Subject: Re: [SANET-MG] giving until it hurts

From: Lion Kuntz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 14:44:36 -0800

--- Don Maroc <[email-masked]> wrote:

> ... Because of the
> well-intentioned
> outpouring of donations from the people of Vancouver Island we
> are being
> made aware that our many food banks (used to be known as soup
> kitchens) are
> being left out by the donators, they are short of money and
> staple foods.
> It does not make sense us to feed the people of Asia and let
> our own friends
> and neighbours starve or go our children go hungry.
>
> All this, of course, demands the question of why, if the
> Canadian national
> and provincial governments have hundreds of millions available
> to aid the
> traumatised people of southern Asia, haven't those same
> governments been
> taking care of hungry and needy Canadians? ...

Despite the deaths of scores of thousands, there are other
millions of people still living in those countries. It doesn't
cost any money to send out work parties to bury the dead -- just
takes volunteers and shovels if that's all you've got.

I already explained how sheets of plastic to catch rainwater
produces pure uncontaminated drinking waters without any high
tech machines, without chlorine or iodine drops.

I have webpages showing modular panels which can be stacked in
containers like Pringles® brand potato-chips.
http://www.ecosyn.us/Panels_01/Panels_01.html
http://www.ecosyn.us/Panels_02/Panels_02.html
http://www.ecosyn.us/Panels_03/Panels_03.html
http://www.ecosyn.us/Panels_04/Panels_04.html
http://www.ecosyn.us/Panels_05/Panels_05.html

A room weighs 250 pounds, like the weight of four teenage girls,
can ride on a roofrack of a VW bug, assemble in the field in a
couple hours using no-power simple hand tools. These are useful
for advance aid stations, field operating rooms, relief supplies
warehousing in up front areas. They come back down just as fast
when the need is past, can store for next use in an instance of
themselves.

Used as forms, some of them can be cemented with a plaster and
make permanent shelters, then the form inside is disassembled
and reused elsewhere again (and again and again).

The materials all come from asia already, they don't have to be
shipped from the western countries. There's millions of
untouched unemployed people right there, eager for some work.

PALACES For The People is the long term answer that will cure
these people's chronic housing problems. In ten years they can
have streaked by the average living standard of the declining
western nations, first making bootstraps, then lifting
themselves up by them. They can have housing which lasts through
100 years against most forces of nature and daily normal wear
and tear.

YES, there are homeless in Canada, homeless in the United
States. There are more homeless in Calcutta sleeping on
sidewalks than there are new homeless from this tsunami in the
Indian part of this event. No wonder the Indians turned back the
Doctors Without Borders -- homelessness (and deaths proximately
caused by it) does not even register as some unusual occurrence
in India. The last time I looked, the Indian government still
had a big unspent cash surplus slush fund from monies ostensibly
raised to aid the homeless in the eastern states two years ago
-- $2,000,000 surplus in a country where that much money buys a
lot.

The sudden outpouring of "aid" from the USA just means that
various compaign contributors figured out how to make a pile off
this tragedy. They flooded the Whitehouse with calls and
telegrams offering their corporate products at "reduced rates"
which the taxpayer will pay for (both as cash purchases and as
corporate tax deductions for charitable giving).

How much do you want to bet that millions of this aid will be in
the form of "licences" to grow GMO seeds for the next two or
three years to get a lock on the local markets and drive out
indigenous varieties adapted to those climates and soils. Yes,
not having to pay $50 million in royalties counts as $50 million
in aid, but WHO is it aiding? Add a few million cash dollars
buying some other products made in the industries the local
politicians own, and the heads of state can shake hands for
photo-ops about how the west cares for those poor people, and
another economic colonization conquest has snuck its
trojan-horse past the "watchdogs" of the press.

We are not fools. We have seen this play out so many times
before.

We need to "give" what people need -- housing that lasts 100
years, that harvest pure rainwater, that purifies sewege daily,
that generates solar PV materials as a byproduct taking care of
regular daily life needs. We need to "give" an agriculture which
produces four times the nutrition per unit land than "green
revolution" agriculture, which uses little or no machinery
(especially uses little or no carbon-fuels).

Anybody who wants to "give until it hurts" can give brainsweat
and hours and hours of their deep study on the subject matters
which will make a real contribution to uplifting people's lives.
Anything else is probably just feel-good posturing putting on a
public mask of (insincere) concern. People not still working on
the problem of 90,000 new homeless from the Florida hurricanes
will forget this problem just as fast -- a few months from now
there won't be a paragraph in the press anywhere, but people
will still be huddled under blue tarps.

=====
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Sincerely, Lion Kuntz
Santa Rosa, California, USA
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
http://www.ecosyn.us/Welcome/ (currently under construction)
http://www.ecosyn.us/Interesting/ (available now)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Palaces4People/
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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