Happy Haiti, tech billionaires! Happy #Haiti, #Pierre Omidyar, #PamOmidyar, #JeffBezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mike Dell, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Arianna Huffington!

January 14th, 2010

It’s hard

to find words for what

has happened in Haiti — it’s shocking,

horrifying, life-shattering, grotesque, sickening.

Yet those words won’t suffice a week from

now. There won’t be words strong

enough a week from

now.

“The disaster

after the disaster” is the term

used in aid circles to describe the absolutely

catastrophic harm that follows the “light” initial shock

of an earthquake or tsunami or genocidal attack.  The disaster

after the disaster is death by starvation, thirst, environmental toxicity,

air- and water-borne disease, gender and ethnic violence, lack of access

to aid that has been commandeered by thugs or corrupt officials.

The epic horrors of the first hours of Hurricane Katrina and

Banda Aceh and Cyclone Nargis were nothing compared

with the death and disease and human

suffering that followed in

their respective

wakes.

Events

like these sicken everyone.

They sicken me ever so much more so because

I’ve been trying to give an idea to the world for a decade now

which would dramatically ameliorate the disasters after the disasters.

You can read about it at www.earthnationlive.org if you like, or watch the

(less detailed) three minute video at the end of this post.  It’s about

using the internet to create a worldwide citizen action network

that could be called upon instantaneously to provide

the most important relief there is in a disaster

like the one that’s unfolding in Haiti:

fast relief.

People

whose eyes are filled

with concrete and glass, whose bones

are broken, whose skin is torn open in the presence of raw

sewage — those folks need help in a hurry.  It takes time for a government

or a Red Cross or a United Nations to get medicine, food, water,

clothing, and shelter to people in a land where a

disaster was unanticipated and the relief

network is poor or

nonexistent.

As

well-financed and

well-organized as the Red Cross, the UN,

and governments are, they are also huge.  And huge moves slow,

even when it’s trying to move fast.  Ocean liners need time and miles to

change direction.  The relief that saves the greatest number of

lives and alleviates the most suffering comes from another,

faster source.  As I write in the synopsis of

the Earth Nation Live

idea,

“In the

early days after the

tsunami struck Thailand in 2004,

the greatest early relief there was provided not

by the UN or the Red Cross but by a man who owned some trucks

in the hills of Thailand — not tractor-trailers, just lorries for hauling melons

and wood and junk. He directed his friends and family members

and employees to load food and water and clothing into

them and simply drive them toward the coastal

areas. This one man saved

thousands of

lives.

“I know

people who have been

working for two decades with the

Karen and Kachin people who inhabit the

forests of northern Thailand and Burma. The border

is porous there because the land is wooded and largely unroaded.

Hours after Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, if the network I’m proposing

were in existence, a handful of strategic emails and phone calls would have

immediately had massive amounts of food, water, and medical aid moving

from Bangkok to northern Thailand, to be borne across the border and

down into the Irrawaddy Delta, in individual packages, on millions

of wily, indigenous Karen and Kachin feet — no ships, no planes,

no government interference. With the direct result that

there would be fewer photos like this one existing

(and accumulating) in the

world today.”

Earth

Nation Live

proposes funding this

worldwide network through music.

A whole heaping buttload of money flows

through music on this planet — it ranks just slightly

behind guns, drugs, and sex on the financial Richter scale.

Among the many things Earth Nation Live would do is buy and place

millions of inexpensive self-powered satellite computer systems and crazy

cheap walkie-talkies for and into the kinds of non-governmental citizen network

hands that — were they in place — would and could save hundreds of thousands

of lives in Haiti now.  Save them by getting food and medicine and water where

it most needs to be, most efficiently, most rapidly, with least chance

of hijackings or hoardings.  Save them by helping citizens police

themselves when regular law enforcement mechanisms are

utterly overwhelmed.  Save them by helping people

find one another, find the hand they need,

find their way out.

But

those lives won’t

be saved, because those networks

aren’t in place.  I can’t, so far, get the idea financed —

it requires a really big piece of software up front (like this),

and it would cost maybe $10 or $20 million to build that.  I could

pay that back, with generous interest, within six or nine

months, after a first concert: LiveAid raised over

$200 million in one day in 1985.  But I can’t

build that piece of software without

some dough.

I’ve been

trying to get it from the

most logical place in the world for

nearly a decade: tech billionaires.  People like

Pierre and Pam Omidyar, founders of Ebay, and Jeff Bezos,

founder of Amazon, and Paul Allen and Bill Gates, founders of Microsoft.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google.  Michael Dell, founder of Dell

Computer.  Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Software. You’d think of all

the people in the world who would understand the power of the

internet to improve the efficiency of citizen action in disaster

relief and other efforts, people who got crazy fookin’ rich

pimping Pez dispensers and books and computers

and software over the web would

be right up front.

And you’d

think they could spare the

change for a few months.  I started appealing

to the Omidyar Network in early 2003.  That’s seven years ago,

if my math is right.  I’m slightly loony, as you know if you read this

blog regularly, but I was perfectly polite in explaining the idea at a website

they created expressly, they said, to help people help people.  They were

going to give their Ebay fortune away, they said.  My memory

(a sometimes flawed device) was that their personal

windfall from Ebay was something like

$5.5 billion dollars at

the time.

$20,000,000

out of $5,500,000,000 is,

mathematically, .36%.   There’s a decimal

there, it’s a third of a percent, roughly.  The interest on

$5,500,000,000 at 5% (a low rate of return for people like tech

billionaires, who have access to the world’s most

productive investment opportunities)

would be $275,000,000.

A year.

So what

I’ve been asking for from

people like the Omidyars, Bezos, Allen,

Page and Brin and Ellison and Gates is, effectively, a stick

of gum to them.  An old stick of gum, a lint-covered stick of gum

from the pocket in a rarely-worn rain jacket left in the

trunk of the old Saab that doesn’t get driven

anymore since the billions

came in.

You

wouldn’t believe the

number of times I’ve asked, the number

of ways I’ve asked, how thoroughly I’ve articulated

the idea, on all their web forms, in hundreds of emails and letters

and strippercakes and candygrams which I know were received.  If I printed

out all the letters and emails, I could wallpaper my house, and yours, and

their very large and numerous vacation homes.  Aside from interactions

with assistants to the assistant’s assistant, well, lessee, Pierre Omidyar

personally acknowledged my existence once.  Jeff Bezos had an

underling email to say he wouldn’t consider any idea I sent him.

Allen, Gates, Google, Nathan Myhrvold, Lord Larry Ellison,

dozens ‘pon dozens of others, absolutely nothing, though

often after startled expressions of  ”Awesome idea!”

from someone sifting their email or snail mail.

Doesn’t matter if I go through channels, like

Google.org or the 10 to the 100th Project

or a friend on the Omidyar’s  or

someone else’s board. Nada

after the first ”Awesome!”

from employees who

ought to

know.

Vexing,

a little, on most days.

Things take time, after all.

But mad, mad, mad

frustrating on

post-disaster

days like

this.

“Perhaps

you’re not a gifted communicator,

BW!”, you might say.  Perhaps.  I tend to look at

things like the Earth Nation Live website and the little video

at the end of this post and think, “Sums it up pretty well — big idea,

cool idea, demonstrably workable, right up their tech billionaire alley.”

I know how to find email addresses, phone numbers, all kinds of channels,

and tell if they’re working or not.  (One of the things about billionaires is that

they kinda sorta gotta read their email, or have someone read it, because they

occasionally get threatened or extorted.  And the ones who set up websites

to save the world are, er, doubly obligated.)  My dealings with the largest

publishing houses and the richest movie studios in the world

suggest I’m not completely inept with words.

Maybe even pictures.

But this

lovely lickle idea,

born of a hundred conversations

between my dearly departed daughter and myself,

born of thousands of hours of unpaid thought, languishes.

Without a doubt, it would reduce the number of photos

of dogs eating human babies, and human adult

corpses, mounting today in the world.

I find those photos so

tiring:

Nonetheless,

here we are.  Waking up to

another day on Earth where dogs

will be eating babies (those pictures even

I won’t publish), and children will

be slowing down, slowing

down, until they are

not children but

corpses.

Just

not the babies

of billionaires.  Just not

the children of tech wizards.

Their kids are high and dry,

sitting on billions in cash.

Cash is comfort, they

say. Cash is

king.

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