In a move that upset the hogs that gorge at the federal trough, the House of Representatives last Friday cut out $100 million from a disaster spending bill that would have funded 20,000 positions in the Corporation for National Service, better known as AmeriCorps. Modeled on previous Raw Deal and Pork Society (oops, I meant to say FDR's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society) programs, and actually a modification of a law passed during Poppie Bush's administration, AmeriPork (the term I prefer to use for the whole mess) is just another way of buying votes and paying off political cronies, including contractors and local community officials. Designed as another socialist/fascist national service program, in fact AmeriPork actually pays volunteers for their work. When is the last time you volunteered for work and got paid for it?
Another Monstrosity
The concept of civilian national service – that all citizens owe some time to the State – began with that socialist/fascist Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when he got the Congress to authorize and appropriate money for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) during the Great Depression. Under the WPA, workers were hired for so-called public projects, which were often nothing more than make-work. Digging holes in the ground and filling them up again was actually one of the main activities of this federal agency. How this was supposed to bring about an economic recovery can only be explained by the "crystal ball school of economic theory."
The CCC was not much different, except that these employees lived in barracks out in the woods, cleaned up forests, planted trees, and sometimes helped build roads. Again, this make-work did not help bring the country out of the depression and instead gave those on the dole false hopes for the future.
Well, cut to the 1960’s, with a booming economy – no thanks to federal government – and Lyndon Johnson decides he wants to fight the Vietnam war and pump up non-defense social spending with your tax dollars and by inflating the currency (sounds like the current Bush-man). Make-work programs like VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), Jobs Corps, and other so-called community service programs were concocted and tons of money were wasted on them. With poor or shoddy financial controls (a lot of the money was given out as grants, meaning that the feds had no real control over what the recipient did), local politicians and their contractor and other cronies – all wired into Lyndon – made out like bandits. Focus groups, junkets, training sessions for "volunteers," and a variety of other nonsense took a lot of your money.
This socialist/fascist mess lasted even beyond the Reagan administration, which did manage to get rid of one or two of the more notoriously wasteful – but minor – Johnson boondoggles. Given the Bush family penchant for spending as much as liberal Democrats, it should not come as a shock that Poppie Bush signed into law the National and Community Service Act of 1990, which formed the basis for Bill Clinton's Corporation for National Service/AmeriCorps in 1993.
Touted by der Schlickmeister as an alternative to military service and as a way for youngsters to earn money towards college, it was still called a volunteer program even though the enlistees were getting paid. Some could earn over $4,000 in college tuition bonuses for their "volunteer work."
The program was just as corrupt and stupid as all its predecessors. Der Schlickmeister actually used various AmeriPork grant recipients as his political shock troops, cheering him and other Clinton administration officials when they toured the country and harassing his political opponents. In fact, the neo-con Newt Gingrich, when he still had the public bamboozled into thinking he was a real conservative, went after AmeriPork in the 1994 campaign that brought the Republicans into control of both the House and the Senate. It seems that one AmeriPork grant funded a group – the Acorn Project – that staged a protest against Gingrich at a speech he gave at the National Press Club in DC. Now that took national service and volunteerism too far, even for Gingrich.
At this point, let me interject my own observations of AmeriPork. In 1994, I was still in the federal government and had the chance to observe an AmeriPork training session that lasted about 2 and days. The raw recruits were brought into what looked like a former military base, where they slept, ate, and received their training. The grant recipient had a contractor conduct the training sessions. Lots of touchee-feelee stuff plus new age psychobabble was the order of the day. It was like they were trying to brainwash these folks into being mouthpieces for the Clintons' Marxist social and cultural agenda.
Two incidents confirmed to me how totally useless and wasteful AmeriPork was. A colleague of mine and I were watching one afternoon session. The theme of the indoctrination session was that everyone was okay – homosexual males, lesbians, you name it – and that to be a team player, AmeriPorksters had to fully embrace such views and even open your mind to adopting such practices yourself. Touchee-feelee time then commenced. My colleague spotted one cute girl, sitting on the lap of and being hugged by what he thought was her boyfriend. I looked and pointed out to my colleague that the so-called boyfriend was instead a "butch," a male-looking girl. We both shook our heads in disgust.
At the end of the training session, the grant recipient took over from the contractor and led the whole group in the "hokey-pokey," a kids' grade school dance in which everyone forms a big circle, holds hands, and then sings and dances (anyone remember – "You put your right foot in, your put your right foot out, …," etc.). Well, that's government. I remember lifting a copy of the training pamphlets and sending them and a description of these activities to a genuine conservative columnist – nationally syndicated at the time. But the columnist would not do a story on it. Apparently it was old and stale news at that point.
Now, back to AmeriPork and its trials and tribulations before the Congress. During 1995, the first year of the so-called Republican congressional majority, Newt and his crew made a feeble attempt to kill AmeriPork; it seems that they settled for provisions that kept grantees from using the funds for political campaign purposes. Feeble attempts resurfaced periodically to flush the whole mess down the toilet of political and financial oblivion, but they invariably failed, although the level of benefits to individual "volunteers" may have been scaled back a tad.
And then along came George II, whom some hoped would get rid of the monster. No such luck. He ditched that option within a few months of taking office. In fact, after 9/11, Bush decided to create a USA Freedom Corps that would be added into AmeriPork. The AmeriPorksters were elated, conjuring up visions of bureaucratic permanency and financial ecstasy. The actual spending for the whole Corporation for National Service mess was $404 million in fiscal year 2002 (Oct 1, 2001–Sep. 30, 2002), about $516 million for 2003, and an estimated $659 million for 2004.
The Horror!
Apparently AmeriPork needed a further infusion of emergency cash as it has authority to hire up to 50,000 volunteers this year and it overhired – that is, brought in too many "volunteers" too quickly and depleted its budget. With the proposed cut of $100 million from the disaster funding bill by the House, AmeriPorksters were in a state of extreme angst and would not be able to hire as many as they had promised.
In an article that appeared in the July 26 Washington Post, AmeriPorksters howled with indignation over being cut $100 million by the House of Representatives. The so-called cut would force AmeriPork to not hire 20,000 out of the 50,000 authorized hires this year. "Democracy is being thwarted," stated a coalition of 12 AmeriCorps groups.
Opponents of AmeriCorps said that the parent agency – the Corporation for National Service – was badly managed, not that the whole concept was a waste. After all, George Bush still nominally supports it, having promised to raise the number authorized "volunteers" to 75,000 next fiscal year.
Despite this support from George II, Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a Republican from California, was quoted in the article as saying, "To me, a volunteer, at a church or something, they get coffee and doughnuts. When you define u2018volunteer,’ let's make sure that volunteer is volunteer – not paid."
Cunningham was quickly countered by the reporter with a quote from Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who is one of the really big spenders and a strong supporter of AmeriPork. "Because of a mistake by the executives in the corporation, we're now going to hold these young people liable, we're now going to decimate this program." It looks like such government projects as home building (was the government funding Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity projects?), literacy coaching (say what?) and cleaning parks and streams (the CCC wearing hip waders) will go undone.
The Post quoted one man, Alan Khazei, the Chief Executive of City Year, a 15-year-old program that recruits 17–24-year-olds for community service projects in urban areas. He fretted that his allotment of AmeriCorps workers would be cut in half, to 500, and that five of his group's 13 programs would close, with 50,000 children being cut from its tutoring, mentoring and literacy efforts. In other words, people might have to take care of themselves. I wonder if Alan Khazei will have to take a pay cut. The horror!
But you real taxpayers out there should not get your hopes up. The Senate, with such spenders like Ted Stevens of Alaska, will in all likelihood loot the public and bludgeon the House into funding AmeriPork in total.
The Protection Racket
Real volunteerism in this country still exists, and if taxpayers were not being mulcted for every goofy and evil social welfare scheme, they would have the time and resources to devote to increased genuine charitable efforts.
Whether AmeriPork, or other federal programs, the real horror is always the same – you as a taxpayer pay more and get less than you would have if the private sector – either for-profit businesses or non–government-funded private charities – handled the problem. The inefficiency, waste, fraud, other corruption and abuse inflicted on taxpayers by the federal government – like all governments it has a territorial monopoly of power and the authority to tax citizens to pay for its activities – appears endless, a price we have to pay for progress.
Taxpayers increasingly see that the real horror is not reduced funding for the Leviathan State, but that it is their continued subjection to plunder by a central government that is nothing more than a protection racket and that operates under a thinner and increasingly transparent cover story of "doing good."
But this racket cannot last forever. The cover story – whether for more warfare or more welfare – has become so thin that even the average Joe and Jane are starting to complain about it. It will be interesting to see if voters continue to get conned into supporting the State or whether they decide not to vote in record numbers, an action that would call into question the legitimacy of the whole scam. A massive non-turnout would say a lot more about disgust with government than voting for turncoat politicians who later renege on their promises to actually cut the size of the central government.
July 30, 2003
Jim Grichar (aka Exx-Gman) [send him mail], formerly an economist with the federal government, writes to “un-spin” the federal government’s attempt to con the public. He teaches economics part-time at a community college and provides economic consulting services to the private sector.
