We're Broke, So Let's Give Our Money to Foreigners

By Alan Caruba

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress,
but then I repeat myself "– Mark Twain

Given the talk of President-elect Obama’s possible selection of Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State in his new administration, the likelihood of “change” is growing more distant by the hour.

The Obama administration is going to look very much like the Clinton administration and, if anyone recalls, we spent the 1990s sorting out its many scandals and failures, despite a healthy economy bequeathed by the Reagan years. Clinton finished his term pardoning—among a raft of miscreants, Linda Evans, a former member of the Weatherman terrorist group led by Obama pal, William Ayers.

A raft of insanely liberal legislation is waiting to be foisted on Americans. One up for consideration by the lame duck Congress is S. 2433, otherwise known as the “Global Poverty Act of 2007.”

In his book, “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good”, William Easterly noted that, in 2002 “We had the world’s twenty-five most undemocratic government rulers (out of 199 countries the World Bank rated on democracy) get a sum of $9 billion in foreign aid…similarly, the world’s most corrupt countries got $9.4 billion in foreign aid.”

Easterly, an expert on such aid efforts pointed out that “Since donors understandably don’t want to admit they are dealing with bad governments, diplomatic language in aid agencies becomes an art form. A war is a ‘conflict-related reallocation of resources.’ Aid efforts to deal with homicidal warlords are ‘difficult partnerships.’ Countries whose presidents loot the treasury experience ‘governance issues.’

It is estimated that at least a billion of the world’s population lives in poverty. Nobody denies it remains widespread, but poverty is solved by maintaining educational systems that ensure literacy and other useful skills, encouraging entrepreneurship, and mostly by ending the corruption that is the hallmark of virtually every nation on the continent of Africa, the distinguishing feature of Middle Eastern nations, and too many others.

For decades the nations of the West have transferred billions of dollars to nations with no evidence of any progress.

The Global Poverty Act proposes to work with what is possibly the most corrupt international institution in the world, the United Nations, as well as other “international organizations, international financial institutions, the governments of developing and developed countries, United States and international nongovernmental organizations, civil society organizations, and other appropriate entities…”

Its expressed purpose is “To require the President to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to further the United States foreign policy objective of promoting the reduction of global policy, the elimination of extreme global poverty, and the achievement of the Millennium Development goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people worldwide between 1990 and 2015, who live on less than $1 a day.”

Its sponsors include Sen. Barack Obama and a who’s who of liberal legislators that include Joe Biden, John Kerry, Diane Feinstein, et al.

Let us understand this. We and the rest of the world are not under attack from Islamofascists because of poverty. This is a movement drawn entirely from the Koran, an alleged holy book that serves as a battle plan for the complete subjugation of the world to Islam. We’re not going to end this conflict by giving the al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the nations in which they flourish a few billion.

As Easterly and many others point out, much if not most of the foreign aid the U.S. has spread around the world has been a complete and utter waste of our financial resources. The poverty it was supposed to end continues and will continue until the recipient nations operate under the rule of law that is not laid down by the dictators who control and loot nations.

The Global Poverty Act of 2007 will further sap the United States of its financial resources at the same time they should be applied to the nation’s aging infrastructure and resolve the huge burdens of reckless debt that exist from small towns up the States and the federal government.

This is just the beginning of comparable legislation that will wreck America’s economy, leave us bereft of the energy we require, and ruin the future of “Generation O” along with the rest of us.