Point, Counterpoint

It's not often that one news item so deftly answers another, such that very little extraneous editorial comment is necessary.

First, the provocation:

On the eve of the G-8 Summit, ex-president Bill Clinton is telling European audiences that the U.S. is stingy with its foreign aid dollars - and that Americans think they contribute more than they actually do.

"In America, for example, we have always been hampered in getting adequate budgets for international assistance by the fact that the American people believe we give much more than we do," he told BBC Radio 4 on Thursday.

The latter half of that is true, though I hardly think that has anything to do with the size of foreign aid appropriations. Also, t'isn't like Mr. Bill to attack the American citizenry at large like this, which explains why he went to Europe to do so. The man always was a pussy.

My apologies for the interruption....

"They think we give about 3% of GDP," the ex-president continued. "They think we give 10-15% of the budget. They think we ought to give about 5%."

Sorry, I just have to ask - where the devil did he get these numbers? His Trojan ribbed prophylactics secret decoder ring?

Clinton blamed the GOP Congress and the Bush Administration, which pledged $15 billion in aid to Africa in 2003, for being shortsighted when it came to foreign
assistance.

I know, I know what I said above, but this assertion is causing me to experience flashbacks of Jan Egeland, only with a twang instead of a "Ya, shur, you betcha!"

"President Bush and the Republicans, when I was president, 100 members of the new Republican Congress after the '94 election did not have passports," he recalled. "They thought all foreign aid was wasted. They did not believe in anything."

A thousand pardons, may my buttcheeks end up in different zipcodes, but that graf is either a misprint, a server hiccup, an editing atrocity, or Mr. Bill was channeling Nancy Pelosi.

He took credit for fostering a different attitude toward foreign aid while he was president.

"By the time I left, we had dramatic consensus across parties for the massive debt relief we did for the millennium in 2000," he told the BBC.

Clinton said that if the U.S. contributed its fair share [like Quint's fingernails on the blackboard], "we can have a whole new paradigm for development assistance from the rich to the poor."

Oh, I don't know. That "attitude" couldn't have been all that different, or he wouldn't have anything to lament today.

Not that he really does, you understand. He's just playing to his anti-American audience, whose estimation of our "stinginess" is impervious to facts and figures, and dripping with the contemptuous demand that we be "the world"'s willing and witting patsy and the faux left-wing "generosity" that sees endless good to be accomplished as long as somebody else is paying the bills.

The inevitable end result of this particular "attitude" is reflected in the answer to story #1:

Despite repeated pledges of openness and transparency, U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan has refused several requests to open his finances to public examination.

The decision comes as the investigation into the scandal plagued Oil for Food program begins to enter its final stages.

A final report by the investigative panel headed by former Fed chief Paul Volcker, is due in late summer....

When the interim report was issued, Annan and his chief of staff Mark Malloch Brown, rushed to tell reporters that the Volcker panel had exonerated the U.N. chief.

That brought personal rebukes by Mark Pieth (a panel member) as well as by Volcker himself, who called a news conference to insist that "no criminal action" by Annan had been discovered "yet."

He went on to proclaim that no definitive determination on the senior Annan will be made until the final report is issued....

The United Nations is self-policing on the issue of taxes and finances. It does however claim to use U.S. government rules as "a model," albeit selectively.

When it comes to personal finances, those rules which govern world leaders such as George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirc, don't seem to apply to Kofi Annan, though his salary also comes from taxpayers.

Trying to "explain" Annan's refusal to release his personal finances, newly appointed spokesman Stephane Dujarric said:

"As part of our ongoing management reform process, we are looking at best practices in governments and other institutions regarding the issue of financial disclosure. Specifically, what gets disclosed and to whom."

What was not said that is that the "review" comes in the 9th year of a 10-year term. Annan's current and final 5-year term ends January 1, 2007.

Therefore, any decision on financial disclosure reform will likely come after the secretary-general leaves office.

This as the U.N. tries to lift itself out of the worst financial scandal in its 60-year history.

I'll leave aside the peacekeeper child sex rings and moral obtuseness regarding what constitutes "genocide" and the relentlessly despicable anti-Semitism that characterizes the "internationalism" the UN symbolizes. Just the Oily Food scandal itself - 22 billion dollars of foreign aid supposedly earmarked for the sustenance of Iraqi children diverted instead into Saddam Hussein's weapons programs and, ultimately, the pockets of as many greedmongers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East as could cram their way to the trough of rank corruption - the very same trough that Bill Clinton and those of his crooked ilk scold us, the people, for slopping in miserly fashion.

There's an old expression about not "sending good money after bad." Speeches like Bubba's just go to show how corrupt, immoderate, and hard-core leftist the Clintons truly are and have always been, and still retain the un-Deaniacal discretion to conceal - except when they think nobody's paying attention.

Small wonder Kofi Annan's job would be such a perfect fit for him.

UPDATE 7/3: William Easterly elaborates further in, believe it or not, today's New York Times:

It's great that so many are finally noticing the tragedy of Africa. But sadly, historical evidence says that the solutions offered by big plans are not so easy. From 1960 to 2003, we spent $568 billion (in today's dollars) to end poverty in Africa. Yet these efforts still did not lift Africa from misery and stagnation.

Why don't big plans work? Because they miss the critical elements of feedback and accountability. If consumers like a product, its maker prospers; if they don't, the company goes out of business. If voters complain about public services to their local politician, the politician either fixes the problem or gets voted out of office. It doesn't always work, but it works well enough for rich people to get potato chips and paved roads.

For the poor, Professor Sachs and the United Nations Millennium Project propose everything from nitrogen-fixing leguminous trees to replenish the soil, to rainwater harvesting, to battery-charging stations, for, by my count, 449 interventions. Poor Africans have no market or democratic mechanisms to let planners in New York know which of the 449 interventions they need, whether they are satisfied with the results, or whether the goods ever arrived at all. [emphases added]

If the "Bush is stingy" left were really serious about getting results in Africa, we'd be hearing the term "neocolonialism" from them. Because, quite clearly, African independence and self-governance has been, in almost all instances, an unmitigated disaster, and has arguably cost as much if not more over the past forty-plus years than retaining Western administrative control
would have.

When it comes to over half a trillion smackers with virtually nothing to show for it, I'll take Everett Dirksen's counsel over Bill Clinton's any day of the week.

[HT: CQ]