An editorial not in today's NY Times

[The Gaijin]

Bon voyage Mr Bush
Editor
Daily News; Tuesday,February 19, 2008 @18:01

TANZANIANS were left with nostalgic feelings as Air Force One, the official plane of the President of the United States, took off from Terminal One of the Julius Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam today.

They had good reasons to feel that way. During his four-day stay in the country, President George W. Bush endeared himself to many Tanzanians and proved that he is a friend in need and thus, a friend indeed.

On Sunday, President Bush signed 698 million-dollar Millennium Challenge Compact with Tanzania, a deal which will help this country to reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth through infrastructure investments in transport, energy and water. This grant is the largest in the history of the programme.

The US leader also announced that his country and Tanzania, in partnership with the World Bank and the Global Fund, plan to distribute 5.2 million free bed nets in Tanzania in six months, which is enough to provide a net for every child between the ages of one and five.

On Sunday, Bush signed 698 million-dollar Millennium Challenge Compact with Tanzania, a deal that will help the latter to reduce poverty and stimulate economic growth through infrastructure investments in transport, energy and water.

This grant is the largest in the history of the programme. President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has given shape and hope to the fight against HIV/AIDS in 13 focus countries in Africa, including Tanzania, and two outside the continent. Tatu Msangi, a single Tanzanian mother, took the story of the success of PEPFAR to Congress during a State of the Union address last month.

She is a living testimony of just how, through PEPFAR, the Bush administration has saved a life deep in a remote African village. Msangi testified how despite living with HIV, she received the necessary counselling and Nevirapine (medication) during her pregnancy, and subsequently delivered a bouncing HIV-free baby girl.

That is just one example of how PEPFAR has benefited its recipients. In Tanzania, Mr Bush and his wife Laura felt at home everywhere they visited. The president hugged everybody near him, including expecting mothers, traditional Maasai dancers and children. He joked and shared other light moments with the people, winning many hearts. Bon Voyage President Bush.
http://dailynews.habarileo.co.tz/editorial/?id=3147

[hardflex]

If Mr. Bush wrote me a check for 698 mil I would probably sing his praises too.

[Gogar]

I want a bed net.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

International Welfare.

We don't have enough, good quality textbooks for inner-city schools in the U.S., but we can send money to Tanzania so every child there has a textbook (NPR story this morning).

[legion]

Originally Posted by Shaun 84 Targa

International Welfare.

We don't have enough, good quality textbooks for inner-city schools in the U.S., but we can send money to Tanzania so every child there has a textbook (NPR story this morning).

Wanna bet if it was Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi doing the exact same thing, giving the exact same speeches, that NPR would have covered it as "spreading goodwill in Africa"?

[Jeff Higgins]

Truly, no good deed goes unpunished. Especially in the wonderful little world of PPOT...

[The Gaijin]

Originally Posted by Gogar

I want a bed net.

Be glad you don't need a bed net.

[Overpaid Slacker]

Into Africa
Bush's rhetoric matches the reality.
by Joseph Loconte
02/20/2008 12:00:00 AM



PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE First Lady are in Africa this week, visiting five countries--Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda, and Tanzania--that have benefited from his $15 billion initiative to combat HIV/AIDS. There is something to be said for a program that confounds liberals, libertarians, and radical Islamists.

"Too many nations continue to follow either the paternalistic notion that treats African countries as charity cases, or a model of exploitation that seeks only to buy up their resources," Bush told an audience at the National Museum of African Art last week. "America rejects both approaches." Sometimes the gulf between the rhetoric of U.S. foreign policy and the reality on the ground is monstrously wide. But not with regards to the Bush administration and Africa.

Consider the fact that before the Bush effort, barely 50,000 people were receiving U.S. assistance for HIV/AIDS treatment. Today, five years after launching the initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has treated nearly 1.5 million people scattered across 15 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. It is likely that U.S.-funded anti-retroviral drugs have prevented more than 10 million new cases of mother-to-child HIV transmission. The administration has expanded its initiative to tackle malaria--an entirely preventable disease--which nevertheless kills millions every year, most of them young children. The $1.2 billion program buys mosquito nets, drugs, and indoor spraying. The president's goal, to cut malaria deaths in 15 African states by half, now seems achievable. In Tanzania, for example, the number of people treated for malaria plummeted from 500,000 in 2004 to 10,000 in 2007. In two years the program has reached 25 million people.

"Global health has graduated into being a mainstream foreign policy priority," says Stephen Morrison, an Africa specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It's a huge and historic and unprecedented policy by this administration . . . and it's predominantly an Africa-focused initiative."

Well, what's a cranky, Bush-hating, big-government liberal supposed to do? What most of them--from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to religious activist Jim Wallis--have in fact been doing, is to ignore or belittle the entire initiative. The administration, we're told, isn't spending enough to help the world's poor. It moralizes about sexual behavior. It relies on theology, not science. And there aren't enough condoms to go around.

The facts are a little different. PEPFAR already represents the largest-ever investment to combat a single disease in American history. In his State of the Union address, Bush announced he intended to double the U.S. commitment to fighting AIDS--to $30 billion. As for PEPFAR's abstinence approach: Numerous studies, some produced by the United Nations, support the contention that programs challenging risky behaviors that spread the HIV virus--drug use, promiscuity, prostitution--make for sound health policy. By contrast, liberal schemes that enable drug addiction or ignore sexually destructive lifestyles are neither humane nor effective. They amount to death on the installment plan. Just ask the AIDS orphans living on the streets of Abuja, Cape Town, Kampala, and Nairobi.

As for theology, here's a Bush doctrine that only crabby atheists like Sam Harris could find objectionable: "We believe that our brothers and sisters in Africa have dignity and value, because they bear the mark of our Creator. We believe our spirit is renewed when we help African children and families live and thrive." Well, sounds like the Salem witch trials, doesn't it? The truth about Bush's Christian faith is that it alone explains his willingness to expend political capital on a humanitarian program greeted at best with ambivalence by most of the party faithful.

Indeed, conservative leaders and think tanks--libertarians, realists, isolationists--often display the same scorn as liberals for Bush's Africa policy, if for different reasons. Africa is a basket case of corrupt regimes, we're told, and no amount of foreign aid can change that. Besides, the United States has few security interests in the region.

Corruption remains a problem, which is why the administration has linked foreign aid and trade to tangible reform through its Millennium Challenge Account. Problems persist, but, for the first time as a matter of U.S. policy, the Agency for International Development is prepared to withhold assistance until there are improvements in governance and economic freedom. Meanwhile, PEPFAR is targeting local, community-based groups over large, bureaucratic aid organizations. Last year nearly nine out of ten of the 2,200 organizations engaged were home-grown. It's all beginning to look like a revolution in America's approach to the developing world.

Is it really conceivable that the world's military and economic superpower should refuse to take any interest in the fate of Africa--when it has the capacity to act? As Bush put it during his stop in Rwanda: "It is irresponsible for nations to whom much has been given to sit on the sidelines when young babies are dying because of mosquito bites." America's example, in fact, has prodded G8 nations to step up their own commitments to help, yet another reminder that hardly any crisis in the world can be tackled without U.S. leadership. Yes, federal spending and budget deficits are massive problems. But they're not likely to be solved by a nation unmoved by the suffering and degradation of millions.

The claim that Africa has little to do with U.S strategic interests looks increasingly naïve. Scholars such as Philip Jenkins warn of a "cultural and religious confrontation" as Muslim populations compete with Christians and other groups for natural resources and religious influence. Can it really be unimportant that no other region of the world produces as many child soldiers and AIDS orphans as Africa? We know that al Qaeda and its allies thrive on the social chaos of failed states. We know that wherever Sharia law takes hold, extremism is bound to follow. Osama bin Laden, after all, plied his trade of terror while receiving sanctuary in the war-torn, Islamic dictatorship of Sudan.

Which brings us to the other group that bristles at Bush's Africa policy: radical Islamists. Since the attacks of 9/11, Muslim leaders (and their liberal sympathizers) have accused the United States of waging a "war on Islam." Conspiracy theories abound. The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Sudan, for example, claims that Americans "are behind all the tragedies that are taking place in Darfur." Bush's AIDS initiative must be part of the same subversive plot.

Perhaps the Islamists realize a fact completely overlooked by the Western media: A sizeable swath of the people being reached through PEPFAR are . . . Muslims. Many of the nations receiving assistance--Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda--have significant Islamic populations. Scores of faith-based NGOs in these countries, including Catholic and evangelical, reach out to Muslims in need. Churches and mosques sometimes work together to help families in crisis. In Ivory Coast, U.S. officials joined imams at the nation's largest mosque for their first public discussion of HIV/AIDS. All of this is bad PR for al Qaeda Incorporated.

Bush's Africa trip culminates what surely ranks as the most principled, sustained, and strategic commitment to the African continent of any Western leader in memory. What a contrast to the Clinton years. There was no suggestion that failed states might present a security threat, no serious attempt to tackle the AIDS pandemic or develop a coherent foreign assistance program. When President Clinton made a trip to Ghana, tens of thousands rushed to greet him, but what came of it? As one observer put it, "the optics were astonishing." His policies were less so. Two images of Africa remain forever associated with the Clinton White House: the humiliating retreat of U.S. Marines from Somalia (which emboldened Osama bin Laden) and the shameful paralysis over the genocide in Rwanda.

It is too early to tell what George Bush's legacy in Africa will amount to; civil wars and political corruption stand ready to crush advances toward democracy and economic growth. But, by any rational measure, an untold deluge of human suffering already has been averted. The story of Kabanyana Renatha from Rwanda, for example, is becoming increasingly common. Kabanyana believes she lost two children to the disease before realizing she was HIV positive. She started getting treatment at the Masaka Health Center while she was pregnant with her seventh child. Her daughter, Clissa Uwimana, is now two-and-a-half years old and HIV-negative. "I feel strong, and I hope to raise my kids until they finish their school," she says. "I have hope for their future."

This week even the Bush administration's fiercest critics, if they were inclined, would receive a singular impression of America's engagement in a troubled region. This week we're seeing images of what Africa might become, what anyone with a shred of conscience would hope for all Africans--scenes of children playing at their mothers' knees, freed from sickness and fear, determined, fully alive. "Different people may have different views about you and your administration and your legacy," said Tanzanian president Kikwete during Bush's visit. "But we in Tanzania, if we are to speak for ourselves and for Africa, we know that you . . . have been good friends of our country and have been good friends of Africa."

[BeyGon]

Originally Posted by legion

Wanna bet if it was Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi doing the exact same thing, giving the exact same speeches, that NPR would have covered it as "spreading goodwill in Africa"?

Bill did it his last two years in office, he and about 200 of his still alive closest Friends traveled Africa, spending and giving.

[The Gaijin]

Originally Posted by Shaun 84 Targa

We don't have enough, good quality textbooks for inner-city schools in the U.S., but we can send money to Tanzania so every child there has a textbook (NPR story this morning).

Inner city like Brownsville Brooklyn or the South Bronx?

You would think $15,000 per student, per year (and most likely more in those tougher "inner-city" nabes) would by plenty of quality textbooks.. But I guess most of it goes to fund retirements at 1/2 pay and full benefits..

[the]

Originally Posted by Overpaid Slacker

PRESIDENT BUSH AND THE First Lady are in Africa this week, visiting five countries--Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda, and Tanzania--that have benefited from his $15 billion initiative to combat HIV/AIDS. There is something to be said for a program that confounds liberals, libertarians, and radical Islamists.

The US sucks, I'm sure Norway is doing much more to help combat AIDS in Africa.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Originally Posted by legion

Wanna bet if it was Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi doing the exact same thing, giving the exact same speeches, that NPR would have covered it as "spreading goodwill in Africa"?

that's how it was covered.

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Originally Posted by The Gaijin

Inner city like Brownsville Brooklyn or the South Bronx?

You would think $15,000 per student, per year (and most likely more in those tougher "inner-city" nabes) would by plenty of quality textbooks.. But I guess most of it goes to fund retirements at 1/2 pay and full benefits..

I only know about East Cambridge and South Boston. HVAC doesn't work, books are ancient, classrooms are ancient, roof leaks...

I'm 100% against the Dept. of Ed. I used to project management/gov. cost accounting for a major contractor. it's a waste of money. But, every student in this country should have the same, or at least similar, education opportunities, and by that I mean textbooks, a variety in and after-school programs and an environment conducive to learning.

Let's fix our country first before we throw money at other countries to fix theirs.

[The Gaijin]

Our schools are broken and currupt and waste billions. And it is going to take a long time to fix them. (And we can agree that throwing money at them does not work.)

But come on guys - cheap doses of AIDS meds and mosquito nets.

And yes, American charities have spend a lot in Africa over the years..

[Rearden]

Originally Posted by Shaun 84 Targa

I only know about East Cambridge and South Boston. HVAC doesn't work, books are ancient, classrooms are ancient, roof leaks...

They need to raise the local and state taxes, then, if there isn't enough to go around after the bureaucracies grab their plunder.

[legion]

Originally Posted by Shaun 84 Targa

that's how it was covered.

So the comparison between inner-city schools and Tanzania was your spin, not NPR's? My bad...

Tons of money is thrown blindly at "inner-city schools". Nevermind that "inner-city" principals spend money on worthless, feel-good programs and neglect the basics. Nevermind that some "inner-city" principals line their pockets with school money--either through explicit embezzlement or by creating expensive "perks" for their job. Nevermind that the NEA and teacher's unions are more interesting in preserving (or increasing) their "take" from education and preserving the status quo--from opposing merit pay to increasing costly benefits--rather than educating the children.

You want to see poor schools? Try going to a rural school. These are the forgotten Peters that were robbed to pay Paul--the "inner-city" schools. Text books are often decades old. The "inner-city" schools complained to their alderman who complained to the mayor who complained to the governor. The funding for their textbooks was provided--yet the textbooks never seem to materialize. The rural schools have no one to complain to. The big city newspapers don't care, nor do the big city politicians. Many of these schools spend less than $1,000 a student per year. Where is their money? Where is the outrage?

What's the problem? Well, we have two parallel education bureacracies: the federal Department of Education and the state departments of education. All of those bureaucrats need salaries. They suck up the money, set standards and curriculums, and let the money trickle back to the source--each successive layer taking their cut. Accountability to the local residents gets lost along the way--the money comes from above, not below.

The largest entity in the education system should be the school district. It should collect its own money and spend it how it sees fit. If it needs more money, it should have to justify it only to its residents. If it has too much money, it should have to justify why to its residents. Many of the problems inherent in the bloated educational bureacratic superstructure would simply cease to be. Bad teacher? It's easy for a powerful union to fight a small school district. It's hard for a single teacher to face her neighbors. Embezzling Principal? Let's see how long he gets away with it when all the funding sources are local...

Oh...but the inequity!!! Some students in wealthy districts will get better educations than those in poor rural districts or in "inner city". Explain to me how that is any different than what we currently have?

[dd74]

Originally Posted by legion

Wanna bet if it was Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi doing the exact same thing, giving the exact same speeches, that NPR would have covered it as "spreading goodwill in Africa"?

NPR has covered Bush in Africa - all this week.

Fact is, if America is in a giving mood, I'd much rather see us giving AIDs vaccinations and educational resources to poor African nations, than give away our American jobs to China and India.

[lendaddy]

George Bush hates black people......errr

[sammyg2]

Public schools get plenty of money. They just spend it on the wrong crap.
Giving them more money is like giving a crackhead more crack. Aint gonna help, it will just make it easier for them to screw up more. They are about as efficient as the postal service.

You keep talking about textbooks, how much money goes to administration, pensions, raises, benefits, etc? how much does the superintendent of shcools there make? I'd bet it's $250,000 a year or more. That's alot of books.
Take a look at how much is spent on teacher's pensions, there's a scary number.
The overhead is where the leak is and that is why there isn't enough left for books after the greedy vultures grab more than their share.


School vouchers would solve this problem. Give people an alternative to the public school system and the schools would have to clean up their act just to survive.

[kstar]

If we took the money from that missile we used to shoot down the satellite and the money we give to Africa, along with all of the nets, we could have provided a book on how to fish along with a fishing net, packaged together, to every hungry person on earth and they could all feed themselves.

That's one long sentence.

Best,

Kurt