Guest News for The Colbert Report (03/23/2009 - 4/2/2009)

[ColbertWatcher]

Dr. Colbert has the next week off and will return March 30, 2009, same time, same ball channel.

And, unless it's an April Fool's joke, his guest scheduled to appear on April 1, 2009 is Dambisa Moyo, author of http://powells.com/biblio/2-9780374139568-0">"Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa".

Here is a snippet from Powell's:

In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worsemuch worse.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declinedand millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the worlds poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in povertywithout reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance.

Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.
Review:
“Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam. Here is an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africas problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank . . . She catalogues evidence, both statistical and anecdotal . . . The core of her argument is that there is a better alternative to be taken seriously.” Paul Collier, The Independent

Looks like a good book.

[Warpy]

1. She's right, everything was done backwards

and without regard to what the Africans actually needed and wanted.

All power and property were taken out of the hands of women and put into the hands of men in the European model. Health care that allowed more children to survive increased the population exponentially and created all the problems associated with overpopulation. Development of resources meant stripping the land, taking men away from their families for long periods of time, and paying Africa less than her buried wealth was worth. Roads and cities just allowed for the easy spread of diseases which had been geographically limited for decades. The old tribal judicial systems were discarded in favor of ones completely foreign to the people's way of thinking.

No wonder Africa is a mess. We Europeans made it that way by trying to convert them to our culture.

Instead of thinking small and respecting what they had, we just insisted they discard it all in favor of something that hadn't worked all that well for us and didn't work at all for them.

[ColbertWatcher]

2. I'm interested to hear if they will mention Rick Warren. n/t

[LooseWilly]

3. Should be interesting.

I wonder though, if Colbert will use info from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to "get" her...
{ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man }
... stuff like, as I recall, the fact that most of that aid money is contingent on it being used to hire foreign contractors (like, say KBR/Halliburton) to do the actual work... so that the majority of the "aid" actually just goes to huge US Corporations, who then turn around and subcontract the work back to people in country (usually companies in turn tied to the government officials of said country) to do the work... who then finally get around to hiring the poor to do the work at near starvation wages...
{ Really?? Are you saying the US Government should cut all that aid to US Corporations?... and, uhh, and Africa? }

[ColbertWatcher]

4. I never even considered that; good point.

I'm hoping he will do a Very Special Segment™ on aid to Africa and include all that plus the GOP policy of making aid contingent on abstinence as well.