www.dailycorinthian.com
Reece Terry, publisher
Opinion
Mark Boehler, editor
4A • Sunday, July 23, 2017
Corinth, Miss.
Porking out with your money Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to eliminate governmental waste and fraud, just released its “2017 Congressional Pig Book,” an annual publication highlighting wasteful government spending that should embarrass each and every member of Congress. While it is true that most government spending is for “entitlements” and other fixed costs, the “Pig Book” properly ridicules politicians who waste significant amounts of money on questionable programs. In 2011, Congress promised Cal to go on the wagon when it Thomas came to pork. That didn’t last long because pork to politiColumnist cians is like blood to a vampire. Members promised to swear-off earmarks, which is spending attached to bills that don’t go through the appropriations process. As CAGW notes, despite that supposed moratorium, earmarks keep showing up in numerous bills. The “Pig Book” exposes 163 earmarks in the fiscal 2017 budget, an increase of 32.5 percent from 123 in fiscal 2016. You owe it to yourself to get this book at cagw.org. Check your outrage meter when you’re done. In 2014, Sen. John McCain (RAriz.) called earmarks “a corrupt system.” And it’s bipartisan, perhaps the only activity that qualifies for such a designation in divided Washington. There’s $150 million going to the Department of Defense for the National Guard Counter-Drug Program. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which has a budget of $2.1 billion, is already responsible for these activities, but duplication is no reason to stop the spending. How about $15 million for alternative energy research within the Combat Vehicle and Automotive Technology program? Since FY 2004, Congress has used the Defense Appropriations bill as a vehicle to insert 27 earmarks worth $289.9 million for this purpose, despite the billions already appropriated for alternative energy research through the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act. Aren’t we already exporting natural gas and headed toward energy independence with less reliance on Middle East oil? “Legislators have long treated the Army Corps of Engineers as a prime repository of pork,” notes CAGW, “and it is among the most heavily earmarked areas of the federal budget. Since FY 1996, members of Congress have added 6,916 earmarks for the Corps, costing taxpayers $12.8 billion.” A lot of this spending, of course, goes straight to a member’s state or congressional district and is designed to sustain politicians in office. Back to the “Pig Book”: $2.387 million for “advanced materials and structural safety within the Airport and Airways Trust Fund (AATF), through which the Federal Aviation Administration finances infrastructure improvements for airports.” The CATO Institute, a public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., has noted that the AATF has the indirect effect of preventing competition among airlines at airports. Because the AATF allows for only limited funding for maintenance and improvements, airports are limited in the number of gates they can build. As a result, airports ration gate access through long-term contracts with established companies, creating a barrier for potential competitors. I’m betting that some of the recipients of this largesse probably contribute to their benefactor’s political campaigns. It’s the way Washington works, or more accurately, doesn’t work, at least not to the benefit of taxpayers. The larger point is not whether any of these earmarks produce anything that benefits anyone other than the recipients of the money. It is whether all this spending is constitutional and something the federal government should be doing in an age when the national debt continues to grow. Don’t read the “Pig Book” and weep. Read it, get angry, call your representatives and ask them to give up earmarks for good.
Prayer For Today My Lord and my strength, I pray that I may possess that expectancy which comes in joyous hope and have the endurance that is controlled by courage and energy. Grant in the future that I may be less concerned about my living and more anxious for what I make of my life. Amen.
A Verse To Share “I issue a decree that in every part of my kingdom people must fear and reverence the God of Daniel. “For he is the living God and he endures forever; his kingdom will not be destroyed, his dominion will never end. — Daniel 6:26
Is Iran in our sights now? “Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender.” Thus does our Churchill, Newt Gingrich, dismiss, in dealing with Iran, the policy of containment crafted by George Kennan and pursued by nine U.S. presidents to bloodless victory in the Cold War. Why is containment surrender? “Because freedom is threatened everywhere so long as this dictatorship stays in power,” says Gingrich. But how is our freedom threatened by a regime with 3 percent of our GDP that has been around since Jimmy Carter was president? Fortunately, Gingrich has found a leader to bring down the Iranian regime and ensure the freedom of mankind. “In our country that was George Washington and ... the Marquis de Lafayette. In Italy it was Garibaldi,” says Gingrich. Whom has he found to rival Washington and Garibaldi? Says Gingrich, “Maryam Rajavi.” Who is she? The leader of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, or Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, which opposed the Shah, broke with the old Ayatollah, collaborated with Saddam Hussein, and, until 2012, was desig-
nated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State. At the NCRI conferPatrick ence in Paris Buchanan in July where Gingrich Columnist spoke, and the speaking fees were reportedly excellent, John Bolton and Rudy Giuliani were also on hand. Calling Iran’s twiceelected President Hassan Rouhani, “a violent, vicious murderer,” Giuliani said, “the time has come for regime change.” Bolton followed suit. “Tehran is not merely a nuclear weapons threat, it is not merely a terrorist threat, it is a conventional threat to everybody in the region,” he said. We will all celebrate in Tehran in 2019, Bolton assured the NCRI faithful. Good luck. Yet, as The New York Times said yesterday, all this talk, echoed all over this capital, is driving us straight toward war. “A drumbeat of provocative words, outright threats and actions -- from President Trump and some of his top aides as well as Sunni Arab leaders and American activists — is raising tensions that could lead to armed
conflict with Iran.” Is this what America wants or needs — a new Mideast war against a country three times the size of Iraq? Bolton calls Iran “a nuclear weapons threat.” To ascertain the truth, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should call the heads of the CIA and DIA, and the Director of National Intelligence, to testify in open session. We are told we are menaced also by a Shiite Crescent rising and stretching from Beirut to Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran. And who created this Shiite Crescent? It was George W. Bush who ordered the Sunni regime of Saddam overthrown, delivering Iraq to its Shiite majority. It was Israel whose invasion and occupation of Lebanon from 1982 to 2000 gave birth to the Shiite resistance now known as Hezbollah. As for Bashar Assad in Syria, his father sent troops to fight alongside Americans in the Gulf War. The Ayatollah’s regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij militia are deeply hostile to this country. But Iran does not want war with the United States -- for the best of reasons. Iran would be smashed like Iraq, and its
inevitable rise, as the largest and most advanced country on the Persian Gulf, would be aborted. Moreover, we have interests in common: Peace in the Gulf, from which Iran’s oil flows and without which Iran cannot grow, as Rouhani intends, by deepening Iran’s ties to Europe and the advanced world. And we have enemies in common: ISIS, al-Qaida and all the Sunni terrorists whose wildest dream is to see their American enemies fight their Shiite enemies. Who else wants a U.S. war with Iran, besides ISIS? Unfortunately, their number is legion: Saudis, Israelis, neocons and their think tanks, websites and magazines, hawks in both parties on Capitol Hill, democracy crusaders, and many in the Pentagon who want to deliver payback for what the Iranian-backed Shiite militias did to us in Iraq. President Trump is key. If he does the War Party’s bidding, that will be his legacy, as the Iraq War is the legacy of George W. Bush. Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.”
Looking back at the Detroit riots Fifty years ago this weekend, a deadly urban riot began in Detroit. It started around 3:30 a.m., when police arrested 85 patrons of a blind pig — an illegal afterhours bar — in the midst of an all-black neighborhood that had been all-white 15 or 20 years before. The statistics are horrifying. Rioting went on for six nights, with some 2,500 stores looted and burnt, some 400 families displaced and property damage was estimated around $300 million in 2017 dollars. Fortythree people, many of them innocent bystanders, were killed. More than 1,000 people were wounded. The reality was even more horrifying. That summer, I had wangled a job as an intern in the office of Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a young, bright and ambitious liberal. Elected with nearunanimous support of black voters, he had aggressively launched anti-poverty programs, trying to make the nation’s fifth largest municipality a model of the Great Society’s War on Poverty. He had not succeeded, however, in changing the modus operandi of a police department that was only 5 percent black in a city with a 38 percent black population. In retrospect, this was a tragic consequence of the migration of one-third of American blacks between 1940 and 1965 from the
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
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Willie Walker
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mostly rural South to the big cities of the North. That meant that Detroit, which Michael had about Barone 1 5 0 , 0 0 0 black resiColumnist dents before World War II, had about 600,000 a generation later. At a time when almost no whites would remain in neighborhoods with a significant black population, and when there were significant differences in the mores and culture of blacks and whites, this was inevitably going to be problematic. Notwithstanding Cavanagh’s liberal policies, and those of Michigan’s Republican Governor George Romney, the riot should not have been the surprise it was. If it was more destructive than the riots in so many other cities, well, Detroit was bigger than just about all those other cities and had had a larger influx of Southern blacks than all but Chicago and New York. I arrived at the City County Building on the warm morning of Sunday, July 23, and spent the next six nights at work. Unfortunately, I made no notes at the time and so my vivid memories may not be entirely accurate. But they show how fragile the web of civilization
can be, just as what happened to Detroit over the next decades show how difficult they are to repair after they’re torn to shreds. I remember listening after sundown in the police commissioner’s office to the police radio, as one officer after another reported abandoning another neighborhood — whole square miles — to the rioters. I remember the mayor, concerned about the triggerhappy performance of National Guard troops, trying to persuade the governor to demand federal troops from a reluctant President Lyndon Johnson and Attorney General Ramsey Clark. I remember riding around in a (nonpolice) car with Congressman John Conyers, then in his second term and now the senior member of Congress, as he told young black men to cool it and stop the violence. After several days, the experienced (and not allwhite) 101st Airborne came in and calmed the city down. Johnson summoned the Kerner Commission, which blamed the Detroit riot on white racism and called for massive federal spending to somehow overcome it. What followed was the cycle of vastly increased violent crime and welfare dependency that nearly tripled in the 1965-75 decade and was not reversed until the 1990s. White flight re-
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duced Detroit’s population from 1,670,144 in 1960 to 1,027,974 in 1990; black flight reduced it from that to 713,777 in 2010. It has become the fashion to call the Detroit riot a “rebellion,” though it was not premeditated and had no explicit policy goals. It was the product of expectations combined with a certain understandable discontent. People throw bottles, break windows, loot stores and set fires when they think that enough other people will be doing the same as to make them immune from punishment. Riots in American cities proliferated from Los Angeles’s Watts in 1964 to the multiple riots following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. They have been rare in the 49 years since; the 1992 Los Angeles riot ended after 18 hours and the dispatch of 25,000 federal troops — more than double the number in Detroit. Lessons learned these last 50 years: Riots hurt, not help, people like the rioters. Riots can be stopped, and prevented, by authorities willing to deploy overwhelming force. Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
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