A Philosophy Of Governance-- Why We Help Our Neighbors… Or Not

Generally speaking, states that elect Democrats to public office spend far more money on public education than states that elect Republicans. The half dozen states that invest the least per student are Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arizona, Mississippi, and Tennessee, essentially one-party states with solid GOP control who take all their orders directly from ALEC. This morning Reid Wilson looked at education spending around the country for Washington Post readers. "There is disagreement," he began, "within education circles over whether spending more money per pupil leads to better results. But there is no disagreement that the amount of money states spend on education has erupted in recent years… Today, the average student costs taxpayers in New York $18,167 a year, while Utah, Idaho and Oklahoma spend less than $8,000 a year on their students." There's "a growing gap between the amount liberal states and conservative states spend on education. Most liberal-leaning states have focused spending on low-income students, the report found, accounting for much of the cost increases."

Among the 10 states that spend the least amount per pupil, students in only one-- Utah-- perform higher than the national average in reading. Five have students who perform significantly worse than the national average in reading in both 4th and 8th grades, and students in three states perform below the national average in math.

Our go-to education policy expert is Compton School Board President Micah Ali, who is worried about the effective day-to-day allocation of resources of a school system struggling with integrating long, medium and short-term goals for lifting a largely economically-stresed population out of danger.

"It's a fact," he told us this evening, "that the United States spends more money on public education than other developed nations. Funding public education is a conundrum for most, as it involves an amalgamation of federal, state and local funds. In a country that believes we are all 'equal under law,' Compton USD students arrive at their very first day of school already behind their peers from Santa Monica or Beverly Hills. Federal funding should help us close that gap. Investing in early childhood education, school-based health centers, and expanded school lunch programs are proven winners that address the societal needs of children in this corner of America's community." He's not far from what billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates have been advocating and effectuating in other parts of the world.

For the most part, the Gates have been on the wrong side of the education debate here in America, funding the worst and most avaricious opponents of public education. They've been a lot better about promoting equality of opportunity outside the U.S., in the Third World. Bill Gates' latest newsletter tackles 3 right-wing myths that poor counties are doomed to stay poor. "The global picture of poverty," he wrote, "has been completely redrawn in my lifetime. Per-person incomes in Turkey and Chile are where the United States level was in 1960. Malaysia is nearly there, as is Gabon. And that no-man’s-land between rich and poor countries has been filled in by China, India, Brazil, and others. Since 1960, China’s real income per person has gone up eightfold. India’s has quadrupled, Brazil’s has almost quintupled, and the small country of Botswana, with shrewd management of its mineral resources, has seen a thirty-fold increase. There is a class of nations in the middle that barely existed 50 years ago, and it includes more than half of the world’s population."

[D]on’t let anyone tell you that Africa is worse off today than it was 50 years ago. Income per person has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa over that time, and quite a bit in a few countries. After plummeting during the debt crisis of the 1980s, it has climbed by two thirds since 1998, to nearly $2,200 from just over $1,300. Today, more and more countries are turning toward strong sustained development, and more will follow. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing economies of the past half-decade are in Africa.

Africa has also made big strides in health and education. Since 1960, the life span for women in sub-Saharan Africa has gone up from 41 to 57 years, despite the HIV epidemic. Without HIV it would be 61 years. The percentage of children in school has gone from the low 40s to over 75 percent since 1970. Fewer people are hungry, and more people have good nutrition. If getting enough to eat, going to school, and living longer are measures of a good life, then life is definitely getting better there. These improvements are not the end of the story; they’re the foundation for more progress.

…I am optimistic enough about this that I am willing to make a prediction. By 2035, there will be almost no poor countries left in the world. (I mean by our current definition of poor.) Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer. Countries will learn from their most productive neighbors and benefit from innovations like new vaccines, better seeds, and the digital revolution. Their labor forces, buoyed by expanded education, will attract new investments.

A few countries will be held back by war, politics (North Korea, barring a big change there), or geography (landlocked nations in central Africa). And inequality will still be a problem: There will be poor people in every region.

But most of them will live in countries that are self-sufficient. Every nation in South America, Asia, and Central America (with the possible exception of Haiti), and most in coastal Africa, will have joined the ranks of today’s middle-income nations. More than 70 percent of countries will have a higher per-person income than China does today. Nearly 90 percent will have a higher income than India does today.

It will be a remarkable achievement. When I was born, most countries in the world were poor. In the next two decades, desperately poor countries will become the exception rather than the rule. Billions of people will have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The idea that this will happen within my lifetime is simply amazing to me.

Some people will say that helping almost every country develop to middle-income status will not solve all the world’s problems and will even exacerbate some. It is true that we’ll need to develop cheaper, cleaner sources of energy to keep all this growth from making the climate and environment worse. We will also need to solve the problems that come with affluence, like higher rates of diabetes. However, as more people are educated, they will contribute to solving these problems. Bringing the development agenda near to completion will do more to improve human lives than anything else we do.



I worry about the myth that aid doesn’t work. It gives political leaders an excuse to try to cut back on it-- and that would mean fewer lives are saved, and more time before countries can become self-sufficient.

So I want to take on a few of the criticisms you may have read.3 I should acknowledge up front that no program is perfect, and there are ways that aid can be made more effective. And aid is only one of the tools for fighting poverty and disease: Wealthy countries also need to make policy changes, like opening their markets and cutting agricultural subsidies, and poor countries need to spend more on health and development for their own people.

But broadly speaking, aid is a fantastic investment, and we should be doing more. It saves and improves lives very effectively, laying the groundwork for the kind of long-term economic progress I described in myth #1 (which in turn helps countries stop depending on aid)… The U.S. government spends more than twice as much on farm subsidies as on health aid. It spends more than 60 times as much on the military. The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

One of the most common stories about aid is that some of it gets wasted on corruption. It is true that when health aid is stolen or wasted, it costs lives. We need to root out fraud and squeeze more out of every dollar.

But we should also remember the relative size of the problem. Small-scale corruption, such as a government official who puts in for phony travel expenses, is an inefficiency that amounts to a tax on aid. While we should try to reduce it, there’s no way to eliminate it, any more than we could eliminate waste from every government program-- or from every business, for that matter. Suppose small-scale corruption amounts to a 2 percent tax on the cost of saving a life. We should try to reduce that. But if we can’t, should we stop trying to save lives?

…Second, the “aid breeds dependency” argument misses all the countries that have graduated from being aid recipients, and focuses only on the most difficult remaining cases. Here is a quick list of former major recipients that have grown so much that they receive hardly any aid today: Botswana, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Mauritius, Singapore, and Malaysia. South Korea received enormous amounts of aid after the Korean War, and is now a net donor. China is also a net aid donor and funds a lot of science to help developing countries. India receives 0.09 percent of its GDP in aid, down from 1 percent in 1991.

Even in sub-Saharan Africa, the share of the economy that comes from aid is a third lower now than it was 20 years ago, while the total amount of aid to the region has doubled. There are a few countries like Ethiopia that depend on aid, and while we all-- especially Ethiopians themselves-- want to get to a point where that is no longer true, I don’t know of any compelling argument that says Ethiopia would be better off with a lot less aid today.

Critics are right to say there is no definitive proof that aid drives economic growth. But you could say the same thing about almost any other factor in the economy. It is very hard to know exactly which investments will spark economic growth, especially in the near term. However, we do know that aid drives improvements in health, agriculture, and infrastructure that correlate strongly with growth in the long run. Health aid saves lives and allows children to develop mentally and physically, which will pay off within a generation. Studies show that these children become healthier adults who work more productively. If you’re arguing against that kind of aid, you’ve got to argue that saving lives doesn’t matter to economic growth, or that saving lives simply doesn’t matter.

…Going back at least to Thomas Malthus, who published his An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, people have worried about doomsday scenarios in which food supply can’t keep up with population growth. As recently as the Cold War, American foreign policy experts theorized that famine would make poor countries susceptible to Communism. Controlling the population of the poor countries labeled the Third World became an official policy in the so-called First World. In the worst cases, this meant trying to force women not to get pregnant. Gradually, the global family planning community moved away from this single-minded focus on limiting reproduction and started thinking about how to help women seize control of their own lives. This was a welcome change. We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.

The fact is that a laissez faire approach to development-- letting children die now so they don’t starve later-- doesn’t actually work, thank goodness. It may be counterintuitive, but the countries with the most deaths have among the fastest-growing populations in the world. This is because the women in these countries tend to have the most births, too. Scholars debate the precise reasons why, but the correlation between child death and birth rates is strong.

…When children survive in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families. Consider Thailand. Around 1960, child mortality started going down. Then, around 1970, after the government invested in a strong family planning program, birth rates started to drop. In the course of just two decades, Thai women went from having an average of six children to an average of two. Today, child mortality in Thailand is almost as low as it is in the United States, and Thai women have an average of 1.6 children.

…Mothers in Mozambique are 80 times more likely to lose a child than mothers in Portugal, the country that ruled Mozambique until 1975. This appalling aggregate statistic represents a grim reality that individual Mozambican women must confront; they can never be confident their children will live. I’ve spoken to mothers who gave birth to many babies and lost most of them. They tell me all their mourning was worth it, so they could end up with the number of surviving children they wanted.

When children are well-nourished, fully vaccinated, and treated for common illnesses like diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia, the future gets a lot more predictable. Parents start making decisions based on the reasonable expectation that their children will live.

Death rates are just one of many factors that affect birth rates. For example, women’s empowerment, as measured by age of marriage and level of education, matters a great deal. Girls who marry in their mid-teens tend to start getting pregnant earlier and therefore have more children. They usually drop out of school, which limits their opportunities to learn about their bodies, sex, and reproduction-- and to gain other kinds of knowledge that helps them improve their lives. And it’s typically very difficult for adolescent brides to speak up in their marriages about their desire to plan their families. I just traveled to Ethiopia, where I had a long conversation with young brides, most of whom were married at 11 years old. They all talked about wanting a different future for their children, but the information they had about contraceptives was spotty at best, and they knew that when they were forced to leave school their best pathway to opportunity was closed off.

In fact, when girls delay marriage and stay in school, everything changes. In a recent study of 30 developing countries, women with no schooling had three more children on average than women who attended high school. When women are empowered with knowledge and skills, they start to change their minds about the kind of future they want.

…[T]he virtuous cycle that starts with basic health and empowerment ends not only with a better life for women and their families, but with significant economic growth at the country level. In fact, one reason for the so-called Asian economic miracle of the 1980s was the fact that fertility across Southeast Asia declined so rapidly. Experts call this phenomenon the demographic dividend.8 As fewer children die and fewer are born, the age structure of the population gradually changes.  Eventually, there’s a bulge of people in their prime working years. This means more of the population is in the workforce and generating economic growth. At the same time, since the number of young children is relatively smaller, the government and parents are able to invest more in each child’s education and health care, which can lead to more economic growth over the long term.

These changes don’t just happen by themselves. Governments need to set policies to help countries take advantage of the opportunity created by demographic transitions. With help from donors, they need to invest in health and education, prioritize family planning, and create jobs. But if leaders set the right strategic priorities, the prospect of a virtuous cycle of development that transforms whole societies is very real.

The virtuous cycle is not just development jargon. It’s a phenomenon that millions of poor people understand very well, and it guides their decisions from day to day. I have the privilege of meeting women and men in poor countries who commit the small acts of love and optimism-- like going without so they can pay their children’s school fees-- that propel this cycle forward. The future they hope for and work hard for is the future I believe in.

Good Luck With Pakistan

No one noticed-- right next to a military base, 35 miles north of the capital?

Other than Fox News and the Bush and Cheney families, no one has benefited as lucratively from 9/11 as Pakistan and it's parasitic ruling class. God only knows how much taxpayer money has been flushed down the Pakistani rat-hole and wasted on that country's corrupt-beyond-reason ruling elites since 9/11. We do have some idea that between 2002-'10, Pakistan received at least $18 billion in military and economic aid from the U.S. In February 2010, Obama requested an additional $3 billion in aid, for a total of at least $21 billion.

It's fairly well-known that right-wing American plutocrats directly funded the rise of European fascism in the 1920s and '30s. Henry Ford may have been the most conspicuous, but countless scumbags from among America's ruling elites-- Averell Harriman, Irénée du Pont and Prescott Walker Bush most notoriously-- were helping to fund Hitler and Mussolini before either had achieved any power. Less well-known that their obsession with "anti-communism" also inspired the Harding, Coolidge, Hoover Administrations' brain trusts to help finance Mussolini's takeover of Italy. That worked out badly for America-- and everyone else concerned. So it was with great trepidation that I watched first crazy right-wing billionaires and then U.S. governments funding al-Qaeda and Osama bin-Laden as, like Mussolini and Hitler, "bulwarks against godless communism." I would be a lot more careful about how we use "foreign aid" if it was up to me.

Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom

I've driven all through that area of Pakistan and I never visited Abbottabad. It's kind of like a garrison town where retired military officers go to live out their lives. Pakistan's West Point is there. Or like Simi Valley in California. What was bin-Laden doing in that town, living in the biggest, fanciest villa in the town? Glad you asked.

The Abbottabad location is important for two reasons. Bin Laden could not have lived in a compound in Abbottabad without official Pakistani government sustenance. Abbottabad is an upscale area and a garrison town, but not so large as to be impersonal. Bin Laden was living in protected luxury. Many people had to know that and probably will come forward in a little time.

On 7 December 2001, Bin Laden escaped from the tunnels in Tora Bora, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, with the help of a local warlord named Hazrat Ali, who betrayed US forces who had hired him to help capture bin Laden and is now a member of the Afghan Parliament for Nangarhar. Bin Laden and his gang crossed the Tora Bora mountains to Parachinar, Pakistan, where a Pakistan Army brigade was deployed to ensure his capture if he crossed the border. They failed, of course. He headed east to Kohat, another Army garrison town and disappeared.

The distance from Kohat to Abbottabad is several hundred kilometers by road, but the two towns are part of the Pakistan Army network of garrison towns in the northwest. Bin laden reportedly moved around in the northwest, but one inference is that bin Laden has been in the safe keeping of the Pakistan Army for a decade. The news reports suggest the compound was specially built for him and his enterprise, which had to have been subsidized by Pakistan and, through Pakistan, by US aid to Pakistan.

Secondly, his compound could not have been attacked from Afghanistan, him killed and his body taken by US Navy SEALs flying US helicopters so close to Islamabad without official Pakistani government cooperation. The US insisted Pakistan played no part in the operation and that the team flew from Afghanistan. That clearly is a cover story for Pakistani public consumption to try to avert overwhelming anti-Pakistan and anti-US demonstrations, which are probably inevitable in any event.

Abottabad is not some remote village on the border. It is a large town in eastern Pakistan, on the main road to Kargil and the north as well as to Muzaffarabad and Pakistani Kashmir to the east. It is northeast - towards India - of Islamabad and within the Pakistan air defense intercept zone for the national capital which is protected by the Pakistani integrated air defense system. Nothing can fly in that region without detection and without permission from the Pakistan Air Force, even from Afghanistan.

The conclusion is inescapable that the Pakistan Army protected bin Laden and recently decided to give him up, rather than sacrifice the Army's relationship with the US. The terms are not known as yet, but there certainly is a trade in which bin Laden was sacrificed. The trade might involve an end to US drone attacks across the border, which humiliate the Pakistan Army, or a new coordination regime for drone attacks into Pakistan.

Bin Laden was a hero in Pakistan. He stood up to the United States and lived …for ten years. Readers should expect an enormous backlash against Americans.

If the Pakistan civilian government survives, it will be because of the cover story that the US acted unilaterally. If the cover story works, on the surface, the US and Pakistani relationship will appear in the international media to take a nose dive. That will not be the truth, though few Pakistanis will know the truth. If the cover story is not believed, the government will not likely survive. There will be investigations by the National Assembly.

One person who foreign aid disbursements have been, at least partially up to is Michigan's senior senator, Carl Levin, who presides over the Senate Armed Service Committee and is in on every decision in this area. Yesterday, like many of us, he came to the conclusion that bin-Laden was probably living under the protect of Pakistan's multi-faced version of the CIA (the ISI). Diplomatically, he says questions have been raised by how and where bin-Laden was caught.

"I think that the Pakistani army and intelligence have a lot of questions to answer, given the location, the length of time, and the apparent fact that this facility was built for bin Laden, and its closeness to the central location to the Pakistani army," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who chairs the Senate Armed Services committee, in a Capitol briefing with reporters Monday morning.

"I think the Pakistani president's statement today was a very reassuring statement-- when he very specifically said that he thinks that it's a great victory and a success, and to congratulate us on the success of the operation," Levin added. "So reassured by his statement, not necessarily suspicious that he knew, or the civilian leadership knew. But I must tell you I hope that he will follow through-- that the President of Pakistan Hardari will follow through and ask some very tough questions with his own military and his own intelligence. They've got a lot of explaining to do."

And now even the White House is acknowledging "probable" ISI complicity. Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser said it's "inconceivable" that Pakistan wasn't helping bin-Laden.

Despite a sense of relief inside the Obama administration and around the country, Brennan said many questions still remain about the incident, specifically about bin Laden's connections in Pakistan.

Brennan confirmed that the Pakistanis were kept out of the loop on the attack until U.S. forces were out of their airspace. Pakistani forces did not engage with Americans involved in the mission, he said.

UPDATE: Who Read Turkmeniscam?

With their treachery exposed, what will Pakistani leaders do to keep our taxes flowing into their pockets? Lobbyists, of course! It sounds an awful lot like Turkmeniscam, Ken Silverman's hilariously chilling book about shady DC lobbyists working for shady foreign powers.

Pakistan will likely call upon Washington lobbyists to help repair its fraught U.S. relations after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in the country Sunday.

Locke Lord Strategies has been lobbying for the Pakistani embassy since May 2008, earning more than $1.9 million in fees, according to Justice Department records. 

The firm’s lobbying team for Pakistan has been led by Mark Siegel, a veteran Democratic Party operative, Carter White House aide and close friend to Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister who was assassinated in 2007 as she campaigned for her old seat.

Siegel told The Hill that he is planning to talk to lawmakers to combat what he terms “speculation” from some in the media that Pakistan’s government must have known of bin Laden’s hiding place.

“It’s these consultants that all these networks have hired to talk about terrorism who are making all these speculations,” said Siegel, a partner at Locke Lord. “We have some education to do on the Hill. We don’t want this speculation to end up being considered as fact.”

And, no doubt, some palms to grease. In other words, the U.S. gives Pakistan billions to help catch bin-Laden and Pakistan hires the crooks at Locke Lord to use some of it to placate corrupt congressmen who are making a fuss that Pakistan was hiding bin-Laden and keeping him safe for years-- part of what kept the cash flowing in their direction.