Who Let the Dogs In? (51 page)

“This,” said the announcer, “is what happens when organized labor comes to your city.” The retail clerks in Port Arthur were attempting to unionize at the time, but the deserted streets were not the consequence of fearsome organized labor; they were deserted because they were filmed at 5:30
A.M.

Raff used to claim that the Establishment had spent “meel-yons and meel-yons of dollars” to defeat him, and so they did. Lloyd Bentsen finally beat him in the 1970 primary by spending the then-unimaginable sum of $6 million. In a Yarborough campaign, it was always the people against the money, and as money came to weigh more and more in our politics, voices like Raff’s were squeezed out of office. But never silenced. That great trumpet sounded again and again, calling to the best in us, for freedom, for justice, for peace.

January 1996

Jesse Helms I

C
ONGRESS
IS
MARCHING
steadily from dumb to dumber on foreign aid under the leadership, as it were, of Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Ben Gilman.

Foreign aid is the easy hands-down winner for the title of Least Understood Government Program. Public-opinion polls show that most Americans believe we spend about 20 percent of our money trying to help other countries; actually, just 1 percent of our budget goes to foreign aid, and less than 0.5 percent goes to economic and humanitarian assistance, which makes all the difference in the world to poor nations. Ireland spends more of its gross national product helping people in other countries than we do, not to mention every other nation with a claim to decency and wealth; Denmark spends more than six times what we do, and last time I checked, no one was calling Denmark the world’s last remaining superpower.

In some ways, foreign aid deserves its generally lousy reputation among Americans because for a long time we did it mostly wrong. Our foreign aid establishment was sort of like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used to be—just couldn’t stop itself from building huge projects in defiance of common, economic, and environmental sense. We were always funding enormous dam projects, from which corrupt local politicians got very rich, and building highways in countries where no one had bicycles. The concept of “appropriate technology” took a long time to take root in the collective mind of our foreign aid people.

But that fight has been won long since, and perhaps the most misunderstood fact about foreign aid is that the really critical part of it is not run by the government at all. What the government does is provide funding to “NGOs,” which is bureaucratese for “non-government organizations.” There are thirty-five thousand of these private groups, an astonishing range from Catholic Relief Services to CARE to the Adventist Development and Relief Agency International. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, they are at work building schools and sewer systems, training health-care workers, teaching new agricultural techniques, and making tiny loans to start cottage industries, also known as micro-businesses.

The Helms-Gilman plan to gut foreign aid takes aim at the very heart of these people-to-people efforts: They are advocating cuts of about 11 percent, supposedly “across the board”—but because military aid and aid to Israel and Egypt are politically sacrosanct, the cuts will disproportionately affect the very people-care programs that do the most good and make the most difference. Many of those agencies expect cuts of 30 to 50 percent.

Through the 1950s and ’60s, the United States provided about half of all aid money spent worldwide; by 1993, that had gone down to 17 percent. From 1985 to 1995, our foreign aid spending went down by 47 percent, so the new cuts are coming on top of cutbacks whose horrific effects can already be seen. We’re not talking about hydroelectric dams in places where no one can afford electricity; we’re talking about an estimated one million babies a year whose lives are saved by oral rehydration therapy, the simple remedy for severe diarrhea that costs about $1 per baby. A 30 percent cut in family planning would result in an estimated 600,000 more unintended pregnancies each year, not to mention 180,000 more unsafe abortions and 4,000 more maternal deaths.

As they say in the military, that’s a lot of bang for the buck.

Helms, who has been conducting a jihad against foreign aid for years, wants to dismember the U.S. Agency for International Development and put the remaining pieces into the State Department. The trouble with that idea is that the State Department, by its nature, deals with those who are in power. Foreign aid will inevitably become more politicized, so that instead of supporting the Sisters of Mercy who go into the slums to save children, we’ll be funneling money through corrupt dictators, who are highly unlikely to use it to help their people.

We could, of course, wash our hands like Pontius Pilate and let the rest of the world go to hell in a handbasket on the grounds that it’s not our problem. That’s quite a popular stand these days. “Hey, we have our own problems; we have hungry and homeless people right here.” But you’ll notice that the new isolationists who want to cut off foreign aid aren’t big on helping the homeless and hungry here, either.

One of the political oddities of our time is that Republicans keep declaring themselves to be the great experts on foreign relations, saying that President Clinton doesn’t know what he’s doing. Clinton could waffle on international crises like Bosnia from now ’til eternity and still not do as much damage as Helms wants to do in one bill.

July 1995

Jesse Helms II

I
AM
INDEBTED TO
Jon Stewart of the Comedy Channel and to
The Daily Show,
the last real news program on cable television, for the idea of a collection of quotes from Senator Jesse Helms:

•  On the subject of President Clinton visiting North Carolina: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.”

•  “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ to her until she cries,” of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun after debating her on the merits of the Confederate flag.

•  “
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
are both infested with homosexuals themselves.”

•  “The destruction of this country can be pinpointed in terms of its beginnings to the time that our political leadership turned to socialism. They didn’t call it socialism, of course. It was given deceptive names and adorned with fancy slogans. We heard about New Deals, and Fair Deals, and New Frontiers, and Great Society.”

Years ago, Larry L. King, the Texas writer, observed in the wake of the political defeat of a couple of unusually unpleasant Texas congressmen, Birchers both, that, “It is not enough that we rejoice over their electorally recumbent forms, but we need to add a few swift kicks while they are down.”

Of course I was appalled—the most unliberal sentiment I ever heard. As King himself observed, we liberals weep copiously over everyone from milk-shy Hottentots to the glandular obese. An old and ailing Jesse Helms is not one to crow over. But nor is it necessary to forget—in the wake of all this folderol about how he was “a man of principle”—what those principles actually were.

Helms has been anti-black, anti-gay, anti-woman, and anti-progress. He was perfectly willing to use his power for partisan nastiness and for petty provincial politics. His main claim to fame is that he protected Big Tobacco and his home-state textile industry. I have liked a lot of outspoken conservatives over the years. Helms is not one. I give him this, he never had good hair. A fine example of the sixteenth-century thinker. Onward.

I don’t know how the political world looks to you, but it seems to me in my lifetime liberals have been right about three important things. We were right about race. We were right about Vietnam. And, by 1980, when our deficit was $50 billion dollars (!) under Jimmy Carter, I thought: “Gosh, maybe we should let the conservatives run things for a while. At least they understand the bottom line.”

Two trillion dollars of debt later, I was not quite so persuaded. That was the last time I ever thought the conservatives should be in charge.

Plus
c
¸a change:
Bush has now blown the entire budget surplus on this huge tax cut for the rich. The silliest line of commentary is this phony wringing of hands and wailing, “If only we had known three months ago what we know today!”

Of course we knew three months ago there was going to be no surplus. We were quite regularly told so by an enormous array of experts. Bush went from saying we needed a tax cut because times were so good to saying we needed a tax cut because times were so bad.

I am a great admirer of John Maynard Keynes, who first pointed out that government needs to spend more money during recessions, but there is a difference between frittering money away on tax cuts for the rich and using the public’s money for public purposes of lasting benefit to all.

If Congress wants a public works program, here’s one suggestion. Somewhere between one third and one half of all the public schools in America are between dilapidated and falling apart (many of them in rural areas as well as inner cities). This is not a problem addressed by mass testing. To put money into schools is a sound investment of public money, it pays off in the future, and you don’t have to do it again for quite some time. That would in turn give the ever-pressed school districts more leeway to hire more and better teachers.

The three things we know work to improve the schools are smaller classes, longer school days or school years, and well-equipped classrooms. The physical plant of schools is not, of course, as important as good teachers. But until we figure out a way to clone good teachers, we know fixing the windows, walls, roofs, floors, wiring, and plumbing will do much good.

August 2001

Jacobo Timerman

O
NE
OF THE GREAT
heroes is gone. Jacobo Timerman, the Argentine journalist and great warrior for human rights, has died.