帮助穷人还是富人？

这次为大家带来了好消息！英国对外援助终于达到了0.7%大关！毫无疑问，正如您将了解到的那样，长期以来，联合国开发计划署都在鼓励富裕的国家拿出本国GDP的0.7%，用作对外援助，帮助较贫困的国家克服不足，改善人民的生活质量。直到最近，还只有斯堪纳维亚国家和为数不多的其他国家成功实现了这个相当小的份额，但现在，英国也成为了其中的一员，可以在国际社会上昂首挺胸了（虽然在英国国内，由于担心惹恼认为不应该向英国以外的任何人提供资金的仇外人士，在其本国并未如此招摇）。

不幸的是，在我们开始为此大肆庆祝之前，还存在一个问题——这实际上是一个相当重要的问题，大部分的援助款都去了哪里。我们愿意想象人们会将其直接用于疫苗接种、修建学校、提供紧急医疗物资等等。但实际上，援助款大部分都会被用于旨在盈利的私人小区和项目（为当地资本家服务，同时，在许多情况下，还为英国企业所用），而非创造各种社会效益。

大部分的援助款都提供给了金融企业，然后，由他们做出对所有人都有好处的投资。这在一定程度上反映出了政府没有能力处理事务，我们只有依靠私营部门寻求最大利益。当然，这种理念完全忽略了私人部门对金钱无法满足的贪念，因此，他们会将大部分援助款投入肯定会产生盈利的项目——私人公寓楼、酒店、购物中心等等。他们所持的观点是，通过投资产生的利润，让部分当地企业富起来，最终这些资金将通过“涓滴效应”惠及大众。他们似乎忘记了这在任何地方都未曾成功过；也从未考虑过只需将资金直接用于穷人所需的观点。

其他存在争议的方案还涉及到了农业。对部分非洲国家来说，要获得农业援助，政府必须接受严格的要求——特别是在任何情况下都不能限制出口。这意味着即使饥荒再次肆虐东非，面向国外市场的食品出口将仍然优先于当地人民的粮食供给。咖啡和巧克力等经济作物也能增加获得援助款的可能性，尽管对当地民众来说，它们几乎毫无用处；同样还有连接港口的运输工具和基础设施，它们让这些作物能快速高效地进入国际市场。这些方案在提供援助款的同时，也通过受益国获得了与援助款相当的收益，但是，许多较为贫穷的国家感觉自己别无选择，只能接受这些要求，以便获得足够的资金来为自己的人民做些事情。

实质上，这些方案证明了我们早就清楚的道理——援助通常是汲取穷国资源，维持全球经济结构性不平等（正是这种不平等让他们处于贫穷的境地）的方式，而不是要真正帮助这些地球上的可怜人。它让政府看来很棒（至少对一些人来说），同时又无需做出真正不受欢迎或会损害本国企业的需要和欲望的事情。因此，在我们制定出旨在帮助穷人而不是企业的更公正的援助新政策之前，终于实现了微不足道的0.7%这一目标，可能也并不是非常值得庆祝的事。

从英文版翻译而来。原文于 6月11,  http://anashell.blogspot.com/2014/06/aid-for-poor-or-for-rich.html

[ 英国对外援助, GDP, 修建学校, 提供紧急医疗物资, Ana Shell, 私人小区和项目 ]

Aid for the poor or for the rich?

Good news for once! British foreign aid has finally reached the 0.7% mark! As you will no doubt know, there has been a longstanding target encouraged by the UN Development Programme to encourage rich countries to give 0.7% of their GDP as foreign aid to help poorer countries overcome their disadvantages and improve the lives of their citizens. Until recently, only the Scandinavian countries and a few others had managed to achieve this fairly small sum, but now Britain can join the club and hold its head up high in the international community (although not so much at home, where this success has been barely mentioned for fear of annoying the xenophobes who believe no money should be given to help anyone outside of the country).

Unfortunately, before we start celebrating too wildly, there is a problem – and it is the rather major one of where most of the money is actually going to. We like to think that aid money goes directly into vaccination campaigns, building schools, providing emergency medical supplies, and so on. In actual fact, a lot of it goes into private developments and projects that aim at generating a profit (for local capitalists and in many cases British corporations as well) rather than achieving many social benefits.

Much of the money is placed into financial corporations, who then choose where to invest it for the good of everyone. This is part of the ideology that the government has no ability to run things competently, and that we should all rely on the private sector to look out for our best interests. Of course, this completely ignores the private sector’s insatiable drive for more and more money, and consequently much of the aid money ends up going into things that will be unambiguously profitable – private apartment buildings, hotels, shopping centres, and so on. The idea is that by making certain local businesses rich on the profits of these investments, the money will eventually ‘trickle down’ to the general population. That this has not worked anywhere in the world seems to be ignored; the idea of simply giving the money directly to the things that poor people need is not entertained.

Other controversial schemes involve agriculture. In some African countries, agricultural aid is only being given if governments agree to strict requirements – in particular, not to restrict exports under any circumstances. This means that even if a famine hits East Africa again, exports of food for foreign markets will still take priority over feeding the local population. Cash crops like coffee and chocolate are also more likely to receive aid money, despite being of almost no use to local people; as are transport and infrastructure links to ports, allowing these crops to get onto the world market quickly and efficiently. These schemes benefit the country providing the aid money as much as the country receiving it, but many poorer governments feel they have no choice but to accept these requirements in order to get enough money to do something for their own people.

Essentially, these schemes prove what we have long known – that aid is often a way to extract resources from poor countries and to prop up the structural inequalities in the global economy that keep them in poverty, rather than a means to truly help the wretched of the earth. It makes governments look good (at least to some people), while not requiring them to do anything really unpopular or detrimental to the needs and desires of the corporations from their countries. Consequently, until we devise a new and fairer aid policy that actually aims to help poor people rather than businesses, there is perhaps not too much to celebrate about finally hitting that tiny 0.7% target.

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Bank Makanan

Surat kabar di Inggris terkenal akan laporan berita mereka yang berpihak kepada politik. Hal ini membuat surat kabar Inggris menjadi sumber yang tidak dapat diandalkan jika kita berupaya memperoleh informasi yang objektif dan fakta tentang kejadian-kejadian di salah satu dari negara terkaya di dunia itu; sebaliknya, ini juga berarti bahwa surat kabar Inggris dapat menjadi barometer budaya yang menggambarkan perasaan dari penduduk khususnya dewasa ini saat publik dapat menanggapi dengan mudah hal-hal yang mereka baca melalui sosial media seperti Twitter.

Salah satu contohnya berasal dari artikel yang diterbitkan akhir pekan ini pada surat kabar Mail on Sunday. Surat kabar ini adalah rekanan dari Daily Mail, yang terkenal pro sayap kanan dan sering menerbitkan berita-berita kosong, yang secara mengejutkan telah menjadi situs surat kabar paling populer di internet melalui tulisan-tulisan mereka akan politik ektrim, cerita-cerita mengejutkan, serta foto-foto paparazzi tentang para selebritas. Surat kabar Mail on Sunday mengirimkan reporter penyidik ke beberapa bank makanan Inggris, kegiatan amal yang memberikan makan secara cuma-cuma kepada orang-orang yang tidak punya pekerjaan, tereksploitasi, dan tertindas yang saat ini jatuh miskin akibat resesi berkepanjangan yang menimpa banyak negara di Eropa.

Para reporter ini datang ke bank makanan dan mengaku tidak mempunyai pekerjaan dan berbohong tentang situasi mereka sehingga tampak kelaparan dan putus asa. Bank makanan melakukan pengecekan identitas terlebih dahulu kemudian memberikan bingkisan makanan. Menurut Mail on Sunday ini adalah penghinaan yang menyedihkan dan menyatakan bahwa laporan tentang adanya satu juta orang Inggris yang harus pergi ke bank makanan tahun lalu adalah salah. Mereka mengklaim bahwa orang-orang yang pergi ke bank makanan hanyalah  orang-orang yang mencari makanan gratis, seperti halnya para reporter yang menyamar itu.

Tanggapan yang muncul di Twitter dan sosial media lainnya penuh dengan reaksi kemarahan. Orang-orang menyebutkan bahwa jika orang-orang dari Mail on Sunday mau berbohong demi makanan bukan berarti semua orang akan melakukan hal yang sama. Lebih jauh, orang-orang menyatakan bahwa meskipun klaim dari Mail on Sunday benar, hal itu tidak masalah.Bahkan jika 20% dari penerima makanan bank makanan tidak benar-benar memerlukannya, hal itu berarti masih ada setidaknya 800.000 orang yang benar-benar kelaparan dan membutuhkan bantuan. Kebanyakan dari jumlah ini adalah anak-anak.  Meskipun angka ini kurang dari angka satu juta, angka yang sering digunakan, seharusnya tetap membuat malu negara yang disebut sebagai salah satu yang terkaya di dunia.

Inggris masih terus menjadi salah satu negara dengan angka GDP tertinggi di dunia, pemilik kota mahal London, pebisnis kelas elit, bankir, dan politikus dengan pendapatan tinggi bahkan saat orang-orang biasa mengalami kesulitan secara ekonomi. Para orang kaya ini telah menganjurkan berkembangnya ideologi yang memandang orang yang memerlukan bantuan sebagai orang yang tidak layak menerima bantuan karena mereka tidak mau mencoba, bekerja keras, atau hanya ingin memperoleh bantuan cuma-cuma. Padahal fakta memperlihatkan bahwa gaji kebanyakan orang tidak meningkat, pekerjaan tidak tersedia, dan para mahasiswa yang baru lulus harus menanggung beban tambahan utang. ‘Pemenang mengambil semuanya’ adalah ideologi kapitalis yang menganjurkan orang miskin untuk saling menginjak agar dapat menang.

Ideologi inilah yang dianjurkan oleh Mail on Sunday dalam artikel bank makanan mereka. Untunglah, publik tidak setuju. Timbulnya kebutuhan akan bank makanan adalah problem sesungguhnya, bukan dari jumlah orang yang menggunakannya. Hal ini memperlihatkan bahwa semakin banyak orang mulai sadar dan menyadari kesalahan dari ideologi ini. Kita berharap bahwa ini adalah awal dari bangkitnya kesadaran publik dan dimulainya perlawanan terhadap elit politik yang telah lama membuat orang-orang yang mereka buat miskin menjadi kambing hitam.

Diterjemahkan dari Bahasa Inggris, artikel asli di publikasikan tanggal di 30.04.2014:  http://anashell.blogspot.com/2014_04_01_archive.html

[ surat kabar Inggris, sosial media, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, bank makanan Inggris, GDP, kesulitan secara ekonomi ]

Banking on hunger

The UK’s newspapers are notorious for the high levels of political bias in their reporting. This makes them rather unreliable sources for those of us who are trying to get objective information and facts about the happenings in one of the world’s richest countries, but it also means that they can provide a useful cultural barometer of the feelings of the population, especially in these days when the public can easily respond to what they read using social media tools like Twitter.

A good example of this comes from a story this weekend in the Mail on Sunday, the sister paper of the famously right wing and vacuous Daily Mail – which, astonishingly enough, has built the most popular newspaper website on the internet through a mix of extreme politics, shock stories, and paparazzi pictures of celebrities. The Mail on Sunday sent investigative reporters to some of the UK’s food banks – charities that hand out free food to the  unemployed and unfortunate, the exploited and oppressed who have been left jobless and penniless by the ongoing recession that has affected countries across Europe.

These reporters told the food banks that they were unemployed, and lied about their situation to make themselves sound desperate and hungry. The food banks ran the few basic ID checks that they usually do, and then handed over some small food parcels. According to the Mail on Sunday, this is an outrage, and demonstrates that the recent figures that suggest that one million British people have had to use food banks in the past year are false. Many of the people using the food banks, they claimed, will just be ‘scroungers’ and chancers who are only looking for a free meal, just like the reporters were.

The response on Twitter and other social media has been primarily one of anger. People have pointed out the obvious logical flaw that just because people who work for the Mail on Sunday are willing to tell barefaced lies in exchange for food, it doesn’t mean the rest of us would do the same. But others have pointed out that even if there is a grain of truth to the story, it doesn’t actually matter. If even 20% of the food bank recipients are fake, that still leaves 800,000 people going hungry and requiring additional food packages just to get by. Many of these will be children. That figure, while not as symbolic as the one million mark that is often used, should still be a source of national shame in one of the richest countries in the world.

The UK continues to have one of the world’s highest GDPs, one of its most glittering and expensive cities in London, and has an elite class of businessmen, bankers, and politicians who are making huge amounts of money even in these times that are so tough for the ordinary man on the street. These rich elites have long encouraged an ideology in which people see those who need help as somehow unworthy of it – they’re not trying hard enough, or they don’t really want to work, they just want people to give them money for free. No mention of the fact that wages have stagnated for the majority of the population, or that jobs are not available, or that many recent graduates have the added burden of debt to deal with. Simply a ‘winner takes all’ capitalist philosophy which encourages the poor to tread on each other to get ahead.

It’s this kind of ideology that the Mail on Sunday was promoting with their food bank article. Luckily, the reaction against it, and the understanding that the need for food banks is the real problem, rather than the exact numbers of people using them, suggests that an increasing number of people might be waking up to the emptiness of this ideology. We must hope that this is the start of an increased class consciousness and a fightback against a political elite that has long scapegoated the very people it is keeping poor.

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