back then, testing for HIV wasn’t up to much in much of Africa. Positives or negatives were very dodgy.  Maybe things are better now.   Throwing money there won’t help – though that seems to be the only suggestion. All that does is make dying a little easier for many people.   It doesn’t solve the problem.   In  many ways, AIDS parallels Global Warming.   The project is in the hands of an international bureaucracy which is tied to what it knows to be true. The problem with bureaucracies – whether governmental, corporate, or non-governmental – is that their rigidity reduces their effectiveness. They are usually not much open to other ideas.   I remember seeing an Oxfam leader laughing at the question of more food for starving Ethiopian people.   “We have plenty of food,” he said. “The problem is getting it through the government to the people who need it.”   Which leads to the major problem in Africa – corruption.   Money going to Africa goes into a bottomless sink – or rather to Swiss banks. I think I reported that after more than a century, Kenya land is not in the hands of white colonials. Instead the largest Kenyan landholders are now members of the present administration and bureaucrats from the previous Moi government.   We now know what they’ve done with the money they stole – they bought land from the white landholders.   What will probably happen is that those with immunity to AIDS will survive and those concerned will declare success.   Harry   ******************************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655  Tujunga  CA 91042 818 352-4141 ********************************     From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lawrence deBivort Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 5:04 PM To: 'Cordell, Arthur: ECOM'; 'Karen Watters Cole'; futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca Subject: RE: [Futurework] Gone with the Water   This is not an excuse, but a contributing factor: despite its great wealth, the US federal government, which unlike the states is not required to balance its budget, routinely undertakes expenditures that are both wasteful and fiscally unwise. There is a lack of fiduciary responsibility in Washington that leaves essential infrastructure without adequate development or maintenance.  The Iraq and Afghan adventures are only the latest and among the most dramatic of such fiscal adventures. The ordinary American does not have the educational skill to question the adventures, and so the politicians get away with it.  Now, not only were preparations for a New Orleans disaster meager, but the response will be relatively meager, due to Iraq and Afghanistan expenditures, and heavily dependent on those same ordinary Americans to donate aid privately.   Of course it is a silly way to conduct the public’s business.  Is it shameful?  I suppose so, but in this case the victims are also contributing to the negligence.   And, to keep things in perspective:  We have inflicted far more death on the Iraqis and Afghanis than have died in Louisiana and Mississippi. The deaths there are trivial in number compared to the deaths from the tsunami, and those are trivial compared to the deaths that have and will result from AIDS.  Yet AIDS and Iraq/Afghanistan were preventable: they are deaths imposed on people by people.  Not only are those numbers vastly greater than those caused by Katrina, they are the product of bad public policy and lacking social accountability.  What of all these things are the really shameful ones?   Why is it that our press can fly people to New Orleans to pose alongside the lapping waters, but can’t send reporters outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, or to Darfur, or to AIDS clinics in Africa, to pose alongside the bodies there?   Of course, these comments go against to popular trend today. But when can we raise these questions? Bush was quick to join the rush to sympathy, but it seems strangely exploitive when you think of the tears he should be shedding, and for whom he should be shedding them.   Struggling against the current, Lawry

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