White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Cry, the Beloved Elephants

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The elephants of Africa have have a fix on family values. They look out for their calves and each other. When an elephant dies, often from a bullet, the herd tries to raise the fallen animal; to lift it back on its feet; to make it whole again. They do not appear to understand death, these the largest and most glorious of land mammals.
 
They walk their young much as human families do, often the adults sheltering the young'uns between them. Soon there may be no African elephants left in the wild.
 
The great, kindly beasts are facing a holocaust. They are being slaughtered on an industrial scale by poachers for their ivory, which is fetching record prices in Asia. A similar extermination of the rhinoceros is taking place, but it is to the elephant that I feel an affiliation, an affiliation tinged with guilt.
 
My mother and one of her brothers hunted elephants in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, the 1920s. She was proud, and as time passed, a little ashamed of her hunting days. It may even have been that she liked to be thought of as a retired big game hunter and had never actually pulled the trigger. As elephant became more endangered, she clammed up.
 
My own sin is that in Kenya, at the Nairobi airport, I once bought a small ivory pendant for someone. It had a government certificate of guarantee that it was made of “old ivory” that had been taken – I find it hard to say harvested — when it was legal. I wanted to believe that and I did at the time, but I doubt it now. I wish, to my soul, that I had not bought it.
 
That piece of ivory, my mother and life in Zimbabwe all came back to me with pain when I learned of the latest, greatest, most ghastly slaughter of elephants – and, in the course of it, many other innocent creatures and maybe people, too – the poisoning with cyanide of the watering holes of 41 elephants. Cyanide is widely available in Zimbabwe, where it is used in gold mining.
 
It happened in the Hwange National Park southwestern Zimbabwe. There are photographs of the carcasses on the Web. They died horribly and, because of their size, probably slowly.
 
The thought of those magnificent animals, bellowing in pain, trying to save each other and writhing as the poison did its atrocious work has been with me for days. I cannot shake the horror of the holocaust in the bush.
 
There is a horror aplenty to go around, from Syria on down. But the gross indecency of the slaughter of the Zimbabwe elephants and the way it was done; cow and calf and bull alike going down in agony for money.
 
There is blame to go around for the elephants' poisoning outside of the lawlessness of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. There is the unfettered trade for rhino horn — Didn't Viagra take care of that? I had hoped so. — and for the ivory used in jewelry and fine furniture. I have seen, in my youth, elephant tusks mounted just for show. And their feet, after treatment, used as indoor planters. Deadly decorations.
 
There is an international regime to intercept and prevent the looting of Africa but, like many international agreements, it is underfunded. It has also fallen prey to, of all things, sequestration on Capitol Hill.
 
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service mans the front lines in persuading other governments not to allow trade in ivory, rhino horn and other products from endangered species. Most importantly though, this small but critical corps fights the use of the United States as a transhipment point. Yet, according Daniel Ashe, writing in Scientific American, there are only 216 agents covering the global movement of animal contraband and there are 63 vacancies that cannot be filled because of budget sequestration.
 
I wonder if any members of Congress can hear, in the far recesses,of their minds, the ghostly trumpeting of 41 beautiful giants as they go down to cyanide poisoning? I can, and I always will. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 
 
 
 

The Economy Is Righting, but Does Congress Get It?

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The great thing about being a pessimist is that something awful may still happen tomorrow. There are still plenty of pessimists about the economy, saying that we are spending our way into perdition; that the Great Reckoning is just around the corner, unless we do draconian things.
 
However on Wall Street, there is hopefulness — even optimism. The stock market is up, the housing market is showing real life and corporate confidence has increased since the Congress delayed action on the fiscal cliff through a bit of old-fashioned give-and-take. Some economists are saying encouraging things, so are the business magazines.
 
There is evidence that the economy, which was heeling badly, is beginning to right. The U.S. economy, still the economic lungs of the world, is breathing easier.
 
Sure, there was a slight dip in performance in the last quarter, reflecting primarily reduced defense spending. It's a hard lesson for the political right to grasp: You can't extrapolate family financial rectitude into national policy, as they like to do. If a family spends more than it is earning, it simply has to cut expenditures. If it doesn’t, the end is known; credit dries up and horrors, like foreclosure, are at hand. Likewise, corporations cut costs, lay off employees and sell assets until the balance sheet recovers.
 
When a family gets into trouble, it doesn't reduce its income by cutting luxuries, it reduces its spending. When a corporation cuts back, it tries to reduce staff not customers.
 
But governments can worsen the situation when they tackle spending at the wrong time. If they cut expenditures too aggressively and too fast, revenues fall, unemployment rises and demands on the public purse grow. Unlike individuals and corporations, governments can’t walk away from their messes.
 
Witness the recessions in Britain, Ireland, Spain and the total catastrophe in Greece. Irresponsible austerity has compounded the results of earlier promiscuous spending. Strong medicine has sent the patient to intensive care.
 
Amy Kremer, head of the Tea Party Express, and many conservative members of Congress playing the pessimist’s card, like to say, and they say it often, “revenue is not the problem, spending is.”
 
If only it were that simple. The problem is many things, including the global recession, the aging population, the high cost of medicine, two wars, badly timed tax cuts, China’s undervalued currency and the balance of payments deficit.
 
Take your pick. The miracle is that the economy is as vigorous as it is.
 
Already it has to deal with the tax increases that came with the budget deal in early January, particularly the increase in the payroll tax, which takes out of the economy money that would normally be spent — the large proportion of the tax which if left in the hands of the salaried class would be disposable. This may be about as much of a hit as it can take at present.
 
But the pessimists, who believe that spending is the mortal sin of our age, want to let sequestration — a 10 percent across the board cut — happen on March 2. The Washington Post says there is no mood in Congress to compromise. But if there is no compromise, the effects could be more devastating than a simple cut in spending. The result, instead, will be a cut in program expenditures while the government’s overhead in salaries and fixed costs will eat up the budget.
 
Austerity has been a disaster for Britain, Ireland and Spain. Do we want to follow the Europeans down that path?
 
The pessimists, who also believe that borrowing is the original sin of politicians, would let this recovery falter through their belief that the government must be starved. Sequestration will starve it, alright. Trouble is we'll all go hungry. There’s pessimism for you. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate