Carter should just butt out (Mouthpiece for ADM?)

As ex-presidents go, Jimmy Carter is a fine home builder. Which is why -- no offense meant to construction workers -- no one should be surprised Carter embarrassed himself and the United States during his Cuban trip.

But then, there are many worse things one can say about Carter's presidency. At least now what he says doesn't matter except to those Americans -- a distinct minority -- who think an ex-president criticizing his country while on foreign soil is acceptable.

It would be a cheap shot not to give Carter credit for his unwillingness to trade on the Oval Office by making big bucks on the speaking circuit, unlike former presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton.

Instead, Carter has set a good example by building houses for the poor with Habitat for Humanity, and becoming a pleader for human rights and free elections.

If only he would confine his role to such causes. But he seems determined to show that the country made a mistake when it turned him out of office. Carter continues to peddle his worldview -- which in many matters is at odds with the American people -- along with his humanity.

That's why his occasional re-emergence into the national consciousness is just political theater. He opens his mouth at the wrong times in the wrong places.

Carter, whose White House foreign and domestic policies were marked by a breathtaking level of political naivete, demonstrated in Cuba that some things never change.

He challenged the word of the U.S. government on intelligence matters while embracing a totalitarian dictator who played him like a fiddle. In comments to the media in Cuba, Carter challenged Bush administration worries that Cuba could be developing biological weapons.

Fidel Castro, looking for a public-relations coup, obviously knew what he was doing when he invited Carter to visit. Castro just had to read the newspapers to see how willing Carter was to undercut President George W. Bush's foreign policy in the past.

Last winter, for instance, Carter sounded more like a former European leader when he derided Bush's characterization of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as "the axis of evil." The comparison is apt because Carter, like most European leaders, appears to believe that the United States should meld its national interests with theirs rather than give priority to our needs.

That was the approach taken by Carter, who, as president, seemingly never met a crisis about which he was unwilling to wring his hands without acting decisively. Apparently, Carter thought Bush sounded too strident in identifying America's enemies and worried about hurting their feelings.

No surprise. Carter offered much the same criticism of Ronald Reagan's solution to the Cold War -- challenge the Russians to match America's military might or get out of the superpower business. Reagan's policy was dangerous, Carter said at the time.

Perhaps. However, during Reagan's watch, the United States and the Soviet Union began limiting nuclear arms because of Reagan's "peace through strength" approach, unlike Carter's penchant for whining loudly and seeing problems as beyond the United States' ability to fix.

Instead of provoking a third world war, Reagan's policies led to the unraveling of a Soviet empire that, during Carter's watch, expanded its influence while the American president boldly responded by canceling U.S. participation in the Olympics.

By comparison, let's give Clinton his due. He keeps up contacts with foreign leaders and criticizes Bush on domestic matters, but he is too smart to let himself be used by America's enemies. Maybe Clinton should explain to Carter that, on foreign policy, America speaks with one voice -- the current president's -- whether or not Carter likes those views.

Clinton was probably pretty steamed himself during his presidency when Carter used the bully media pulpit to criticize Clinton's policies toward Haiti and North Korea.

Although Carter's meddling is bipartisan in a bizarre way, it's detrimental to U.S. interests.

Peter A. Brown can be reached at 407-420-5276 or at pbrown@orlandosentinel.com

I guess meeting with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah during delicate negotiations missed the author's notice. Clinton Gets Mideast Role, Meets with Crown Prince Abdullah

___________________________________________________________________

Most of the lobbying in Congress to open up trade with Castro is coming from Senators and Congressmen with large farm interests in their states.

Price-fixer to the world **ADM bought Carter's peanut farm for $1.5 million.***

[Many references to Carter] ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND: A CASE STUDY IN CORPORATE WELFARE ***When former president Jimmy Carter decided to get out of the peanut business, Andreas was there with a check for $1.2 million to help Carter promote Habitat for Humanity…….After President Carter named Gartner to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1977, news of the ADM windfall leaked out…….. When OPEC restricted oil production again in 1978--and the Carter administration tightened oil and gasoline ration- ing, creating artificial panic--Andreas arrived at the White House with a salvation scheme….. According to Frank Greven, who is working on a book on Andreas and ADM, "During the 1978 Persian Gulf oil crisis, he convinced Carter that using ADM's ethanol as a lead-free octane booster in gasoline would promote energy independence and cleaner air."(39) As part of its grandiose solution to the energy crisis--which the president pro- claimed to be the moral equivalent of war--the Carter administration drove through Congress a plan to exempt gasoline with 10 percent ethanol from the 4-cents-a-gallon federal fuel excise tax…….

On the eve of the 1980 election, the Carter adminis- tration announced a deluge of loans to companies to build processing plants to make ethanol. On October 9, 1980, Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland announced $341 million in new loans to finance construction of gasohol plants.(41) On January 27, 1981, the new Reagan administration rescinded all the loans after its inspector general discovered that the Carter administration had violated official procedures and federal law in awarding many of the grants. Testimony by private investigators at a congressional hearing in February 1981 revealed that some of the loans were "reviewed in a matter of days, some in a matter of hours." Bruce Yellen of the Chicago-based Better Government Association told Congress, "Two loan guarantees were approved for individuals who had contributed to the Democratic National Committee or the Carter campaign. And 10 of the 15 guaran- tees went to states that were, at the time, considered critical to the president's re-election bid. These elements suggested that this last-minute rush was politically in- spired, and our interviews with agency officials substanti- ated that point." He said that one official said that an October 10 announcement of the guarantees was timed as "a public relations ploy for political gain."(42)

Although the Reagan administration initially blocked the loans, the farm lobby prevailed and the new administra- tion added its seal of approval to ethanol. Nevertheless, 9 of the 12 recipients of the loans the Farmers Home Adminis- tration made for ethanol plants went bankrupt. The Energy Department also got into the ethanol game and has lost more than $100 million on recipients' defaults on ethanol loans. [The Energy Dept. was begun under Carter's watch.]

………. President Carter's EPA announced in 1978 that "recent EPA and Department of Energy tests . . . show slight increases in nitrogen oxide emis- sions and substantial increases in evaporate hydrocarbon emissions" from cars using gasohol."(59) But because ethanol amounted to only about 0.005 percent of the nation's gaso- line sales, EPA administrator Douglas Costle ruled that "there is no significant environmental risk associated with its continued use."(60)

Since 1978 far more evidence has accumulated showing ethanol's harm to the environment. As a 1986 USDA report noted, "Alcohol blends are significantly more volatile than alcohol-free gasolines.

…… In 1980, despite the enormous subsidies it was already getting, American gasohol was being under- sold by Brazilian gasohol. American gasohol producers lobbied for a tariff, but the Justice Department, the Office of the Special Trade Repre- sentative, and the Treasury Department objected on the grounds that a tariff would raise costs to consumers, provoke retaliation from Brazil, and grant too much power to ADM. On October 7, in the White House, Jimmy Carter hosted a small luncheon for campaign contributors, including Dwayne Andre- as. Former ADM lobbyist Joseph Karth, who was at the meeting, told me that Andreas told Carter he would announce plans for a big new grain-alcohol plant in Iowa if the Administration would guaran- tee the plant's profitability by imposing the tariff. . . . In the last weeks of the election campaign Carter overruled his advisers and ordered Treasury Secretary G. William Miller to impose a tariff, by administrative means if necessary. On October 31, ADM announced the new plant, but canceled its plan after the election.(90) ****

International Food Policy Research Institute***These advances include products of genetic engineering. Former President Carter, whose Carter Center is doing outstanding work on agricultural production in the developing world, says that by increasing crop yields, genetic engineering reduces "the constant need to clear more land for growing food. Seeds designed to resist drought and pests are especially useful in tropical countries, where crop losses are often severe." Carter makes clear that the poorest, hungriest people of the world have the most to lose in the public relations assault on new bioengineered foods.

Science deserves most of the credit for advances in food production and nutrition, but so do education, the economics of wealth-creation, philanthropy and enlightened political leadership. Together these have put to rest the old Malthusian fear that population would outstrip our capacity to feed the world and that there was nothing we could do about it. There was something, and we did it: Today we feed 6 billion people much better than we fed 4 billion 20 years ago.

Yet this is no time to rest on our laurels. The 1996 U.N. World Food Summit reported that 800 million people are chronically undernourished, and the International Food Policy Research Institute projects that we will have to increase grain production 40% by 2020 just to keep up with population growth. We can do that; but to bring better nutrition and more food to the neediest people of the world, we have to use every resource at our disposal.

Superstition and sheer misunderstanding, however, are being used to browbeat the public--particularly in Europe, but increasingly in the U.S.--into opposing agricultural biotechnology, which the world needs to feed its growing population, improve nutrition and head off famine.

………Despite numerous studies, there are no known hazards associated with bioengineered foods, which sound science shows to be as safe as--or safer than--the foods that have been on supermarket shelves for a generation. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work to attack world hunger with better food crops and who now heads the Carter Center's effort to improve crop yields in Africa, points out that what some in Europe are calling genetically modified foods are just advances in conventional plant breeding, which has been used for years to increase yields, nutritional value and pest and disease resistance. Some critical studies of genetically engineered crops merit further investigation, while others can't meet the basic standards of scientific peer review. Surely we can agree on sound science standards for bioengineered crops, as we should for all scientific breakthroughs with commercial applications.

The extremist opposition may be satisfied with nothing less than halting the agricultural advances altogether. Already, Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. has asked farmers planting its genetically engineered soybeans to segregate those crops, and Monsanto is apologizing for bringing more disease-resistant crops to market."Solid scientific evidence" has been all too lacking in this debate--a war of words and slogans, not ideas and initiatives. Let us suggest some facts that must not be forgotten: Without dramatic improvements in crop yields, people will starve; they will suffer disease and death from malnutrition. The world's wildlife, habitats, endangered species and entire ecosystems will be put at risk as we are forced to draw more agricultural land into production. Pest-resistance, which we now know can be bred precisely into plants, will be supplanted by wider use of chemical pesticides. The promise of improving the nutritional value of indigenous crops in the developing world may be lost for a generation.

[I must note Carter did not observe the Zimbabwe election that has been condemned as out and out theft by Mugabe. Now, because of the confiscation of white farms and the displacement of their workers, famine has gripped the country and terrorism is the order of the day. Are they being sacrificed as a lab experiment for ADM and the Carter Center? ]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.