This Week:

Quote of the Week

Foreign Aid from Marshall to Powell

U.S. Foreign Aid: An “Entirely New Approach”?

Greetings,

Once again I have left myself insufficient space to jot down the usual meaningless gibberish that I like to call the “editor’s column.” It reminds me of the two people talking about a new restaurant. One says, “The food there is terrible!” and the other replies, “Yes, and the servings are so small!”

I hope everyone notices that this week's "Quotes" of the Week are in italics. Boy, the innovations just never stop here at Nygaard Notes!

‘Til next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

I offer a trio of quotes this week, all from an Associated Press article headlined “U.S. Needs Image Makeover, Terror Experts Say,” published in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of July 10th. Reporter Laurence Arnold starts out by telling us that

“Scholars on terrorism and Al-Qaida told the independent commission studying the Sept. 11 attacks that the United States badly needs an image makeover in the eyes of the world.”

Then he says that Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (upon whose board sit an Undersecretary of “Defense” and an admiral in the U.S. Navy), believes that

“Leaders of other countries, particularly in the Middle East, should be expected to express public gratitude for U.S. help... Somehow we tolerate Arab leaders telling us something in private rooms and then dealing with their public the way they want to.”

Then Arnold quotes Dennis Ross, whom he identifies as “a peace envoy to the Middle East under former President Clinton” (not mentioning that he also worked on the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan), as saying:

“We are resented in no small part because we are seen as using democracy as a tool or weapon against those we don't like, but never against those we do like.”

“We are seen”?! “Democracy as a weapon”?!

Foreign Aid from Marshall to Powell

Back in the 1970s, I was involved in solidarity work around the issues of liberation in Southern Africa. We focused a lot on anti-apartheid organizing, but we also worked to support liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia. All of us knew that our organizing efforts were hampered by an amazing level of ignorance among Minnesotans about these liberation struggles, and about the role of U.S. power in perpetuating white-minority rule in the region.

This awareness of the obstacles posed by mass ignorance led to an ongoing debate among local activists in regard to the media. On the one hand, we wanted more coverage of the region and U.S. policy towards it. On the other hand, when the mainstream media did cover the region, the coverage was often so bad that it served mainly to replace dangerous ignorance with dangerous misconceptions. So, which is better: No coverage, or bad coverage? It was a dilemma from which we never fully extricated ourselves.

A similar dilemma faces those of us who are concerned about the U.S. role in global hunger and poverty: Do we really want more aid if that aid will be used to enhance U.S. corporate interests at the expense of human needs? I don’t pretend to have an answer, but ponder the words of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Speaking to the Organization of American States last month, he told the assembled leaders of the Western hemisphere that the so-called “Millennium Challenge Initiative” proposed by the Bush administration “would provide the largest increase in US development assistance since the Marshall Plan.” (He makes that sound impressive but, as we saw last week, it’s a pretty modest claim, since the increase is starting from a base that’s the lowest it’s been in half a century.)

“Chiefly a Matter of National Self-Interest”

It’s telling that the Bush people like to compare their current efforts at aiding other countries with the Marshall Plan. That 1948 effort, coming in the wake of World War II, saw the U.S. send some 16 billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Western Europe, which would be about $119 billion in today’s dollars, a large amount by any measure.

In the minds of the U.S. public, the Marshall Plan no doubt symbolized—and continues to symbolize, for those who remember it—American generosity and compassion. But those values were probably among the least important considerations for policymakers at the time, to whom economic and political motives were paramount, as we learned years later.

American planners knew that the Europeans had to be given a lot of U.S. dollars, or else they wouldn’t be able to buy U.S. products, which were numerous in the wake of the incredible increases in productive capacity of American factories during the war. The post-war economic aim, then, was to assure that the post-war European market remained as “open to American business” as it had been before the war, as Secretary of State Marshall himself said at the time.

The political motive for this aid was to reinforce the power of “pro-American” (i.e. capitalist) European leaders in the face of the growing influence of anti-capitalist nationalist movements in such countries as Italy and France. Marshall’s successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, put it plainly:

“These measures of relief and reconstruction have been only in part suggested by humanitarianism. Your Congress has authorized and your Government is carrying out, a policy of relief and reconstruction today chiefly as a matter of national self-interest.”

A few years later, Minnesota’s own Hubert Humphrey, an icon in my state and seen by many as a symbol of American liberalism, expressed a similar philosophy in regard to “humanitarian” U.S. aid and the motivations for it. Referencing the birth of the U.S. aid program called P.L. 480, commonly known as the “Food for Peace” program, Humphrey testified before the U.S. Senate in 1957, saying,

“I have heard...that people may become dependent on us for food. I know this is not supposed to be good news. To me that was good news, because before people can do anything they have got to eat. And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.”

This sort of frankness, infrequent but recurring, continues up to the present. Recall the comment of Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's national security adviser, as that administration prepared to take office in January of 2001. Ms. Rice said,

“American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the United States on the national interest... There is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect.”

Note that the myth of American “generosity” lives on, which allows Ms. Rice to claim that her administration needs to “refocus” on the “national interest,”as if previous administrations had at some point strayed into a foreign policy of performing random acts of kindness. Marshall to Acheson to Humphrey to Rice to Powell. There’s a frightening, bi-partisan consistency here, isn’t there?

I said last week that the U.S. was quite stingy with its foreign aid budgets, which might have led some readers to think that we should press our elected representatives (and presidential candidates?) to come out in favor of “more foreign aid.” As the above history makes clear, it’s not as simple as that. Before lobbying for “more” aid, we need to take a critical look at how and why U.S. foreign aid is supplied. With this in mind, let’s look at the Bush administration’s approach to foreign aid, focusing on their key initiative, the Millennium Challenge Accounts.

U.S. Foreign Aid: An “Entirely New Approach”?

George W. Bush announced his Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) initiative in a major speech on March 14th 2002. As I reported in “Hunger, Power, and Politics: Looking for the Key Fact” in Nygaard Notes #210, Mr. Bush has said that the MCA represents “an entirely new approach to development aid.”

Well, it does and it doesn’t. It doesn’t, in the sense that foreign aid from the U.S. has always been motivated in large part by national self-interest, more than by compassion and justice. It does, in the sense that the exact terms of the “rules of the game” have not in recent years been quite so explicitly spelled out in the policy itself as they are in Bush’s world. And it represents something new, also, in the sense that countries have never before been so clearly forced to directly compete with each other in their adherence to U.S.-made rules in order to receive U.S. aid.

Mr. Bush does not even bother to disguise this requirement of obedience to “Free Trade” orthodoxy—sometimes rather accurately referred to in international financial circles as the “Washington Consensus.” As he said in his March 14th speech,

“I'm here today to announce a major new commitment by the United States to bring hope and opportunity to the world's poorest people. Along with significant new resources to fight world poverty, we will insist on the reforms necessary to make this a fight we can win.”

As always, listeners are assumed to understand what he means by “we” and also by “win.”

According to Bush and Secretary of State Powell, in order to be considered a “winner” in the competition for U.S. aid, a country must prove that it is making “the right choices.” The “President” tells us that “these choices are plain,” and that they fall into three categories.

To qualify for aid under the MCA rules, a nation must show to the satisfaction of U.S. leaders that it is “Governing Justly,” that it is “Investing in People,” and that it is “Promoting Economic Freedom.” Countries will be judged in these areas using “a set of clear and concrete and objective criteria for measuring progress,” says Mr. Bush. These criteria involve evaluating nations using 16 “indicators” on a range of issues. This week I want to take a look at two of these three categories.

Category #1: “Governing Justly”

While it may seem reasonable to want to direct aid to countries that “govern justly,” the devil, as always, is in the details. First of all, who gets to decide what it means to “govern justly?” It turns out that nations will be judged in this area using six scales. Four of them are derived from the World Bank Institute, and the other two from a group called “Freedom House.” Who are they?

The World Bank Institute is an arm of the World Bank, an economic financial institution that is controlled by the world’s richest nations. In the World Bank, the seven wealthiest nations hold more than 40 percent of the votes. In contrast, the entire continent of Africa holds 3.4 percent of the votes in that body. So the rules in these areas will be set by the powerful, and imposed on the poor, following a long tradition. Nothing new here.

As for Freedom House, much can be learned about their ideology by looking at a list of their trustees and their funders. Trustees include such neo-conservatives as Ken Adelmann (author of the famous statement, “Demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk”), Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and the infamous Dan Quayle.

When you look at Freedom House’s funders, you see groups like the Sarah Scaife and Carthage Foundations (both of which are part of the Scaife family of foundations), the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the Orwellian-named National Endowment for Democracy (which is anything but).

In addition to Freedom House, these organizations have funded such reactionary groups as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Accuracy in Media, the Center for Individual Rights, and many others, most or all of which are interested in shaping a world in the Bush “Free Market” mold.

Category #2: “Investing in People”

Who gets to decide what it means to “invest in people?” The four criteria in this group are set by statistics gathered by the World Bank and “national sources,” and I don’t doubt their accuracy. The problem here is the judgement of what is “good.” For example, one of the criteria in this group is that a country must have a high level of “Public Expenditures on Health as Percent of GDP.” [GDP is Gross Domestic Product, basically the overall size of the economy.]

The irony here, of course, is that the U.S. itself has one of the lowest levels of public spending for health care of all the world’s industrial nations. So, will the U.S. be looking for high levels of public subsidies to corporate health-care providers, as we have in this country? Or will they be rewarding countries with socialized medical systems? They haven’t said.

Another criterion is “Primary School Completion Rate,” as reported by the World Bank. An obvious problem here is that the poorest and most troubled countries often have the lowest school completion rates, for a variety of reasons.

In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, relatively “developed” South Africa has a primary school completion rate of 98 percent, while dirt-poor Chad graduates only 19 percent, and Somalia, Rwanda, and a half-dozen others are so torn-up that there isn’t even any data available on completion rates. Into this complex reality comes the U.S. plan to use foreign aid to “reward” nations that “invest” in “better schools.” (To be fair, the Bush people have inserted language that they say “limits bias against low income countries,” indicating that they are at least aware of the bias, if not committed to eliminating it.)

So, those are two of the three categories that the Bush administration plans to use to judge whether or not nations are deserving of U.S. aid. The third category of criteria for entry into the Millennium Challenge Account sweepstakes is labeled “Promoting Economic Freedom.” This group may well be the most problematic and revealing, and I plan to discuss it next week.

Perhaps the best introduction, for Nygaard Notes readers, to that final aspect of the Bush plan would be to go to Notes website and look up my essay from issue #146 called “Fetishes, Cults, and Infinite Possibilities.” In that I discuss the three pillars of the dominant American ideology, of which the fetishization of “freedom” is one.