Carter is leading thousands of volunteers in building homes for the poor along the Mekong River.

[WI_DEM]

CHIANG MAI : Former US president Jimmy Carter is helping the homeless in the Mekong Region in Thailand, Vietnam, China, Laos and Cambodia.


Former US president Jimmy Carter adds cinder blocks to a wall as he helps to build a home under the Habitat for Humanity project in Chiang Mai yesterday. Mr Carter is leading thousands of volunteers in building homes for the poor along the Mekong River. The volunteers for Habitat for Humanity will build or repair 166 homes in Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam from Nov 15 to 20. AFP
The Carter Work Project works with the international housing charity organisation Habitat for Humanity which launched a campaign yesterday to build 50,000 homes in the Mekong Region over the next five years.

Working in the sweltering heat yesterday, Mr Carter, his wife Rosalynn and about 3,000 volunteers from 25 countries started building homes for 82 Thai families in Ban Nong Kon Kru of San Sai district. Eighty-four more homes will be built in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. The 166 homes are expected to be built and completed this week.

Mr Carter said the 82 Thai homes are being built in honour of His Majesty the King who celebrates his 82nd birthday next month.

"Twenty-five years ago I had the chance to meet His Majesty the King and I have a lot of admiration for his leadership," Mr Carter said.

The new homeowners are needy Thai and hilltribe villagers. Many are Christians and Muslims but most are Buddhists.

"In an area of the world where many people live in deplorable conditions, we have a chance to help families improve their housing," Mr Carter said.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/27537/when-carter-is-not-mending-fences-he-building-houses

[azmouse]

1. He's a good man.

[Nikki Stone1]

2. One of my faves.

:)

[madrchsod]

3. greatest president since leaving office in the history of our country

no former president has came close to what he has done for this planet. he`s an example that age has no meaning when one lives to ones fullest. unlike the phony christians around the world...he actually does what christ asked us to.

[StarfarerBill]

4. Former President Carter is a humanitarian's humanitarian.

[Brother Buzz]

5. I carry a Habitat for Humanity medallion on my key set

It's my constant reminder or all the hopes and dreams I shared with Carter. It also reminds me of the treasonous actions of the operators working to foist Reagan upon us by undermining Carter's administration: Would have, could have, should have been.

[Orsino]

6. Didn't think my admiration for the Carters could increase.

It did.

[Bitwit1234]

7. And the republicans continue to slur him

He has more honesty, compassion and caring in his sweat then ANY republican has in their whole body. Did you ever see ANY republican start ANY kind of organization to help the poor and needy. Hell no. They are too busy grabbing all the loot for themselves. Cheney is a perfect example. How much did he make off the country. With his no-bid contracts to his companies Halliburton, KBR and Bechtol look at all the money he got back from the stock he kept from those companies. It was estimated at 80 million a year.

[WI_DEM]

8. my favorite ex-president and a better president than given credit for.

[Echo In Light]

9. Rec! He's staving off the bad karma for his role in the mass slaughter in East Timor

Q: You have written and spoken about Carter's move to send arms to Indonesia to help them slaughter the natives of East Timor. This runs counter to the prevailing image of Carter as a decent peace-seeking man. Was he just a hypocrite? Was this something that happened without his full awareness of the consequences of what he was doing? Was it tacked onto other legislation?

A: This was a Carter initiative. Not only did they radically increase the flow of aid to Indonesia, but Walter Mondale, who was then vice president, flew to Jakarta in 1978. That was the period of the worst atrocities, which were well known incidentally, I mean the press wasn't reporting them, but there were plenty of other sources. Surely US intelligence knew all about it. Mondale went to Jakarta. He was terribly impressed by how wonderful it was. He telegraphed back to Washington that they ought to send them more jet planes. Carter couldn't do that because of congressional legislation that prevented direct military aid to human rights violators, so they arranged with Israel to ship American jets to Indonesia. That was all White House initiatives.

Q: What could have been his motivations?

A: His motivations were ``stability'' and the usual things. When you ask whether Carter was a hypocrite or not, I haven't the slightest idea. You'd have to get into his head and find out. Maybe he believed he was doing the right thing, who knows? In my opinion, these are not very interesting questions. Most people, we all know from our own personal experiences, if not from reading history, that it's very easy to construct a pattern of justification for just about anything you choose to do. I mean none of us are so saintly that we haven't done ugly and unpleasant things in our lives, like maybe you took a toy from your five-year-old brother when you were a kid or something. Just ask yourself, anybody can ask themselves, how often did I say to myself, ``Boy I'm really rotten, but this is what I feel like doing.'' Very rarely. Usually you set up a pattern of justification that makes it exactly the right thing to do. That's the way beliefs are formed.

Motivations are kind of hidden. If you're honest maybe you could dig out and find them, but it's awfully easy and a common experience to construct a pattern of justification for things you do out of some kind of self interest. And that's done in statecraft all the time. So the question whether someone's being hypocritical or not is almost meaningless.

His motivations are straightforward. Indonesia's a very rich country, huge resources which were open to exploitation by foreign corporations. Suharto, the head, was keeping the country under control. If you want to know the motivation, I suggest if you're interested you might have a look at, I have a book that came out about a year ago called ``Year 501'' and one of the chapters in it reviews the western reaction to the military coup that brought Suharto to office in 1965. He immediately launched the biggest slaughter since the holocaust. Nobody knows how many, but maybe seven- or eight-hundred thousand people were slaughtered in four months. Huge bloodbath, Time magazine called it ``a boiling bloodbath.'' Most of the people killed were landless peasants. It destroyed the only popular organization in the country, namely the Indonesian Communist Party, mostly the peasant party. What's interesting about it was the reaction of the west, which was total euphoria. The New York Times described it as ``a gleam of light in Asia.'' News magazines were writing about ``hope where there once was none.'' New York Times editorials, which I run through closely in this, thought it was just magnificent. The more the boiling bloodbath boiled the more they loved it. It wasn't even hidden. It was quite open. It was a very interesting episode. It's a lot of detail about it there and the point was very straightforward: this vindicated the US war in Vietnam. In fact American liberals were writing that this proves that we were right to be in Vietnam because in Vietnam we were providing a shield which encouraged the Indonesian generals to get on with the necessary work of cleansing their own society and throwing it open to western robbers. It was remarkably open. Take a look at the quotes. I went through a very comprehensive review then, complete euphoria. A lot of the reason why the Vietnam war was fought was to protect the surrounding regions from the infection of popular uprisings. The most brutal dictatorship we supported was in Indonesia, but at the same time we also supported very bloody dictatorships and coups in other surrounding countries in Thailand, the Marcos coup in the Philippines and so on, all for the same reasons. So sure, that's the motivation."

http://www.davidcogswell.com/Political/Chomsky_Interview_93.htm