Maggie's Farm

Till Bruckner worked for NGOs in Georgia and Afghanistan before managing Transparency International's Georgia’s aid monitoring programme in 2008-2009. He writes in Aid Watch: Just Asking That Aid Benefit The Poor about Secret NGO Budgets.

Are you ashamed of your organization’s budgets? Do you think your supporters would be shocked if they could see exactly how you are spending their money? Do you feel the need to keep your finances hidden from your local partners and clients? If you answered all three questions with “yes,” you might be working for an international NGO.

Bruckner also writes at NGO Watch, "How Corrupt Is The World Food Program?"

Private donors in wealthy countries simply lack the information needed to hold aid and development NGOs to account for how their donations are used thousands of miles away. The only information available is that which is voluntarily provided by the NGOs, which are extremely reluctant to open their operations to scrutiny....

Institutional donors like USAID usually do have a presence on the ground in developing countries, but they rarely directly monitor NGO activities in the field. Instead, they usually, though not always, rely on information provided by their grantees. Interviews with dozens of donor and NGO representatives in Georgia, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan suggest that neither NGOs nor donor country offices have an incentive to document instances in which aid money is stolen, wasted, or unwisely spent. Projects are almost invariably portrayed as successful, irrespective of realities on the ground....

Aid organizations have responded to concerns about their lack of accountability through a variety of initiatives and mechanisms intended to create transparency within the aid community. Senior staff members at NGOs’ global headquarters readily sign up to noble-sounding initiatives and commit their organizations to meeting certain standards. But these measures lack teeth and often require organizations to act as a whistleblower against a partner agency. As a result, they are almost universally ignored in practice.

A respondent to Bruckner's top piece says he's afraid to alarm the natives:

Although open accounting can seem like a good practice, it is very tricky in poor countries. I have been running international projects for twenty years. The rent on my house is higher than the salary of many of my staff. My salary is nearly triple the highest local salary. Additionally, my top staff is paid well–many times more than what our beneficiaries receive. I think that telling our beneficiaries how much we earn would reinforce the gap between them and us. It would also complicate relations with our government partners (who earn less). I am always happy to share general information about costs (our program in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands is around $650,000/year), but see little upside to sharing details.

I bet he votes Democrat.

Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, author of Jews and Power, argues that the defensive self-blame and even self-abasement that Jews adopted in the millennia since the fall of the Temple is counterproductive to survival.

This argument is at the heart of today’s critiques of Obama’s feckless and failing foreign policy.

On May 20, Wisse addressed the thirteen Jewish cadets graduating West Point.the Naval Academy.  The Weekly Standard has the text.

Wisse uses the humor about schlemiels to make her point.  There are many definitions of the Yiddish term, mostly varying in emphasis, but basically a schlemiel is naïve, gullible, even a simpleton.

Wisse starts with some Old World jokes about schlemiels in combat who don’t recognize they are in a mortal situation.  Then Wisse comments:

Hilarious in Yiddish, this joke hardly works in English, which has trouble imagining someone so unworldly that he cannot grasp that a man may be shot just for stepping on the wrong side of a border. The joke may likewise fall flat because we now know what happened to the people who created those jokes. They were slaughtered in the millions. What we call the Holocaust targeted precisely the population that created schlemiel comedy. We learned from that episode that sweetness was no laughing matter and that joking—which momentarily releases tension—offered no defense against real belligerents. The schlemiel who initially made us laugh also taught us to raise our guard.When I wrote about the schlemiel in the 1960s, I had in mind the culture of Jews, but nowadays, we Americans similarly confront enemies who intend to destroy our way of life. Like the Jews of Europe, we are tempted to ignore them. We enjoy getting along with the rest of the world. We have no passion for war, favoring peace and prosperity. Like the schlemiel, some among us think that warfare is a ridiculous pursuit….

A schlemiel doesn’t know how to find the notch in a saw.  Sound like Obama? Oy vey!

But, it's even worse than that among many leading Jews, as Jennifer Rubin points out about the Rabbis selected as safe for Obama to meet with:

This is what passes for “leadership” in American Jewry. A kabuki dance is orchestrated by an Obama fan to gather other Obama fans to air the mildest criticism and to avoid challenging the factual representations of an administration that is the most hostile to the Jewish state in history. As one Israeli hand who definitely isn’t going to be invited to any meetings with this president put it: “They may be fine rabbis, but they are out of their league here.” And by not directly and strongly taking on the president, they are, in fact, enabling the president’s anti-Israel stance. It is, come to think of it, more than an embarrassment; it is an egregious misuse of their status and it is every bit as dangerous as the quietude of American Jews in the 1930s.

Same goes for the Americans of the 1930s.

The New York Times report on President Obama’s speech today to West Point’s graduating class is headlined “President Lays Out Security Strategy Based in Diplomacy.”

That “security strategy based in diplomacy” is actually based in both self-delusion and believing that other nations and foes can be similarly deluded.

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system,” the president told graduating cadets. “But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”

Mr. Obama said the United States “will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well” while also trying to “build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions.” He added: “This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times.”

On the other hand of reality, as Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez sums up the dysfunctional Obama foreign policy, that no one abroad wants much part of:

It’s easy to believe the dysfunction is real. Faced by the linked yet separate crises in the Middle East and in Northeast Asia the Obama administration is acting like it was shot through the central nervous system, acting in uncoordinated jerks. The alliances with Korea and Japan and the special relationships with Israel and Britain lie almost forgotten like neglected toys on the floor of a spoiled child distracted by his latest bauble. Gone are the heady prospects of Grand Bargains with the Muslim world kicked off by dramatic speeches in Cairo. Gone is the idea of a swift drawdown from Iraq; or of a comprehensive solution in the Middle East. Gone is the promise of catching Osama Bin Laden. Gone is the notion that Europe, which once hated America because of George Bush, would turn like a blossoming rose to Obama. In their place are half-finished begun threads without closure: a growing Hezbollah menace in Lebanon; a defiant Iran; a belligerent North Korea; a buffoonish but menacing Chavez; a drug war on the southern border; an Eastern Europe with the shadow of the Russian bear growing ever longer across it.

Good luck, West Pointers.

MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) brings us an exceptional debate in Kuwait over whether a performance in Kuwait of the internationally enjoyed song Hava Nagilah, performed by all races and nationalities, should be forbidden as legitimizing Israel.

What makes the debate exceptional is that, for a change, more than one side is heard in an Arab country.  Highlights of the debate are below the fold. Worth reading. (Or, be doomed to endlessly dance to the Macarena.)

Meanwhile, here’s Harry Belafonte sharing the song’s joy with an audience in Italy in 1988.

Translation of the objectionable lyrics:

Let's rejoice
Let's rejoice
Let's rejoice and be happy.

Let's sing
Let's sing
Let's sing and be happy.

Awake, awake brothers!
Awake brothers with a happy heart.

One of the songs mocking the old daily, then weekly, then merged, then gone, Worker, “Our Line’s Been Changed Again”, referred to the slavish contortions of its adherents as the approved line from Moscow veered and twisted to fit whatever was deemed its current self-preservation.

Such genuflective transmutive party line writing today is steered from Washington where its anointed leader is in the White House, its main apologist is Ezra Klein at the Washington Post – and its disappearing irrelevant Newsweek, and its dissemination is via his network of quick parroters assembled at Klein’s secretive JournoList of Left writers at blogs and major media.

Their God -- that is failing, again -- is that the Democrat Party and its President is the most progressive force to alter mankind and its institutions, and that this end justifies the means of increased central power over the economy and individuals’ lives.

Five years after graduating college with a political science degree, with no work experience except for writing, Ezra Klein churns out advocacy that excuses the latest line or attacks uncomfortable facts, and his disciples echo his sleights of hand.

In rebuttal one might hear that other writers are slavish to the Republican Party or have a following.  That smacks of old attacks on the fractious Trotskyists, Republicans actually containing disparate and battling interests, political figures, and writers, inherently unable to cohere around any line except vague restraints on central power.

Neither socialists nor Trotskyists brought down communism or Moscow.  Rather, communism and Moscow were unable to maintain their spin in the face of their flailing failures recognized and rejected by the true masses living in the real world when coupled with firm resistance from those with power.

Today’s Tea Partiers lack a manifesto except for crying out “BS” to the transparent excuses of any – Democrat or Republican -- who go along with Washington’s self-serving funny business as usual. Those – either Democrat or Republican – who are seen to pay lip service but not consistency and will to actually reversing statism’s growth are not trusted.

As with any revolution from below, the big question remains of whether anyone will emerge to lead and be followed who will not waver, accommodate or sell out.

As with the Worker and their "God That Failed", there is no question that those who align themselves with state power will find new “progressive” rallying points for their same-old, same-old.

Ezra Klein will become an obscure footnote in the tedious history of the Left. So may the Tea Partiers as a temporary insurrection join the Trotskyists in the dustbin of history.

But, the real masses never will submit, and stand ready – armed by the vote in a democracy -- to emerge in strength when their primary interest in personal freedoms is  trampled. The powerful or monied who are wise enough to see their fate as tied to the masses need to step up to the podium and to contribute heavily to the pot of clarifying insurrection before their narrow self-interests are eliminated.  Their feeding at the trough in Washington will not save them, but transform them into lackeys.

(There are too many allusions and references above to weigh down with links, footnotes, and detailed explanations.  Enjoy the learning experience, unless repeating the past is preferred.)

Some sauce: