How Low Has the United States Sunk ? – It is Now the Recipient of Aid from Foreign Countries

The ‘Hell No We Won’t Pay Taxes’ Group Gets Charity from the United Arab Emirates

That there is massive wealth in the United States is a given.  That many of those who hold the massive wealth are excessively greedy and refuse to support government programs designed to aid and enrich a community is also a given.  In fact, an entire political party is based on the philosophy that the wealthy should have their taxes cut.

The result is that there is a huge divide in this nation between those who have and those who need.  For example, in Joplin, Missouri where a tornado destroyed the town the rebuilding effort has been hampered by a lack of funding.

Six schools, including the city’s sole high school, were destroyed in the May 2011 disaster. Insurance would cover the construction of new buildings, but administrators were scrambling to replace all of the books that had blown away. . . .

a proposal to obviate the need for high school textbooks that had been shelved two years earlier because nobody — not the cash-strapped school system, not the state of Missouri, not even local charities — had the money for it: Give every student a computer.

Gosh, where to get the money.  It turns out the money did arrive, from foreign aid from the UAE, an oil rich country of the Middle East that, it turns out, has been doling out foreign aid for some time.

Joplin, Missouri Rebuilds with Foreign Aid

Today, the nearly 2,200 high school students in Joplin each have their own UAE-funded MacBook laptop, which they use to absorb lessons, perform homework and take tests. Across the city, the UAE is spending $5 million to build a neonatal intensive-care unit at Mercy Hospital, which also was ripped apart by the tornado.

The gifts are part of an ambitious campaign by the UAE government to assist needy communities in the United States. Motivated by the same principal reasons that the U.S. government distributes foreign assistance — to help those less fortunate and to influence perceptions among the recipients — the handouts mark a small but remarkable shift in global economic power.

Now this is not to say this is a huge amount, for the oil rich UAE it is pretty much loose pocket change. And the motives here are not humanitarian, but political.   But it is appreciated anyway, certainly by the recipients.  As for the rest of us, well, our obligation in this affair is to try and hide our embarrassment at having to rely on the kindness of strangers because of the selfish greed of the wealthiest in this country who just want more and more for themselves.

And if the citizens of a place like Joplin have to suffer, well Conservatives would say that if they cannot afford a tornado then they should not have had one in the first place.