07/17/14 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

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Foreign Aid Clobbers the Third World by our friend James Bovard in The Future of Freedom, the journal of the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe, but now unembargoed for the rest of the website.
You can find it there today at fff.org.
Foreign Aid Clobbers the Third World by Jim Bovard.
Welcome back, Jim.
How are you doing?
Doing pretty good.
How about you, Scott?
I appreciate you joining us today.
And so now let me see if I can do this for, it's been a minute since I looked at the list.
The Fair Trade Fraud and the Foreign Fiasco, Feeling Your Pain, Freedom in Chains, oh man, I'm forgetting a few of them here, Terrorism and Tyranny, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, and of course, The Memoir, Public Policy Hooligan.
I know I'm missing a few from the 90s there.
Anyway, it's a ton of great books.
It's close enough for government work.
Yeah, yeah, well, you know, it's just typing.
But yeah, so my favorite one of those, and it's a little out of date now, but you know what?
Not really.
It's still all right, is Attention Deficit Democracy, and Terrorism and Tyranny is also really, really good.
Oh, The Bush Betrayal, too, is really, yeah, I really like all your books, Jim.
They're really good.
But I really want people to read, if I could get them to read one, it would be, well, wait, which one are you making the most money off of these days?
The Hooligan book, but Scott, I'm aware that the Attention Deficit Democracy is your favorite, and that's okay.
It's a great book, man.
It really is.
I wish people would read it.
And I don't need to hear any crap from minarchists about who's supposed to be a republic and whatever, as though Jim Bovard ain't know all that.
Just read the thing, and then you'll understand.
Yes, that's, thank you for saving me having to explain that.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, let's talk about this great article.
This is a really great article.
I can tell you've really done a lot of work on this.
And what it's about is it's about American food aid.
And normally, when you think of foreign aid, you think of America arming and training up quote, unquote, national guard forces in various kingdoms and tyrannies around the world so that those governments might kill their own people more efficiently.
But that's if you're a libertarian.
If you're a regular person, you might think foreign aid means, you know, giving them food like on the Sally Struthers commercial, poor, starving Africans need a bite to eat.
Gotta get them through the bad weather or whatever it is.
Let's go help them.
And yet, boy, you sure paint a different picture of American food aid to the third world here.
Well, these are programs that were started in 1950s to help dump abroad.
The embarrassing surpluses, crop surpluses have been generated by U.S. farm programs.
The Congress insists on paying farmers far more than their crops were worth.
Farmers produce huge surpluses and the Congress had to get rid of the evidence of the failure of federal farm policy.
And by dumping them in foreign countries, it was possible to pretend that the U.S. was being benevolent.
Though from the late 1950s onwards, it was obvious that the U.S. was having a profoundly disruptive effect on third world farmers.
So in other words, this is, again, another case of the wild excesses of free market capitalism ruining everything.
That's as good a thumbnail as I came up with.
Yeah.
There you go.
Well, OK.
So now go back to the 50s.
Was it just the farm lobby or whatever got this thing passed in the first place?
The farm lobby was a huge power behind this.
There were some foreign aid pretenses for it.
I mean, politicians like to have, you know, freebies to pass around.
And so this is something which would serve the U.S. government's interest in numerous ways.
And it was also a benefit to foreign governments, which got the free food, even though it often harmed their own farmers.
But lots of those farmers didn't vote.
So it didn't cost the third world regimes very much political support, even when it did a lot of damage.
Mm hmm.
Well, now, here's the thing.
I mean, you talk about obviously what's the worst part of this is what you mentioned there, the effect of destroying all the local markets by disrupting all the price structure when all the food gets dumped and all that.
And I guess, you know, I can expect that bureaucrats don't really even think about things like that, much less really understand them.
And yet I have met and talked to real no fooling NGO hippie, dippy, you know, very left liberal, maybe more like socialist types who they get it.
They understand good and well.
And in fact, I've talked to NGO types who have even said, well, you know, this is a very careful balance that we have to strike because, you know, at some point someone finally hit us all in the head with a hammer and made us understand there really is such a thing.
And supply and demand and we could screw up prices and how that could hurt farm.
Somebody made them understand that there's, you know, two or three steps to some things in life or whatever.
And so they they at least give it lip service.
They they get it.
Some of it.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
There are there even former Peace Corps volunteers who recognize how U.S. the so-called food aid can wreck the farmers.
I think a number of Peace Corps volunteers from Haiti were speaking out even 30 years ago talking about how the Haitian farmers were being bushwhacked by this.
And this is this is part of the reason why Haiti has become more and more dependent on food handouts because of the U.S. aid in a long term basis, undermining the farmers there.
Right.
Well, and so what about the government, if hippies and peaceniks and goofballs can figure this out?
What about the Congress?
They just don't care to know or they don't know and don't care.
It's interesting.
There was a there are some congressmen who have protested this and said, well, you know, it's not so good that we're harming the third world countries.
We're trying to help.
There was an amendment passed in 1977 by a senator from Oklahoma that compelled AID and U.S. USDA to certify that food aid would not devastate the farmers and the recipient countries.
And most of the time, most time what the U.S. government does is simply ask the ask the governments or the private NGOs who get the free food if it's going to hurt the farmers there.
And they always say, no, no problem.
OK, keep sending it.
So thus far, it's been a total facade of a protection, something which is written in the law.
But that's something that the U.S. government is really not giving a damn about obeying.
That might be changing a little bit.
There was a little bit of effort with the farm bill last year that the Obama administration made some token efforts to fix things, but it kind of lost its nerve and didn't really put any elbow grease in its reform effort.
And I think that I think that some of the Obama people felt that simply writing an op-ed or two and having the president make a speech would be sufficient to roll the farm lobby on Capitol Hill.
And and it didn't work, of course.
So, yeah.
Well, you know, like you said, they have these embarrassing surpluses that they're paying the farmers to grow all this stuff more than market demand.
What do you want to do, Jim?
Just dump all this food into the ocean?
Well, the answer is to get rid of the farm programs.
The it's interesting that the problem, the surpluses, it's not much of a problem right now, partly because so much of the corn crop is going into gas tanks with the biofuels mandate.
So that's changed the whole outlay of U.S. farm production.
That's a whole different kind of boondoggled waste, which is which is also starving a lot of people in the third world because it drives up food prices.
But it's interesting that a program that was started to get rid of surpluses has perpetuated itself long after most of the surpluses are gone.
But this is typical how farm program works.
Farm programs work because they've never shown any learning curve.
Right.
Well, they're the government.
All right.
So now and toward the end of this article here, you talk about how since 1933, the U.S. government has sought to drive up world grain prices.
And so it's not just here where they're trying to drive up the price artificially, but around the world.
How do they do that?
At the same time, obviously, we're talking about them dumping here and dumping there.
Well, the the thing that the U.S. was doing actually from 1929 onwards was trying to corner the world grain market in the first few first years of the Hoover administration to drive up prices.
It was a complete fiasco.
Prices collapsed.
And that's part of the reason we had a Great Depression in this country.
But there were a lot of other things.
I'm sorry, Jim.
I got to interrupt you now because the dang music's playing where when we get right back from this break, we're going to talk more Jim Bovard about America's so-called food aid, which is really just obviously aid to Archer Daniels, Midland and Monsanto and them because that's how America works.
It's a fascist dictatorship, you know.
Anyway, we'll be back in just a second.
Hey, all Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
CNN's interviewing an expert saying that this plane was whole.
There's no evidence it was on fire or smoking in any way before it hit the ground.
Just fell out of the sky for some other reason, apparently, other than being shot down.
Best information I know so far.
That's all I know.
I don't know.
Hey, I'm talking with Jim Bovard from the Future Freedom Foundation.
The author of, I don't know, 20 books or something, 15 of them.
Go look up his page at Amazon.com.
The latest is his memoir, Public Policy Hooligan, which is a lot of fun to read.
I hope you will.
We're talking about this article here at FFF.org, Foreign Aid Clobbers the Third World.
I'm sorry we got interrupted by the heartbreak thing.
I don't ever time my questions very well, Jim, but I was asking you, how is it that the U.S. props up global prices at the same time that they then go around on a case-by-case basis, dumping them through the floor and driving every local farmer out of business?
The thing the U.S. government has done long term is pay American farmers to leave some of the best farmland in the world idle.
This is a program, again, going back to the 1930s.
What the U.S. Agriculture Department has done is tried to be the OPEC of world grain markets, thinking that it could benefit U.S. farmers by pulling U.S. cropland out of production, even though prior to the New Deal, the U.S. was relying on exports massively in order for farm profits.
This is a bias that the U.S. agriculture policy still has to a lesser degree, but there is still a lot of land being withheld.
Farmers are being compensated.
There's all kinds of Byzantine rules, and it's especially a mockery at a time when there's a lot of people in the third world starving, partly because of the disruptions to agricultural markets in both directions that the U.S. government has done.
Yeah, I remember in Catch-22, there's a character who's talking about his father back home, who says the government better hurry up and give him his damn money to pay him to not grow alfalfa.
But anybody else gets paid by the government to do anything, well, that's creeping socialism.
But he better get paid to not grow his alfalfa, by God.
Yeah, and this is a joke that goes back more than 50 years.
The absurdity has always been obvious, except in Washington, where it helps congressmen get re-elected and helps them raise campaign contributions and win votes.
Every now and then, there's some very good coverage analysis and exposés in the news media, but for the most part, the news media is very complacent about farm subsidies.
Alright, now, so, can you please take us through some of the examples here?
Again, the article is Foreign Egg Clobbers the Third World, and you really go through and talk about some different examples, and when you talk about the Indian subcontinent here, you make it sound pretty deliberate, that Richard Nixon meant to destroy their local food markets.
Is that right?
Well, going back to the 1950s and 60s, massive U.S. wheat dumping in India had a huge adverse effect on, probably helped bankrupt thousands of Indian farmers.
The chief of staff of the Senate Agriculture Committee speculated to me 30 years ago that American food aid might have been responsible for the starvation of millions of people in India.
But back at that time, the Indian government was generating a lot of hostility from the U.S. government because it was pro-Soviet in the Cold War.
There was a secret White House tape in 1971 in which Richard Nixon declared that the Indians, that what they really need is a mass famine.
He was in a conversation with Henry Kissinger at that point, and this tape became available, I think, many years later.
And there was a General Accounting Office report a couple years later which said that the massive U.S. food aid to India had restricted agriculture growth in that country and allowed the government to postpone essential agriculture reforms, which is something which has happened throughout Africa, where the U.S. has dumped a lot of food over the decades.
There are so many African governments which ravage their agriculture sectors, and yet the U.S. keeps sending free food, which is basically a ticket for those governments to continue screwing up their own farmers.
Yeah.
And now, on the Nixon thing, I guess that's enough for an indictment but not a conviction.
Is that what you're saying here?
I don't know if it's even enough for an indictment, but it was interesting.
There's some other evidence on that.
It's sort of hard to know with Nixon because he was kind of like a redneck and he was always blathering, you know, blathering threats and, you know, kill these people, whack these people, you know.
Yeah.
But it's hard to know if there was a clear intent behind his policies.
But it may have been that Lyndon Johnson's policies may have done more damage to the Indians than Nixon's.
I'm not sure on that.
Yeah.
I'm trying to remember.
I just learned something but I didn't learn it well enough, I guess, to remember.
There was just some scandal about, was it newly released Nixon tapes that have him talking about the war for Bangladesh or something like that or Kissinger doing something to you?
I'm sorry.
I'm off topic.
It may have been.
I think last year or the year before there was a book by Gary Bass entitled The Blood Telegram Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.
That must have been what I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
But there's more to it than just this food stuff, right?
I mean, they were intervening.
Yes.
I mean, there was a lot of hostility and it had, well, it was nasty.
It was Nixon.
It was nasty.
Surprise, surprise.
Yeah.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed, I think it was, something like that.
I don't know exactly how responsible he was.
I should learn my stuff before I go bringing it up.
Anyway.
Well, but just keep in mind since he's dead, he cannot sue you for libel.
Oh, that's good.
Although, then again, he's got an estate or something, right?
I don't know.
Cannot sue you for libel.
You're safe.
Oh, wait.
So you're saying there's an actual rule of law somewhere that would protect me from the will of the men with power around me?
I don't know, man.
Only if they're dead, Scott.
Only if they're dead.
Oh, okay.
I mean, that's my understanding of libel law.
I've spent hours working through book manuscripts with lawyers, with libel lawyers in New York doing the fact checking and the verification for some of the books I did for St. Martin's.
But if I say to the judge, but your honor, the judge doesn't have to sustain my objection, right?
They can do whatever they want.
What exactly would you be objecting?
Oh, you know, like, hey, they can't sue me for libel.
He's dead.
And the rules say they can't.
And the judge could just say, I'll allow it.
I don't think so.
No.
I mean, it's okay.
Maybe I'm dead wrong on this.
And if I am one of your.
You know what the problem is?
I'm trying to be sarcastic about how there's no rule of law that binds the power of the government in any sense in this country.
They can kill all of us and our little sisters and whoever they want and do whatever they want.
And none of them ever get in trouble for anything.
So if there's no accountability, then what rules are there?
If a judge breaks the law, who's going to stop him?
Another judge?
I'm sure that the American people wouldn't put up for it.
See, that's what I'm getting at right there.
All right.
Now, I already kept you over time, but it's my fault because I'm just blabbing on about all this side issue stuff.
So please tell me more about Senegal and about sub-Saharan Africa and down in Guatemala and some more of these examples so that people can see really how this works time and again.
Would you please?
Well, you know, that's some hot coffee which we're pulling out of these stores, Scott.
Senegal, the Food for Peace program in Senegal in the mid-'80s resulted in the government shutting down the local rice markets in order to force the people to buy the American rice that the government had been given, even though the U.S. government basically gave the government the wrong kind of rice as far as what the people prefer.
But it was a good example of the perverse incentive that the local politicians have because it was more profitable for them to prohibit local farmers from selling their own harvest because they got lots of money that way.
Right.
Yeah, it's sad, too, that the NGOs who mostly are staffed by people who really just mean well kind of thing, they want to do the Peace Corps for a living, just go help people, but all their incentive is, we've got to get this food aid in and out the door.
That's their bailiwick or whatever, and so that's what they've got to do, even when they know better.
Well, it's interesting.
There have been some very good criticism of these programs by some of the NGOs.
CARE has made some very good criticisms.
I think it was Bread for the World or maybe some other group.
Hell, there's Oxfam.
Oxfam has made some very good criticisms in the past.
I'm not sure how critical that they are right now, but there's a huge split among the NGOs on this program because there are some NGOs that simply see it as a way to pad their cash flows, and others say, hey, this is screwing the people that we're dedicating our lives to help.
Right.
Well, and it's a good lesson for all of us about all kinds of government programs, really of any description, that they really just get out of control, and they don't have the kind of accountability that regular people have in government work, and that's why everything is good enough for government work, as you joked at the beginning of the show there.
And so, really, whatever it is, especially even something like this that has caring for poor, hungry children written all over it, it's actually the kind of thing that may well be worse for those hungry kids than whatever crisis they might currently be in.
And so, you know, there's a great lesson there for government intervention all around, I think, if people look for it.
Well, yeah, it's great lesson number 4019, and I'm not aware anybody's going to give it a rat's patooey about it.
But the sad thing is, is that there have been bureaucrats in AID and USDA who have recognized that this is a problem.
They have tried to fix the program at times in some places, but the incentives for the politicians and others just keep the harm continuing.
All right, with that, I've got to go.
You've got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Jim.
Hey, Scott, thanks for having me on.
All right, everybody, that is the great author, Jim Bovard.
Foreign Aid Clobbers the Third World is at FFF.org, and go read his books.
They're all for sale at Amazon.
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Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
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