THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412250091
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
DATELINE: RALEIGH LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Jesse Helms, the senior Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has a few ideas about the country's international policy.
These are excerpts from the plan he sketched out to present after the Republican victories in November:
The Foreign Relations Committee has been all but moribund in its oversight responsibilities. As a result the State Department bureaucrats too often fail to carry out their duties as required by law.
The Arms Control and Disarmament Agency needs to be examined in terms of whether it should even be continued - certainly as now structured.
The so-called foreign aid program (known as the Agency for International Development) needs to be reviewed. This one agency has 2,000 employees in Washington, another 690 in Cairo - and so on. I personally feel that the American taxpayers' money should not be handed out to the heads of any government that does not support America's principles - and certainly to NO country headed by thugs and hoodlums. The foreign aid program has spent an estimated two trillion dollars of the American taxpayers' money, much of it going down foreign rat-holes, to countries that constantly oppose us in the United Nationals, and many of which reject concepts of freedom. As it now stands, the foreign aid giveaway program qualifies as the world's greatest WPA (The Works Progress Administration was a Depression jobs program that employed 2.1 million workers.).
The Foreign Relations Committee ought to evaluate and request the full Senate to evaluate, why the Foreign Service should operate under different personnel rules from all other of our government's civilian personnel.
Cuba is very likely to be a major foreign policy problem for the United States. I intend to insist that the Congress and the State Department begin consideration of a plan of action when Castro departs.
And then there is that longtime nemesis of millions of Americans - The United Nations itself. The UN is costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars. A complete reevaluation of the U.S./U.N. relationship is imperative.
And then there are the treaties that slip through the Senate with scarcely more than a dozen Senators having the vaguest notion of how they effect the sovereignty of the United States.
Congress simply must get a handle on all spending relating to and caused by the U.S. foreign policies. Let me reiterate that considering the $4.7-trillion debt that Congress has run up and dumped on the backs of generations yet unborn, we must stop this stupid business of giving away taxpayers' money willy-nilly. There are alternatives - we should consider OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, as an alternative.
I doubt if more than 3 or 4 percent of Americans have even the vaguest notion about how much the Camp David Accords have already cost them in taxes. The figure is somewhere between $80-billion and $100-billion with no end in signt. And for what? Syria doesn't want peace with Israel. What Syria wants is the Golan Heights - plus, of course, access to the American Taxpayers' money. Congress needs to get off the dime and demand a reassessment of the entire Middle East Peace Process.
The role of NATO ought to be on the front burner instead of tucked away in some dusty file. We need to rethink the matter of how American taxpayers are being gouged so that the United States Government can make enormous contributions to the World Bank, the European Bank, and others. by CNB