An oft-quoted myth by a properly-trained American is that the US is too 'good' to other countries; we give too much aid/money/support/food/personnel to other countries in need, purely out of the goodness of our hearts. <a href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/14/95732/396" source="Kuro5hin">Report on U.S. foreign aid statistics</a> covers the actual amounts given by the US and compares it in absolute and relative (to total GDP) terms to other nations. It's the 'relative-to-GDP' number that's the most damning --- the US ranks lowest of the 22 countries listed, which includes all the first-world countries in Europe. Why do people still think the US is the world's largest donor? Because we tell them so all the time. The press, the administration, books, magazines, talking heads: the story of US altruism is hammered in good and deep. We hear fantastical numbers, delivered without substantiation, and manipulated to sound far better than they are. For example, in last year's State of the Union Address, Bush pledged 15 million to all of Africa to help with the AIDS crisis. That's pretty much peanuts to a country that blew 162 Billion last year on the war in Iraq, no? Especially when you realize that was only USD 5 million <i>new</i> money: the other 10 million was reallocated from other funds already scheduled for Africa. And, not to sound unappreciative, but <i>only</i> 15 million for <i>all</i> of Africa??!!?? Didn't anybody hear about their AIDS problem? Or their civil wars? Or their life expectancy (under 40 in a couple of countries)? Perhaps people remember a time when foreign aid spending was higher and haven't bothered to check whether that's changed in the last 40 years: <bq>foreign aid accounted for 0.56% of total U.S. spending in 1999. This figure appears to have been falling for several decades: in 1962 the figure was 3.06%.</bq> Though it <iq>was historically true</iq> that the US gave generously, this is no longer the case, nor has it been for a long time. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A46707-2001Jan25" title="Aid Abroad Is Business Back Home: Washington Firms Profit From Overseas Projects" author="Michael Dobbs" source="Washington Post">Aid Abroad Is Business Back Home</a> reveals an even more insidious detail: while the US basks in the glow of self-admiration and altruism, they simultaneously crow that <iq>the principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance program has always been the United States.</iq> It goes on to state that <iq>nearly 80 percent of USAID contracts and grants go "directly to American firms."</iq> That doesn't really sound so altruistic to me. That sounds like an investment ... one that the foreign country is not exactly in a position to refuse and one that pays off rather handsomely. Especially for the well-connected corporations who benefit from the opened markets and get to vacuum up the US tax dollars with little to no competition. The benefits to you and I are a little harder to see. Most US aid goes directly to countries that agree to let us run them, or choose their governments or let our companies dominate their markets and resources. On top of that, on what is this foreign-aid money being spent? The biggest recipient of foreign aid is Israel. <a href="http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/U.S._Assistance_to_Israel1.html">US Assistance to Israel</a> shows that, last year, Israel received 3.1 Billion in the form of a military grant and 500 Billion in the form of an economic grant. Follow the years back and you can see during Reagan's rule, the policy changed from 'Loan' to 'Grant' (and didn't change all the way through Clinton). So, the majority of assistance to the biggest donee is military. If you look at other large benificiaries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, etc.), you'll see they also get money for military regimes that keep the people in check. Very honorable foreign aid indeed. Mix those numbers with the fact above that most foreign aid gets spent on American companies and you see that US tax dollars are now flowing, in the form of grants, directly to US military contractors. And it's all sold to us as altruistic foreign aid. A little bit of lobbying sure does go a long way. To be fair, we're not the only ones doing it. The Brits are happily letting themselves be screwed as well, as shown in <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0106-01.htm" author="George Monbiot" source="Common Dreams" title="On the Edge of Lunacy: British Foreign Aid is Now Targeted at Countries Willing to sell off their Assets to Big Business">On the Edge of Lunacy</a>. Monbiot describes how this works, with a practical example from Africa: <bq>A doctor working in Gondar hospital in Ethiopia wrote to me recently to spell out what this means. The hospital has none of the basic textbooks on tropical diseases it needs. But it does have 21 copies of an 800-page volume called Aesthetic Facial Surgery and 24 volumes of a book called Opthalmic Pathology. There is no opthalmic pathologist in training in Ethiopia. The poorest nation on Earth, unsurprisingly, has no aesthetic plastic surgeons. The US had spent $2m on medical textbooks that American publishers hadn't been able to sell at home, called them aid and dumped them in Ethiopia.</bq> Britain's analog to USAID, <iq>DfID is giving Indian state, Andhra Pradesh £342m ... [which] is being used to "restructure" and "reform" the state and its utilities.</iq> In effect, they are using it to buy off the leader of the area and privatize all the resources. In Zambia, DfID is spending just £700,000 on improving nutrition, but £56m on privatizing the copper mines. Countries that want any form of foreign aid from these two shining lights of world society, the US and Britain, had better be prepared to sell themselves cheaply. This is all quite cheap for the beneficiaries, since, as in the American examples above, the capital investment comes from taxpayer money, but the resources go to private corporations, for <iq>development</iq>. As Noam Chomsky is fond of saying: <iq>socialized risk, privatized profit</iq>. Even when a third-world country has a crop that the US people want, the US government would rather spend aid money burning it to the ground (see <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17483" source="AlterNet">West Africa's Cash Crop</a>). Ghana's food markets have already been shredded by 'globalization' and pot is the only thing of worth Ghanan farmers can grow that isn't already grown under heavy subsidies in richer nations and cheaply imported. The US is only offering money to eradicate the devil weed though, not help Ghana market its highly-desired product. However, you can bet if pot is ever legalized in the States, Ghana will be brought to heel and set up producing cheap pot to be sold through select US pharmaceutical firms. All this mistreatment of third-world economies may come back to bite us in the ass someday, though ... and perhaps sooner than you think. US economic policies have approached lunacy in the last several years and this is damaging credibility with lender nations (yes, the US is in debt, not only to its own people, but quite heavily to other nations, like Japan and Europe). As noted in <a href="http://pkarchive.org/column/010604.html" author="Paul Krugman">Rubin Gets Shrill</a>, <bq>If this kind of [economic] fecklessness goes on, investors will eventually conclude that America has turned into a third world country, and start to treat it like one.</bq>