The Future of "Aid"

I read this article in the FT in August. I kept it. I have been talking about how Africa will be re-colonized by the middle of this century for some time, not the same way as in the last century or two, but in a new way, one involving control through production and resource allocation with people in place to make this possible being both local and from the colonial powers.

You may wonder what an FT article about how 45% of US Aid to Pakistan gets "distributed" to "well paid consultants" or other specialists overseeing international aid instead of to the "project" that the Aid was meant to benefit, has to do with colonizing Africa.

The answer is simple. The US Government is yet again attempting to install a kind of overriding system to track every dollar in the latest "stimulus" money. I say "again" because some years ago this type of tracking system was supposed to be in place at least in the military, yet there is still an extreme amount of waste and fraud in every dollar the Defense Department spends, mostly because all of this spending is still controlled by "people" who know how to abuse the cash and of course much of the Defense Department spending is nothing but Welfare for well fed contractors and pay backs for whatever folks are due big contracts to bail them out of the latest financial mess enveloping our nation.

Anyway, the time has come for a direct Aid system that is completely divorced from the "Aid Machine" of consultants, ex-peace corp inbreds, grant writing professionals and other "non-profit" do good organizations that scour the world looking for "projects" to fund and other ways to scrape cash from the aid budgets coming out of Washington. All US Aid should be generated from request of the people who would directly benefit from the aid in the country where it will be granted. Yes there are many models for how this could be accomplished but suffice to say, direct request from the people / nation needing the aid and who will be responsible for implementing the program is paramount.

All grants should have a "formula" based on a set of parameters, like the size of the grant, the intensity of the project, the purpose etc. where "management" of the grant as a portion of expense is built in along with other guidelines. The people submitting the grant request would in fact be able to work with these "formulas" and argue their percentages etc. when such flexibility is warranted.

All grants should be distributed electronically. There should never be "cash" until actual designated expenses are distributed and only where non-electronic forms of payment are necessary. Every dollar should be tracked to the final recipient and every final recipient should have a direct role to play in implementing the program the grant is for.

The entire "industry" in Washington of people who make a living scraping as much money as possible from every US Aid dollar should be put out of business. I live in this town and although I don't "run" regularly in circles of these folks, I have and do run into them relatively often. I have yet to meet ONE person in this US Aid "industry" who I would say is qualified to go to another country and tell folks there how to do anything.

I live in a city that sold its above ground rail system to GM for $1 and it was promptly dismantled; a city that has no pedestrian friendly public areas to partake in civil discourse (with the exception of the "Mall" and surrounding National Park, areas which are not where the "citizens" of this city live, work and play); a city where the public education system from K through University is so poorly able to accomplish it's task it looses 50% of its students; a city that has just experienced a building boom but assumes there will never be young adults with children ever living here, hence no regulations to make anything suitable for children; a city that still dumps vast amounts of it's raw sewage into the adjacent waterways; a city that has plenty of "affordable housing" as long as you don't mind being mugged, shot or otherwise harassed for living there; a city that pays out vast amounts of money to developers and corporations to bring "national retail" to its center yet fails to provide reasonable cost municipal parking to serve the majority of its residents un or under served by public transportation to get there; a city that has the highest percentage of administrators per-capita in the US running everything from it's metro transportation service, fire and police service to public administration getting paid over $100,000 a year and who do absolutely nothing; a city with inadequate or unreliable medical facilities for a vast number of its residents; a city with crime and incarceration rates that are more comparable to a developing drug lord nation. I could go on. I have not event touched the city from the Federal level yet, the corruption, incompetence, waste, crime, war etc. created by our national government.

There are these people who actually think or have been led to think they can help someone in another country do ANYTHING! It astounds me. Most people when I bring this up are politely offended when I simply ask them "What qualifications do you have that make you think you have the ability to implement anything to improve the lives of folks in another part of the world when you are a of this country, which is such a complete mess and is responsible for more death, destruction and terror around the world than any other one or group of countries combined?"

Enough said.