A good commentary on bourgeois charity. This reminds me a lot of an incident a few years back. I was part of a grad student mailing list at the time of the Sichuan earthquake a few years back. A Chinese student group, no doubt, with the very good intention of helping the victims of the quake, sent out an email on the mailing list asking for donations to various charity groups to help the victims. I very politely replied to the list suggesting that with $2T in foreign reserves, money was not in short supply in China. And coincidentally at the very same time, Burma was lashed by cyclone Nargis resulting in a humanitarian crisis of similar proportions to the China quake. I suggested that anyone who wanted to help should (a) find a way other than cash donations to aid the Sichuan victims and/or (b) instead redirect their cash donation to Burma, which was a much poorer nation and where money really was in desperately short supply.
My email never got through to the mailing list. Someone censored it. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/03/14/dont-donate-money-to-japan/ -----------------------snip Japan is a wealthy country which is responding to the disaster, among other things, by printing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new money. Money is not the bottleneck here: if money is needed, Japan can raise it. On top of that, it’s still extremely unclear how or where organizations like globalgiving intend on spending the money that they’re currently raising for Japan — so far we’re just told that the money “will help survivors and victims get necessary services,” which is basically code for “we have no idea what we’re going to do with the money, but we’ll probably think of something.” Globalgiving, it’s worth pointing out, was created to support “projects in the developing world,” where lack of money is much more of a problem than it is in Japan. I’m not at all convinced that the globalgiving model can or should be applied directly to Japan, without much if any thought about whether it’s the best way to address the issues there. That said, it’s entirely possible that organizations like the Red Cross or Save the Children will find themselves with important and useful roles to play in Japan. It’s also certain that they have important and useful roles to play elsewhere. So do give money to them — and give generously! And give money to other NGOs, too, like Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which don’t jump on natural disasters and use them as opportunistic marketing devices. Just make sure it’s unrestricted. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
