updated ! .. reminder - >> mind the _

for the start of the 5th world social forum in Porto Alegro on 26.01., which links me to related thoughts expressed in the recent ‘Le monde diplomatique‘ issue in a comment by Ignacio Ramonet on the already vanishing attention for the tsunami impact:

The level of need exposed by the tsunami demonstrates that humanitarian generosity, however admirable and necessary, is not a long-term solution. Emotion is no substitute for policy. Each new disaster reveals in detail the structural suffering of the poorest, who are the everyday victims of the unequal, unfair distribution of the world’s wealth. If we really want to reduce the destruction caused by natural disasters, we must look for permanent solutions, including the compensatory redistribution of resources to benefit all of the planet’s population.

UPDATE 23.01: Correction of the mixed up date I had posted first, sorry for that, and some further links in that context.
Opendemocracy is among those journals which offer some coverage of the WSF, including an article about the unbalanced coverage in traditional media during the last years. So for this year they put out the question if despite wellknown guests like Manuel Castells, Jose Saramago, Gilberto Gil, Hugo Chavez etc… can we ever realistically expect excluded voices to make it into our newspapers?
Meanwhile some places were coverage can be found: coike‘s indepth coverage, opendemocracy’s DIY World, which started already a discussion forum with the commentary essay of Ezequiel Adamovsky about the need for a new form of institutions according to the emerging structures. A congruent thought comes along on WorldChanging:

As we’ve said again and again, if the future’s already here, but not well-distributed, redistributing the future is one of our main tasks. Debates like this make it clear that may be happening more quickly than we think.

UPDATE 28.01: openAlegre is the actual opendemocracy blog on the World Social Forum and on another site they post on Davos.