COMMENT
Comment Attack of the Baby Kissers The Republican budget-cutters and their allies in Congress are having a little public-relations problem. Slashing the federal school-lunch program isn't proving...
...The balanced-budget amendment has been a misnomer from the start...
...These are poisonous tactics, but they may succeed: Jesse Helms owes his political career to his overt use of the race card on the affirmative-action issue...
...Affirmative action is the Willie Horton of 1996...
...The group voted in February to require that prospective obstetricians learn to perform abortions...
...No matter...
...The amendment it hoped to pass and send along to the states for ratification would have required a three-fifths vote by the Congress to allow deficit spending in any given year...
...And they voted to slash $37 million in services for elderly residents...
...Without an institutional effort to correct for racism, sexism, and the power of the old-boys' network, minorities and women will still be shut out...
...we dodged a bomb...
...The reason is simple: to balance the budget by the year 2002, Congress would have to slash $1.3 trillion in spending...
...A few Democratic Senators, however, were uniquely cowardly—especially Joe Biden of Delaware and Tom Harkin of Iowa, who came out late in favor of the amendment...
...Yet Congress came within an inch of taking this tool away...
...Evidently so...
...Maybe if they manage to read a couple of books a day, they can afford lunch...
...government will simply not let him do it...
...White men these days like to feel put upon and beleaguered, but the fact remains that they are the single most advantaged group in this society...
...Apparently, in this nation ravaged by AIDS, by unwanted pregnancies, and by sexual abuse, we're still not ready to confront the facts of life...
...And black children live in poverty at three times the rate of whites...
...Under the Personal Responsibility Act, school lunches, the Women Infants and Children nutrition program, food stamps, and other welfare programs would be slashed by 10 percent and then turned from entitlements into block grants...
...Carter, who craves a Nobel Prize for helping to restore Aristide to power, is now advising Aristide's opponents...
...The INS is hardly going out of its way to find Constant, either...
...For Carter's initial effort was not designed to return Aristide to his presidency or democracy to Haiti...
...Fact is, the Haitians weren't happy to see him...
...When I see you in class, it bugs the hell out of me because you're taking the seat of someone qualified.' Still Legal It bodes ill that Henry Foster Jr., the man President Clinton has chosen as his nominee for surgeon general, could be sunk because of the stir over the number of abortions he performed...
...Dodging a Bomb We all lucked out when the Senate just barely voted down the balanced-budget amendment...
...Quite the contrary: he met with the leaders of the anti-Aristide forces in hopes of uniting them for the elections scheduled for early June...
...That the Haitian military that so oppressed its people be left intact...
...But does it create disabilities, too...
...These economic disadvantages, when coupled with residual prejudice, make it all but impossible for blacks and other members of minorities to have a fair shake...
...The big losers in this numbers game are poor people, many of them children, who lack money and political clout, and who depend on programs the Republicans are slashing...
...The real income of African-American families in 1993 has not changed since 1969, while for whites it has gone up 9 percent...
...This spending creates jobs, sustains businesses, and boosts income...
...They might want to try looking in Langley, Virginia...
...And Gingrich's lesson adds insult to injury for poor kids who may no longer receive free or reduced school meals thanks to the Republicans...
...Now the INS and the State Department want us to believe that this was just an innocent bureaucratic blunder, but they take us for fools...
...Affirmative Action Race is still the great divide in this country, even now, 130 years after the Civil War, and forty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and thirty years after the major civil-rights laws were passed...
...Whenever politicians go on a baby-kissing binge, watch out...
...Our government refuses to deal honestly with public-health issues...
...The French philosopher Voltaire told would-be do-gooders 200 years ago to cultivate their own gardens...
...Carter should take his sanctimonious act back The United States is 'always more interested in protecting the army than seeing human-rights violators Dunished.' Comment to Plains, Georgia...
...The House Speaker showed up at an urban grade-school recently to hand out books and rub elbows with teachers and students...
...I can't imagine leaders of this country so caUous, so short-sighted," Cisneros said...
...It is a simple psychological fact that white men in positions of power feel much more comfortable hiring other white men than hiring people they don't have a high "comfort level" with...
...The idea that the American workplace would be a level playing field were it not for affirmative action is a joke...
...It's affirmative-action month...
...You got it, he was in Washington...
...Now that Aristide is trying to loosen the ropes, Carter comes back down to tighten them...
...official told The Washington Post...
...In December, Aristide's government summoned Constant to appear before a tribunal to answer a complaint about human-rights abuses he committed...
...He told reporters he wants to help adjust the attitudes of poor kids by getting them to learn for the purpose of making money: "It means that in public housing, you suddenly legitimize every second- and third-grader carrying books...
...The balanced-budget amendment would be a disaster for this country—and not just because the balancing act would be performed on the backs of the poor...
...Slashing the federal school-lunch program isn't proving as popular with Americans as all that tough rhetoric about cutting taxes...
...They are busy recalculating the cash value of every social good and liquidating government programs right and left...
...Newt Gingrich to the rescue...
...Affirmitive action is one of the most significant antidiscrimination efforts since Reconstruction...
...Some people would just have to go hungry...
...While the Republicans advertise the block-grant system as enhancing "local control," the reality is that funding for all programs would shrink substantially...
...If the controversy swirling around the Foster nomination is a bad sign, the good news is that the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has decided to take a principled and professional stand on abortion...
...The rhetoric doesn't make sense...
...Newspaper photos show Gingrich leering at a group of African-American children at Moten Elementary School in Washington, D.C...
...They would hurt the poorest of Americans who are already suffering in unimaginable conditions and put them into worse conditions so they can generate capital-gains tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans...
...The cuts to HUD would deprive 62,000 poor households of rental assistance this year, 27,000 mostly elderly or disabled owners of subsidized housing would lose their properties, and another 14,000 tenants would risk being evicted to make way for private developers, according to HUD secretary Henry Cisneros...
...He's carrying out U.S...
...Elevating heartlessness to a new art form, House Republicans in committee have voted to approve cutting off cash assistance to tens of thousands of poor children with physical or mental disabilities...
...As a result of intense U.S...
...There are always business cycles in a capitalist economy, and deficit spending is one of the only tools to mitigate the danger of the downward cycle...
...Jimmy Carter has made no effort to distance himself from the old rightwing forces in Haiti when he visited in February...
...Under the new system, states with the highest number of children who qualify for free meals would be forced to use up their money more quickly, and would not be able to serve as many meals, while those with a smaller number of impoverished children would gain...
...You change the culture," Gingrich said...
...Baseball players go on strike to get more money, and rock stars sing to make money," The New York Times reported Gingrich as saying, "and we want you to work at learning how to read so well that some day you can earn a very good living...
...That would be an almost impossible hurdle to clear...
...What are those desires...
...An excellent surgeon general was fired for speaking frankly about masturbation, and her potential successor may be sent packing because he performed a procedure that was an important part of his job...
...Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Veterans' Affairs have so far been the targets for $14.9 billion out of the $17 billion in mid-year spending cuts proposed by House subcommittees...
...It would bring about a deep recession, and it would make it almost impossible to get out of a recession once the economy tumbled into one...
...How do we find out if a five-year-old or a seven-year-old is an illegal alien...
...The president of Haiti is powerless to form his own military...
...The urge to pose with children is a good indication that our political leaders have reached some nadir of cynicism and hypocrisy...
...Meanwhile, the $260 billion military budget stands untouched...
...It was a media stunt reminiscent of George Bush's grandstanding with toddlers at a Head Start center, even as he refused to fully fund the Head Start program...
...We didn't dodge a bullet...
...Carter was quite blunt about his reaction to this exercise in independence...
...The total money available for school lunches will shrink under the Republican plan by $1.3 billion, according to the Office of Management and Budget...
...Prejudice has not disappeared, and it's even debatable whether it's diminished...
...They voted to wipe out $186 million in housing grants to persons suffering from AIDS...
...Yet the Republicans are not so enamored of local control that they can resist telling cities, counties, and states exactly whom they can and cannot serve...
...Carter should cultivate his peanut farm...
...The Haitian government proposal to include hundreds of unvetted people in the Interim Public Security Force was unacceptable," a U.S...
...The block grant also doesn't allow for a predicted 4 percent to 6 percent growth in the number of school-age children over the next five years, according to the Children's Defense Fund...
...But Bill Clinton is not vigorously defending affirmative action...
...The silly and potentially ruinous amendment is dead, at least for now—one of the few reasons to rejoice in this political season...
...Obviously, the firing of the generals and colonels is well recognized as not being compatible with American desires...
...Certainly, it's not as public as before, but it lurks just below the surface, and the Republicans have known for years how to exploit it— Willie Horton being only the most obvious case...
...Nor will the U.S...
...it's true name is the guaranteed-recession amendment...
...In their haste to hack away at the poor, Republicans are committing a double assault: They are hacking away at people with disabilities, as well...
...said Woodrow Wiedenhoeft, a school administrator in La Crosse, Wisconsin, upon hearing about the illegal-immigrant provision of the plan...
...That's why affirmative action is still needed...
...But the Republicans are stealing thousands of wheelchairs, and they're getting away with it...
...And don't think he's acting alone...
...Strapped for cash, states and localities will be called upon to do more with less...
...Take the case of Emmanuel Constant, who set up the notorious paramilitary squad FRAPH while he was on the CIA payroll...
...In a recession, if more people needed assistance, the money would no longer be increased to match the demand...
...Hats off to The Nation, for breaking and pursuing this story...
...They haven't issued an APB, and they say they have no way of finding him, anyway...
...Carter Go Home Jimmy Carter's act is getting old...
...Remember, when they go about scapegoating welfare recipients, they use the spurious argument that welfare creates poverty...
...That's lovely, isn't it...
...It was designed to subvert democracy in Haiti by returning Aristide to power with his hands tied behind his back...
...The most common noise heard in Washington these past two years has been the splash of another principle being thrown overboard by the Clinton Administration, and so, kerplunk, goes affirmative action...
...How do you tell him he won't eat today...
...companies stop ripping them off at $2 a day...
...With that, Gingrich kicked off his program to give kids at the school $2 for every book they read...
...Constant failed to show, so an arrest warrant was issued...
...policy, which is the same as it's always been: to prevent the Haitian people from running their own affairs, lest they demand that U.S...
...Schools can't serve lunch to illegal immigrants under the Republican plan, and states are forbidden from giving welfare assistance to legal immigrants, and to children born out of wedlock to teenaged mothers...
...There he goes traipsing down to Haiti, as if he were the Pope visiting his minions...
...That's a "personal responsibility" the Republicans in Congress won't have to face...
...One of the worst casualties is the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is slated to lose $7.2 billion from its 1995 budget...
...Whites in general are getting ahead, blacks are just running in place...
...government let him prosecute the human-rights abusers who were responsible for the torture and deaths of thousands of Haitians during the time of the generals...
...Guess where he was...
...States would receive a fixed amount of money for these programs...
...Small wonder that a gynecologist has never held the office of surgeon general...
...Besides demonstrating his warm and fuzzy side, Newt gave poor kids at Moten Elementary a lesson in bottom-line Republican values...
...But it's really not a paradox at all...
...We asked them if any of the parties would come together in a coalition," Carter admitted...
...In the case of the school-lunch program, which serves about twenty-five million kids, states with large numbers of poor children would be penalized...
...Women's reproductive health—and perhaps any topic related to sexuality— is simply too controversial...
...Rejoice, you crybaby niggers...
...It was therefore an enormous relief that a handful of Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator withstood the heat and voted the amendment down...
...Under the current system, the federal government reimburses states for the number of all free, reduced, and paid meals they serve...
...When Aristide had the effrontery to hire several hundred men into the Haitian security forces without clearing their names with Washington first, the Clinton Administration was outraged...
...How, exactly, can the Republicans rationalize this one...
...But Constant was nowhere to be found...
...The Republicans and their lobbyists are changing our culture all right...
...Constant's the guy with his feet up on the table...
...The decision may help reverse the trend that is making abortion services more and more difficult to find, as fewer doctors offer them, and those who do are targets for "pro-life" terrorists...
...Take it away, and millions more people will be unemployed, individuals will have less disposable income, and businesses will go belly up by the thousands...
...It's one thing to talk about putting government on a diet, but it's something else to tell poor children they can't have lunch...
...And does cutting off benefits somehow miraculously cure these disabilities...
...the U.S...
...They say they have to cut the deficit because they don't want to mortgage our children's future, but they want to eliminate help for children today.' Learning to work for bribes might be useful these days on Capitol Hill, but it's a cheap and demeaning approach to education...
...They detected—quite rightly—that Carter was there not to ensure democracy but to shore up the rightwing forces aligned against President Aristide...
...If someone stole a wheelchair from a disabled person, we'd be disgusted...
...Seems the INS let him in, even though his visa had been withdrawn...
...Conservatives in California are organizing a ballot initiative to repeal all affirmative-action laws in that state, and the Republican Presidential candidates are playing up claims of so-called reverse discrimination...
...We could use an equal measure of sanity in the political realm...
...pressure, Aristide was forced to fire these new officers...
...While they were at it, the Republicans voted to eliminate $90 million in HUD funds designed to clean up lead paint in subsidized housing—a huge health hazard that can cause brain damage in kids...
...In mid-February, Aristide dismissed Haiti's top generals and colonels...
...Even if the cuts were made more humanely and the Pentagon took its fair share of the lashes, the balanced-budget idea would still be crazy...
...Carter scolded Aristide for having the audacity to try to control his own armed forces...
Vol. 59 • April 1995 • No. 4
