News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
[The Republicans seem to understand quite well that ***ual
repression leads to sup****t for authoritarian regimes. See
Maurice Brinton's work _The Irrational in Politics_:
http://www.uncarved.org/pol/irat.html
or
http://www.uncarved.org/pol/irat.html
.--DC]
Grants flow to Bush allies on social issues
Federal programs direct at least $157 million to
conservative groups
By Thomas B. Edsall
The Wa****ngton Post
Updated: 12:49 a.m. ET March 22, 2006
For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw
as the liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds
went to abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to
promote birth control, and groups closely aligned with the
AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to run worker-training
programs.
In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering
that turnabout is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer
funds have flowed to groups that sup****t President Bush's
agenda on abortion and other social issues.
Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and
other federal programs, the administration has funneled at
least $157 million in grants to organizations run by
political and ideological allies, according to federal grant
do***ents and interviews.
An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston,
S.C. A decade ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with
deeply conservative social philosophy but not much muscle to
promote it. An offshoot of an antiabortion pregnancy crisis
center, Heritage promoted abstinence education at the county
fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The budget was
$51,288.
Groups led by influential Republicans
By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major
player in the booming business of abstinence education. Its
budget passed $3 million -- much of it in federal grants
distributed by Bush's Department of Health and Human
Services -- sup****ting programs for students in middle
school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.
Among other new beneficiaries of federal funding during the
Bush years are groups run by Christian conservatives,
including those in the African American and Hispanic
communities. Many of the leaders have been active
Republicans and of Bush's presidential campaigns.
Programs such as the Compassion Capital Fund, under the
Health and Human Services, are designed to sup****t
religion-based social services, a goal that inevitably
funnels money to organizations run by people who share
Bush's conservative cultural agenda.
"If what you are asking is, has George Bush as president of
the United States established priorities in spending for his
administration? The answer is yes," said Wade F. Horn, who
as assistant secretary for children and families at HHS
oversees much of the spending going to conservative groups.
"That is a prerogative that presidents have."
Horn and other officials said politics has not played a role
in making grants. "Whoever got these grants wrote the best
applications, and the panels in rating these grants rated
them objectively, based on the criteria we published in the
Federal Register," he said. "Whether they sup****t the
president or not is not a test in any of my grant programs."
"These are just slush funds for conservative interest
groups," countered Bill Smith, vice president of the
***uality Information and Education Council of the United
States, one of the most outspoken critics of abstinence-only
***-education programs. "These organizations would not be in
existence if not for the federal dollars coming through."
H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said politics plays
no role in grant-making decisions. "We don't have that kind
of calculation," he said.
Programs new under Bush
Most, but not all, of the money going to conservative groups
has come from two programs that did not exist before Bush
took office in 2001. The Compassion Capital Fund, which
distributed $148.3 million from 2002 to 2005, was created
"to expand the role that faith-based and community groups
play in providing social services to those in need,"
according to the White House.
The Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program was
enacted by Congress in 2001, and $391.7 million has been
appropriated for it.
Beneficiaries of more than $2 million each from the
compassion fund include five organizations run by black and
Hispanic leaders who endorsed Bush and Operation Blessing, a
charity run by television evangelist Pat Robertson. It has
received $23.5 million, which includes $1.5 million from the
Compassion Capital Fund and $22 million in surplus dry milk
from the Agriculture Department.
Hundreds of struggling antiabortion and pregnancy crisis
centers have received federal grants that often doubled or
tripled their annual budgets, allowing them to branch out
and hire staff, especially for abstinence education.
The Door of Hope Pregnancy Care Center in Madisonville, Ky.,
a small outfit of four part-time employees committed "to the
belief in the sanctity of human life, primarily as it
relates to the protection of the unborn," operated on an
annual budget of $75,000 to $79,000, most of it raised from
an annual banquet and a "walk for life." Last year, Door of
Hope got an abstinence education grant of $317,017, allowing
it to hire staff and expand.
Surge in federal funding
In Dyersburg, Tenn., the Life Choices Pregnancy Sup****t
Center, where the staff believes "without reservation or
qualification that the Scriptures teach that human life
begins at conception," had revenue of $81,621 and could pay
Executive Director Natalie Wilson $12,247 in 2001. Two years
later, the center got a $534,339 grant for abstinence
education. By 2004, annual revenue totaled $617,355.
Altogether, local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers
have received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence
education and other programs, according to a Post review of
federal records.
The distribution of new money to conservative organizations
is a small part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year
in federal grants to religious and religiously affiliated
organizations. For decades, in Democratic and Republican
administrations, well over $1 billion annually has been
going to such groups, most of it to mainline organizations
such as Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army and Lutheran
Social Services.
The ****ft under Bush in part grows out of the
administration's Faith and Community Based Initiative. Under
the initiative, White House officials and new offices in 10
Cabinet-level departments have aggressively sought to widen
the "pool" of applicants for federal grants for all kinds.
Faith-based organizations are encouraged to apply for grants
to operate Head Start and subsidized housing programs.
Suspicion abounds
In a Dec. 12, 2002, executive order, Bush addressed one of
the major concerns of religious groups considering applying
for public money. Bush declared that religious groups
receiving federal grants would not be required to comply
with certain civil rights statutes, and could discriminate
by hiring employees of specific religious faiths.
Skepticism about the distribution of money under the
religion-based initiatives abounds in both parties.
Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), chairman of the Government
Reform subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and
human resources, said the effort "has gone political."
"Quite frankly, part of the reason it went political is
because we can't sell it unless we can show Republicans a
political advantage to it, because it's not our base," he
said, referring to the fact that many of those receiving
social services are Democratic voters.
Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) was more outspoken. "I believe
ultimately this will be seen as one of the largest patronage
programs in American history," he said.
The Compassion Capital Fund has disbursed many multiyear
grants of $1.5 million to $7.5 million to groups designated
as "intermediary organizations" empowered, according to the
White House to "issue sub-awards directly to qualified
faith- and community-based organizations."
Receiver turned donor
In effect, this designation turns the recipient organization
into a major dispenser of federal money.
The Institute for Youth Development in Sterling, which is
run by Shepherd Smith and his wife, Anita M. Smith, has been
awarded $7.5 million over three years. In turn, the
institute has parceled out $4.5 million of the federal money
in grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to smaller organizations.
Shepherd Smith, who was a top strategist in Pat Robertson's
1988 presidential bid, said the institute's grants were "not
an effort on my part to make the right stronger; this was an
effort to help little people" who have difficulty getting
access to federal money.
The recipients listed on the institute's Web site include
many socially conservative groups, among them at least 15
pregnancy crisis and counseling centers that oppose abortion.
The Rev. Luis Cortés's Esperanza USA has received three $2.5
million grants. Cortés is an evangelical Protestant; many of
the grants from his organization have gone to Protestant
Hispanic providers.
Among organizations run by ordained ministers, every Latino
group receiving a large grant is headed by a Protestant.
Protestant Hispanics are a key Republican target
constituency. From 2000 to 2004, Bush's sup****t among
Hispanic Protestants grew from 44 percent to 54 percent,
while remaining unchanged among Hispanic Roman Catholics,
according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
Battleground benefits
In Milwaukee, a 2004 presidential battleground state,
Pentecostal Bishop Sedgwick Daniels's Holy Redeemer
Institutional Church of God in Christ was awarded $626,598
in 2003 and $824,471 in 2004 from the Compassion Capital
Fund. Daniels, a Bush sup****ter, was a 2004 Republican
National Convention delegate.
In Florida, another presidential battleground state, the
National Center for Faith Based Initiatives, run by one of
Bush's earliest 2000 sup****ters in the black community,
Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, has received $1.75 million over
three years from the compassion fund.
HHS is not the only department making such grants.
The Education Department awarded a $750,000 discretionary
grant to the GEO Foundation, run by Kevin Teasley, a former
staffer at the libertarian Reason Foundation and
conservative Heritage Foundation, and conservative Center
for the Study of Popular Culture, to "provide outreach and
information" on public-school choice. The department also
awarded $1.5 million over three years to the conservative
Black Alliance for Educational Options, which was created in
2000 with sup****t from such funders on the right as the
Bradley, John M. Olin and Walton Family foundations, to
provide information about the No Child Left Behind Act.
In addition to liberals, there are conservative critics of
taxpayer funding of groups on the right.
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said
the grant-making is "corrupting."
"The danger is that any group that gets money from the
government will end up serving the interests of the state
rather than the constituencies they are trying to serve," he
said. "The guy who writes the check writes the rules."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11951695/
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"
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