Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The G-8’s Self-Serving Math

The final communiqués haven’t been written. But the word on the street is that when leaders of the Group of 8 industrialized countries meet in France this week, they will claim that wealthy countries have come close to fulfilling their 2005 promise to boost annual development aid by $50 billion by 2010. They are not even in the ballpark.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which keeps track of aid flows, said aid from rich nations in 2010 was $19 billion short of the promises made at the G-8 summit meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, six years ago. Aid to Africa came in $14.5 billion short.
Yet the G-8 seems determined to fudge the numbers rather than admit to a broken promise. The accountability report published on the G-8 Web site last week inflates the aid figure by not accounting for the fact that a dollar today is worth much less than it was when the promise was made. By this accounting, annual aid from wealthy countries came about $1 billion short.

Full Article

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