Forced compassion
From Reuters:
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) – President Bush, under pressure over the pace and scale of American aid to Asian tsunami victims, abruptly raised the U.S. contribution to $350 million on Friday, 10 times the amount pledged just two days ago.
Good. That’s up a lot from the ludicrous $4M we offered five days ago, the boost to a shameful $15M, and the upping of that to the merely disgraceful $35M. It’s still not nearly enough from a country that claims to be the world’s economic, military and moral leader; before the election, Congress allotted $13.6 billion to rebuild states after the horrendous hurricane season. I understand that no other countries were contributing to the Help Florida fund, and that countries have a first responsibility to their own, but how about a little proportionality here?
And why the hell did it take pressure to get Bush to begin to do the right thing? It took Bush three days to announce the $35M. He is addressing this catastrophe through press releases. What does it take to make George W. Bush’s heart hurt?
When Bush was first elected he had been out of the country once or maybe twice, to Mexico and Canada. He was the son of an ambassador and a man of enormous personal wealth, yet he never bothered to leave the continent. (The rumor is that when he was elected, he didn’t have a passport.) This is usually taken as an indication of his utter lack of curiosity, definitive of his own special brand of stupidity. But it is also a sign of his lack of caring, his lack of a sense of connection to those unlike him.
This is just further confirmation that whatever a person declares himself in public to be is exactly what he is not. As W likes to say, he’s a “compassionate conservative.”
I don’t claim to know W’s soul. I could be dead wrong about him. Maybe he’s crying himself to sleep. But his actions suggest not.
I’d like to see him get on a plane for Sri Lanka.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
This came up in a conversation I had with my SO yesterday. I wrote this post over at the blog saying, among other things, that I believed Bush and the rest of his crew were human, and horrified by these events, but the Administration was as incompetent as ever, so why should we be surprised that they were incompetent at dealing with America’s involvement in helping after this tragedy?
My SO actually thought I was being too kind and generous. He doesn’t think Bush cares, doesn’t think he has had the natural
human reaction of horror. He thinks that Bush doesn’t care too much about anything happening outside his own little comfortable world, and that the problems of these “others” halfway around the world touch him not at all.
Although I rite a lot of scathing commentary on the Administration, I guess it’s harder for me to extinguish the Anne Frank-like hope that there’s a little bit of good in everyone. Believing as my SO does would just make me that much more scared and angry that this is the leader of our country.
Mr. B. appears to possess no sense of proportion whatsoever. $147 billion to kill several Iraquis, $4 million to help hundreds of thousands, if not millions. It is impossible to take him to task without including the incestuous circle of advisors, his wider executive councillors, and the moral atmosphere of his supporters at large. Had Bin Laden triggered the quake, how much potential political capital would have danced in the Bushian brain? How much would he and his moronic masses be willing to spend to get it?
I’d suggest that you read this:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2005/01/swine-before-pearls-un-plan-to-provide.html
Heck, you might even learn something. Before the pledged aid rose to $350M, the US and Australian militaries were flying in aid on C-130 transports. Meanwhile, all you could do is close your eyes and carp.
I guess to those of you on the left, absolutely everything is an occasion to bash the administration. Here’s a tip:
It’s not all about you and your feelings. Grow up and read something other than MoveOn and Democratic Underground.
James, it’s a question of proportion. I’ve seen various statistics thrown around about US contributions (from both left and right sites, despite your assumptions about how I need to educate myself) and one’s perspective on those stats will doubtless come down to an opinion about the proportion, not the gross numbers. No one said the government was doing nothing, merely that it didn’t seem to be *enough*. Just because someone disagrees with your definition of “enough” doesn’t mean they are lacking some essential knowledge.
And discussions about what the left and right use “everything” as an occasion to do are fruitless and unsupportable. Go visit Wizbang and see an alternate view deplorably in action: that the right uses everything as an occasion to bash the left. What good are these generalizations from either side?
Finally: Is it necessary to tell people to “grow up” in a grown up discussion? Go ahead and make your points, provide your links (which so many people neglect to do in support of their positions…so kudos to you) but leave your unfounded assumptions and throw-away insults at home.
What does it take?
D.Weinberger at JOHO asks: Joho the Blog: Forced compassion And why the hell did it take pressure to get Bush to begin to do the right thing? It took Bush three days to announce the $35M. He is addressing this…
David,
To a very large extent, I’d be happier to see less direct government aid and more private aid. Why? Because I have far greater faith in the efforts of groups like “Doctors without Borders” and the “Red Cross” than I do in groups like USAid. The former groups consist of people who are “on a mission”, while the latter tends to be people out “doing a job”. If I were really in need, I know which group I’d rather have helping me. I’d post a link to the amount of annual charitable giving (I’ve seen numbers in the $30B + neighborhood tossed around on TV) – but I can’t seem to construct a Google search that gives me what I want.
In all fairness, you should mention that the $35 million was the entire budget for the year of the agency of the US government devoted to developing that area (Pacific Rim) of the world. All other budgets of the US government were allocated for other purposes.
Bush could not just arbitrarily offer them, he is bound by law to spend them for what they were allocated. Nobody in the budget process anticipated a disaster of this magnitude .
Before Bush could offer any more, he had to find it somewhere in the budget. That took some time and thats why the amount wasn’t larger initially.
He did allocate what manpower he had available (several strike forces) but what else could he do?
Most of our manpower and resources is in the middle east. You can’t just redeploy those people or those resources in a few minutes, you have to work out the logistics first. That would take a month or so at the very least, assuming there is any significant amount we could redeploy without putting everyone, civilians, military and indigenous population of the middle east at serious risk.
He could have gotten on the TV, spoken from his heart, and said that he is going to use his “political capital” to get an appropriate amount of aid allocated.
Incompetence or insensitivity: I believe those are our options for explaining the Administration’s response.
What does it take to make George W. Bush’s heart hurt?
Millionaires paying taxes.
David,
Bill Clinton would have given a speech – and left the amount at $35M. I say this based on how things went down in Rwanda during his term. Bush pretty much stayed quiet, but went ahead and figured out how to (legally) get more money allocated.
Sounds like you would have preferred the former. I’d also suggest that you read the post two comments up – the one that points out the legal limitations Bush was working under.
i’d like to see him wake up to the reality of public relations and the potential for international political capital and goodwill,especially as a tool in this “war on terrorism” that he is claiming but not really waging. it would be easy to actually present as compassionate, more effective than just tossing up the label.
James Roberston,
Looks you the Right never passes up a chance to bash Clinton. How the fuck do you know what Clinton would have done? You write: “$35 million was the entire budget for the year of the agency of the US government devoted to developing that area (Pacific Rim) of the world. All other budgets of the US government were allocated for other purposes. Bush could not just arbitrarily offer them, he is bound by law to spend them for what they were allocated. Nobody in the budget process anticipated a disaster of this magnitude .Before Bush could offer any more, he had to find it somewhere in the budget. That took some time and thats why the amount wasn’t larger initially.”
What utter nonsense. What if only $3,000 had been left in the budget? Do you think he would have said, “well we’ve allocated $3,000 because that’s all that we have for the moment.”? Your argument simply doesn’t make any sense. Republicans control just about all branches of all government. Bush is at the apex of this awful pyramid. He can pretty much do just about whatever he wants to do. And has. The idea that he offered only what was in the budget because he didn’t have the authority to authorize more is really rich. The only reason the amount of money allocated for the disaster was adjusted upward by the administration was because of the gross embarrasment they would have otherwise suffered by being out-donated by countries with perhaps a hundreth the economic resources that we have. But I don’t expect any ideologues to acknowledge this. For the Bush true believers, Bush, just like Mao to the the 50’s era Chinese, can NEVER be thought to be in error about anything: not Iraq, not Social Security, not taxes, not foreign policy, nothing. He talks to Jesus, and he has a good heart. That’s all that matters.
Oh yeah, there is also this: according to the True Believers, the other thing that can never be wrong is the market. Humanity has never known a better arbiter of its affairs than the market. By definition the government is inefficient and bumbling, and the private sector is skilled and efficient. According to this belief system, evidently adhered to by Mr. Robertson, government has no business helping the unfortunate. They are better off trying their luck with various agencies that use their funds more wisely. This too is utter nonsense. Which falls apart upon close examination. While private organizations do a great deal of good to be sure, they cannot match the resources of a government program even if they do handle their money more carefully. For those who believe that the private sector is always better, there are many, many examples to disprove this.
Bravo, Daniel. There are other numbers that Mr. Robertson ignores as well:
U.S. annual defense budget: USD 375.2 billion (2004 – note the number of defense dept. employees: 700,000 civilian, 2.3 million military)
U.S. annual non-military foreign aid budget: USD 15.7 billion (2003)
Foreign aid as percentage of U.S. GDP: 0.14% (2003 – smallest among developed countries)
And these facts, from the Center for Defense Information:
· At $325 billion, the U.S. military budget request for FY’02 is nearly six times larger than that of Russia, the second largest spender.
· It is more than twenty-two times as large as the combined spending of the seven countries traditionally identified by the Pentagon as our most likely adversaries (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria).
Mr. Robertson complains about the perceived trade-off between individual contributions and taxes. Perhaps the real problem is taxes — not that we are likely to be assessed more, but that our tax dollars are being used inappropriately NOW. Why is is that we outspent the next 7 or more countries as an aggregate and we still can’t prevent a terror attack like 9/11?
Perhaps it’s because we spend entirely too much on our own WMD and not enough on caring for our global partners via foreign aid?
Rayne,
Defense expenditures are simply unfathomable. It is simply beyond my comprehension that we spend almost a third of a trillion dollars annually on “defense” and we send humvees over to Iraq without armor. Until very recently many soldiers did not have body armor. How can this possibly be? On what scale could you possibly measure this kind of epic mismanagement? I’m still waiting for the headlines that inform the public of this dirty swindle, the journalistic investigations that reveal how the system works. When is someone going to report that defense expenditures very obviously have every thing to do with political patronage, and lining the pockets of defense contractors, and not much at all to do with taking simple measures to ensure that our soldiers are equipped well enough so that they don’t needlessly dye whenever an Iraqi cobbles together a roadside bomb.
The likes of Mr. Robertson is quick to come to the defense of this administration which offered, proportionally, a very meager amount of monetary help literally in the wake of the greatest natural, humanitarian disaster ever witnessed. As the numbers that you provided support, even the revised amount is meager. If it is tax dollars which Mr. Robertson is so concerned about, where is his outrage on how they are so clearly being wasted on defense? If his comments on disaster relief are any guide, I suppose his answer would be that we need more Halliburton’s and KBR’s to make sure that big projects are completed on time and under budget. I mean the free market always does things better, right? There are enough examples extant already to repudiate much of the magical thinking regarding markets that so many of our business learders cling to, but for some, it is not enough for reality to offer strong hints. The True Believer is almost always willing to go down with the ship–belief system intact! It is yet another testament to human folly that people ignor reality if it doesn’t conform to their belief system.
1) Don’t assume I am a “right winger”, I am not. I am a centrist, and an amateur economist. I don’t take sides.
Look, being elected or appointed to high office doesn’t automatically convert someone into a sociopath (though there are several on both sides of the aisle I am certain were that way long before they ever entered public service).
I was just pointing out the limitations that Bush was under.
Also, don’t associate my quotes with someone elses name. I am not Roberson.
2) We know exactly what Clinton would have done (same as Bush), because if you are watching Larry King right now, the elder Bush and the Clinton are on, together, explaining what they were doing in those first few hours.
What they were doing was raising a million or so an hour each, along with the president, via phone calls. (Carter is overseeing the Palestinian election, and has his hands full).
3) As far as fund raising goes, for any public figure, on air TV ads rarely are as effective as personal meeting or phone calls to people who have access to the kind of funds where they can make multimillion dollar donations. This was the best use of their time, rather than useless political grandstanding. Both parties understand this, it is a key skill to have in their profession.
But don’t assume the president can do anything he wants, because he can’t, any more than Clinton, the elder Bush, Reagan or Carter could. Politics is negotiation and compromise, and arbitrary actions of any kind almost invariably are ineffective.
Look at what would happen if he had done as you suggest (or Clinton, or the elder Bush). The whole process would have been highly politicized, with both sides fighting over proper credit, and instead of a lot of money being raised, all the potential donors would have had to decide what side to take. By keeping quiet, they kept potential donors from worrying about being associated with supporting the wrong side of the aisle (whichever one that was asking).
4) According to Jan Egelund, the undersecretary at the UN who is responsible for handling crisis like this, there are 19 more crisises ongoing that are just as much in need of help. For example, 5 million people died in the Congo over the past few years. We have limited resources, there are 30 million Americans below the poverty line we should be helping also. How do we divvy up the pie?
There is no easy answer
5)You are right about the political capital to be made. President Carters actions in the third world during his tenure are one of the major reasons America does not have as much problems as it could have with that area. The Bush administration could have done far more by taking that approach than making the defining issue one of “war on terror”.