Refuse to Fund UNICEF on Principle

Recently I came across a flier in my elevator encouraging me to donate to UNICEF. The flier even promises that the dorm that raises the most money per person will win a 21 Choices Party. (We won't go into the question of how it isn't charity when there's a reward attached.)

The flier says that UNICEF helps children worldwide. Assuming that the first point is true, the question becomes how are those children helped and to what end. I can find little evidence that UNICEF helps, even smaller evidence that it helps in the right direction.

One thing that UNICEF supports is the Hague Convention on Protection of Children, which has had disastrous consequences in Guatemala and has led to the death of hundreds of children.

As I've said before, I've visited Guatemala three or so times. My uncle is a radio talk show host in Guatemala City and I have had the privilege of meeting the ambassadors of Canada, Sweden, and America down there, in addition to Guatemala's former president.

I do not doubt that there are "baby brokers" who abuse and misuse adoption law for their own private gain. As callous as it may sound whenever there is a good and one willing to supply it, there will be a market price. But, as John Stossel points out in a column from February, there were but five confirmed cases of 4000 legal adoptions in 2006. (As an aside, I'd like to think that I had a hand in getting Stossel to write this piece as I asked a question of him at UFM on this very topic.)

And yet now adoption in Guatemala is a "social service" rather than a "business" and its had disastrous consequences for the children.

The sentiment was captured perfectly by a UNICEF representative who huffed to The New York Times that adoption "has become a business instead of a social service."

Oh, yes, everyone loves "social service." But when adoption was a government-run social service in Guatemala, the results were disastrous.

I happened to be in Guatemala City last month visiting the Americas' most free-market university, Universidad Francisco Marroquin. UFM's president took me to visit Ines Ayau, a nun who runs an orphanage that was formerly in the hands of the government. The children are well cared for now, but before her church took over, Ayau said, the government staff had forced some children into prostitution. The orphanage itself was rat-infested and without electricity, and the government used the facility to funnel money to cronies. "Thirty-six persons were working, (but) 105 were on the payroll."

. . .

Even if the new bureaucracy isn't corrupt, there's little chance it will process adoptions as quickly as the brokers did because without profit, it has no incentive to move the kids through the cumbersome adoption process. When other countries have put adoption in government hands, adoptions slowed or stopped. Paraguay went from sending more than 400 kids to the U.S. in 1996 to sending zero in 2006.

That's a tragedy.

Well said, but alas, it's a UNICEF-backed tragedy.

On this point, here is a letter from Families Without Borders with which I very much agree with encouraging UNICEF to change its policies vis a vis adoption. UNICEF's positions are in bold, while the argument against that policy is in italics. The introduction has no emphasis.

On any given day in Guatemala, 60 children under the age of five die as a result of poverty-related factors. This is almost eight times the child mortality rate of the United States. Another 1500 to 5000 children live on the streets and survive by begging, robbery, or prostitution.

Yet another 25,000 to 30,000 children live in orphanages (mostly private) due to abuse, neglect, poverty or parental abandonment. At least half of the children in Guatemala are considered to be malnourished so severely that their growth is stunted and immune systems compromised, two- thirds live in poverty, and 30% live in extreme poverty.

Each year, a relatively small number of Guatemalan children (2219 in 2002) find homes in the United States through the legal intercountry adoption process, and fewer than 1000 more are adopted into other countries. As we write, the future of intercountry adoption in Guatemala is being decided as politicians and government officials are pressured to implement prohibitive adoption laws aggressively promoted by UNICEF. The backdrop for this struggle is a larger debate over how to protect "the best interest of children "worldwide". UNICEF has been an active and powerful voice in this debate, placing considerable pressure on the Guatemalan government to accede to the Hague convention on Intercountry Adoption and attempting to influence the framework and conditions under which future intercountry adoptions will proceed.

We acknowledge that UNICEF offers considerable assistance to children worldwide through vaccination, education, and nutrition programs, and we do not find fault with that well-intentioned mission. However, we feel that elements of the UNICEF position on intercountry adoption are misguided and threaten the welfare of the very children they claim to protect.

UNICEF Position 1- Every effort should be made to keep the child in his biological family and within his ethnic group. If this is not possible, adoption should preferably be by Guatemalan parents, then by foreigners residing in Guatemala, and as a last resort, by foreign parents.

Formal domestic adoption is rare in Guatemala, not because of cost but because a culture of formal adoption does not exist in that country. While Guatemalans rarely adopt formally, a system of "informal adoptions" already exists in which family members simply take over the care of relatives' children. Other factors make intercountry adoptions more common than formal domestic adoptions- including the fact that middle to upper class Guatemalan couples reportedly prefer to adopt children a particular hair and eye color, ethnic origin, etc., while the majority of children available for adoption are indigenous (Maya, Garifuna, or other) heritage. While we support efforts to make formal national adoption affordable and desirable, we do not support any proposal that delays a child's eligibility for intercountry adoption while domestic options are sought. Such a system can only lead to a greater number of children languishing in temporary care for long periods of time. Potential adoptive parents, whether domestic or intercountry, should be the ones that wait on a list, not the children.

While we fully defend in-family adoptions, we vehemently oppose the system supported by UNICEF in which an adult birth mother would be forced to notify her extended family of her pregnancy and decision to place the child for adoption. Similarly, we do not support a mandatory waiting period to allow for family or domestic adoption. We believe each adult birthmother should have the right to decide whether family placement is a viable, legitimate option for her child. A system in which every adult birth mother is compelled by law to notify her family of her adoption plan would undoubtedly increase child abandonment and infanticide and unnecessarily delay placement of children into permanent homes.

UNICEF position 2: Adopting parents should not reside in a country with racial discrimination.

While we acknowledge the intent behind UNICEF's position- to protect the adopted child from prejudice- we do not believe that any country is free of racial discrimination. We cannot support such a standard as it would lead to the cessation of virtually all intercountry adoptions.

Furthermore, racism and a rigid class system within Guatemala places most children born into poverty or of indigenous heritage at a distinct disadvantage within their own birth country.

UNICEF Position 3: The current laws established for intercountry adoptions in Guatemala do not create a transparent adoption process that provides clear knowledge of the child's origin.

The adoption process in Guatemala for children voluntarily relinquished by their birthmothers (described by UNICEF as "extra-judicial") currently includes a birthmother interview and social study by a court- appointed social worker, a secure DNA study of the birthmother and potential adoptive child, four separate occasions over a period of several months that the birthmother affirms her intent to relinquish, and an investigation into the background of the prospective adoptive family. Along with a specialized attorney (the Notary), two separate Guatemalan government institutions- the Family Court and the Attorney General's Office (PGN)- are involved in this process, along with the U.S. Embassy and Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The Notarial Process, sometimes referred to as the "extra-judicial" process because it is finalized before a Notary rather than a Judge, was established in the Guatemalan Constitution as a way to deal with non- litigious matters and is in fact a part of the judicial system. The Notary is held to the same legal standards and consequences as a judge. The current system is relatively efficient and effectively reveals any misrepresentations of the child's origins. Consider that less than 0.6% of US adoption cases have been denied due to "negative" DNA matches since 1998.

It is unclear what changes UNICEF would propose to make the system more effective at preventing fraud than the current "extra-judicial" system. Systems which place great power in the hands of judges are typically prone to corruption, incorporate less accountability, and generate greater delays in permanently placing children. T he one component of reform UNICEF clearly supports is centralization of adoption procedures by the government. However, in countries that have implemented a "central authority" to regulate adoptions without sufficient economic and infrastructure support, the effects on the welfare of children has been devastating. In most cases, intercountry adoptions have virtually come to an end and alternate systems remain nonexistent or are ineffective at caring for the children. Ms. Gladys Acosta, the UNICEF representative in Guatemala, has responded to concerns raised about inadequate alternate support systems by stating, "To take care of unwanted children is not the main concern of UNICEF, but of the local government. UNICEF only has to take care that Guatemala passes laws that the international community expects, to fulfill the international treaties that Guatemala has accepted to become a party."

Guatemala currently does not have any significant program in place to assist the poorest families. In 2000, public spending on social protection (assistance and insurance) was 1.8% of the GDP while it is estimated that 8.4% is the minimum annual cost of eradicating the poverty gap, and most of the recipients were in the wealthier urban areas rather than the poor rural regions of Guatemala.

UNICEF Position 4- International adoption should be reformed because it has become a profit- making enterprise that has led to the commercialization of children.

A great deal of UNICEF's agenda focuses on economic aspects of intercountry adoption. UNICEF has been critical of the fees paid to attorneys to process adoptions, arguing that any economic gain leads to commercialization of children. We believe that attorneys must remain at the center of the legal adoption process in Guatemala and that reasonable fees should be paid to the specialized professionals. It is not the child that is being marketed, but rather the services provided by the attorney, Notary, foster mother, translators, and medical professionals.

UNICEF Position 5: All private relinquishment adoptions should be suspended so as to favor the large number of older, institutionalized children.

We cannot favor any proposal that pits on child's best interest against that of another. We do not support the elimination of relinquishment adoptions as a means of encouraging adoption so certain other children. Instead, we support initiatives tat reform the public adoption process while maintaining proper safeguards. UNICEF has suggested that the "popularity" of private adoptions among biological parents is evidence that child trafficking is taking place. However, after reviewing 90 randomly selected cases in 1999 as part of a UNICEF- sponsored study ILPEC, not a single case in which a biological parent was forced or paid to relinquish her child was identified. In fact, the popularity of direct relinquishment adoption likely reflects a birthmother's desire to avoid placing her child in an orphanage.

UNICEF Position 6- Children should not be relinquished for adoption due to poverty.

We agree that a main goal for humanitarian aid should be the elimination of poverty , so that every family has sufficient resources to raise all the children born into it with a reasonable level of nutrition, medical care, shelter, etc. However, this is simply not the reality in developing nations such as Guatemala. Unfortunately, extreme poverty is a fact of life for 30% of the population and there are few, if any, government programs to assist these families. Even private humanitarian aid is only effective at reaching a small minority of needy individuals. Therefore, until there is adequate support for the desperately poor families, the reality is that poverty will continue to be a major reason for birthmothers to make adoption plans for their children.

The unfortunate Impact of UNICEF Policies on Guatemalan Adoptions-

UNICEF continues to aggressively lobby the Guatemalan Congress to pass extremely restrictive adoption laws that, if implemented, will likely have disastrous consequences on the health and well-being of thousands of needy children and their birthmothers.

The lobbying of UNICEF has successfully disrupted adoptions in India, Romania, El Salvador, Honduras, and many other countries. For instance, a recent UNICEF report has proposed a ban on relenquishments and a national moratorium on intercountry adoption in India. The impact of this report has caused unnecessary suspicions of all adoptions and has had a negative humanitarian effect on the children.

If you agree that UNICEF's positions on intercountry adoption do not support the best interest of the children of Guatemala AND that your donations to UNICEF would be better served on vaccination, education, and nutrition programs, then we ask that you contact UNICEF and ask them to reconsider these positions and re-allocate resources to humanitarian programs, or that you consider shifting your sponsorship to a humanitarian organization that better represents the mission you support.

John Lerew CMC '81 Runs for Congress on Segway

Hitting the streets on his Segway

If you want to hear him talk about his financial background and how he'll help with the financial markets, watch this video.

Here he is in The Rocky Mountain News giving the argument for why he should be elected.

With more than 20 years as a financial professional and a current Certified Financial Planner, I am well versed in the matters of finance. Given the current financial crisis, you will want a congressman who not only understands these issues, but will keep you in mind when Congress starts to write new regulations for the financial markets.

As a small-business owner and family man, I have your same concerns about the financial stability of this nation and our individual financial future. We are seeing the effects of a Congress that let the regulatory process be tilted toward a special few and not fair toward the whole. That same Congress cannot now bail out every bad business decision in our markets with taxpayer dollars. A great deal more could be accomplished with government-sponsored programs directed toward this country’s crumbling infrastructure. The $850 billion of taxpayer money could be used to repair roads and bridges. People who work on these projects would pay taxes on the local level, which would benefit cities and our state.

I am an independent thinker running a grass-roots campaign. I am beholden only to the constituency of the 7th Congressional District. As a Republican, I am interested in preserving individual rights and enforcing fiscal responsibility of our government.

In walking door to door in the district over the last four months, the issues remain the same: high energy costs, government intrusion, illegal immigration and our government’s insatiable appetite for debt. All of these lead down a path to a weak economy. I ask for your vote and look forward to working for you. Check out Lerew2008.com for further information.

Here he is in The Rocky Mountains News on why he's the man for the job, given this financial climate.

Here his sister and campaign treasurer tells PolitickerCO.com that the FEC got their fundraising numbers wrong. They actually made raised more money than was reported.

Seventh Congressional District John Lerew raised $13,718 during the third quarter of 2008, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

But the FEC report mistakenly show Lerew's cumulative fundraising numbers as being less than his third-quarter numbers.

Deborah Lerew, John Lerew's sister and campaign treasurer, told PolitickerCO.com that the campaign's total contributions from individuals totaled $21,218. Total campaign receipts after the third quarter totaled $31,211, she said.

The FEC report stated Lerew's cycle-to-date contributions from individuals as $12,610.28 and his total operating expenditures as $15,696.

Lerew's campaign had $5,833.24 at the end of the third quarter, according to the FEC report and Deborah Lerew.

Here he is in PolitckerCO.com on his door-to-door segway campaign. How entrepreneurial!

With only a small campaign budget, 7th Congressional District Republican nominee John Lerew has turned to an unconventional campaign vehicle: his Segway.

"The district is so large, and when you're a grassroots campaign and you don't have any money for mailings, the only way I can get around and do lit drops is I use a Segway," Lerew said. "They're good on the sidewalk, and they're easy to run."

Lerew estimated he can cover about 350 homes in two hours using his Segway, which he rents from his financial planning business.

He predicted that the personal vehicles could become a valuable tool for political candidates.

"It may not happen in two years, but probably four years from now, as Segways become more of the society, I would think if you ran a mail-distribution-sized campaign or you did lit drops, you could put your whole crew on Segways and you could cover thousands of homes in one way," Lerew said.

Jared Diamond Is Coming to HMC on Oct. 23

2008 Dr. Bruce J. Nelson '74 Distinguished Speaker Series:
Jared Diamond: "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed"

7:30 - 8:30 PM

Galileo Hall
Harvey Mudd College
240 E. Platt Blvd.
Claremont, 91711
(909) 607-0899

"Biology and the Environment: Past, Present and Future." Jared Diamond, Professor, Department of Geography, UCLA, and Pulitzer Prize winner for the book Guns, Germs and Steel. Lecture followed by a dessert reception.

Jared Diamond is author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and most recently, Collapse.

Although I very much disagree with Dr. Diamond's thesis that geography explains culture, I find his work full of fascinating insights. It is a shame that so many on the multicultural left have taken to his work as somehow evidence of geographic determinism. This book review by Victor Davis Hanson essentially answers many of Diamond's arguments.

May 20, 2005, 8:37 a.m.
Decline and Fall
From the March 28, 2005 issue of National Review.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond (Viking, 592 pp., $29.95)

Jared Diamond’s bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel argued that geography trumped culture, and that the current privileged position of the West was therefore mostly attributable to the advantageous resources in, and location of, Western countries, rather than to Europe’s singular values. Despite the allure of such a politically correct exegesis — President Clinton endorsed the book wholeheartedly — there were numerous criticisms of this determinist idea of natural accidents resulting in the present-day dominance of the West. At some point a Cleisthenes, Plato, Augustine, Magna Carta, Sistine Chapel, Thomas Edison, or Albert Einstein — and the thinking and substructure that produced them — is worth more than long, indented coastlines and concentrations of iron ore. Diamond seemed to be terribly confused about the course of 2,500 years of Western history: Environment, far from being a precondition for Western success, was often almost irrelevant to it.

For example, how did the Ptolemies create an even more dynamic civilization than that of the earlier dynastic pharaohs, when they inherited from them a supposedly exhausted and increasingly salinized landscape? Or why did the palatial culture of Mycenae prove to be a dead-end society, and yet the radically different Greek city-state centuries later blossomed in the exact same environment? More immediately, are we to suppose that there are underappreciated micro-climates that separate Tijuana from San Diego, strangely different soils on the two immediate sides of the Korean DMZ, and something about those ever-changing lagoons of Venice that made it irrelevant in late Roman times, a world power in 1500, and once again a backwater by 1850? Did the environment of Britain improve from A.D. 400 to 1700 while Rome’s declined, thus explaining why the former outpost of the Western world became its new center and vice versa?

Never mind that these bothersome historical details point to a particularly innovative — and ever evolving — social, economic, and political Western paradigm that can not only destroy, but repair, and, yes, often improve on nature in a way not quite possible in other cultures. The hillside slums of Mexico City, Sao Paulo, or Calcutta may support Diamond’s gloomy assessments of what population density and environmental ignorance have wrought, but why does such a theory break down when we look at civilized and relatively affluent life in similarly congested Tokyo and London? Instead of the hard work of sorting out the subtleties of how sophisticated Westernized cultures both succeed and fail in inhospitable landscapes, the morality tale of Guns, Germs, and Steel was soothing salve to the increasingly berated Westerner, who apparently was amused by the idea that he had not stolen, but bumbled onto, his embarrassing bounty. And so the book, presented in a chatty and often witty style, went on to sell a million copies.

Perhaps Diamond sensed those inconsistencies and thus in his new book, Collapse, he attempts to demonstrate through case histories of small micro-climates from Easter Island and modern Montana to Iceland and Greenland how civilizations disintegrate: Mishandling of the fragile environment causes wars, famines, depopulation, and eventual breakdown — and we modern wastrels should learn from them all before it is too late. Of course, empires can seem to fall for other reasons, but usually historians fail to see that political and military causation “masquerades” deeper environmental degradation.

Diamond’s natural determinism and condemnation of the West’s pathological means of exploitation are nothing new, but represent a synthesis of the previous pessimisms from Marx and Toynbee to Paul Ehrlich and Kirkpatrick Sale. Most scholars, however, would accept the notion that societies like those of the Egyptians, Romans, Aztecs, or Ottomans — civilizations that, unlike those of Diamond’s tiny settlements at Pitcairn Island or Vineland, had millions of inhabitants — at some period in their growth, evolution, and maturity inevitably declined; whether abrupt or insidious, such breakdowns were largely due to government overcentralization and rigid bureaucracy, affluence and leisure among a bored elite, high taxation, and depopulation in the countryside — all of which made rulers insensitive to change and unable to react rapidly to the radically new stimuli of invasion, novel religions, internal dissent, and, yes, occasional natural challenge.

In contrast to this broad historical picture, most of Diamond’s examples are slanted: They involve fragile, mostly isolated or island landscapes that witnessed colonists, renegades, or adventurers who sought in their greed or ignorance to put too many people in the wrong place. Modern Montana cattlemen and miners, like Norsemen and Mayan big men of the past, are easy targets; Diamond breezily disparages them through comparisons to “modern American CEOs” and caricatured chauvinists who proclaim “the unconscious message, ‘We are Europeans, we are Christians.’” When the reader begins to suspect that these light, anecdotal impressions are either irrelevant to larger historical questions or themselves internally inconsistent, Diamond coughs out a necessary qualifier: “I am not claiming,” “On the other hand,” and “Nor am I . . .”

The main problem, however, with this book is that Diamond’s well-meaning, environmentally correct storytelling cannot impart any coherent lesson of why in fact societies fail. Environmental degradation, climate change, hostilities, political and cultural failures, and trade are cited as the roots of collapse, but are used so interchangeably that we never learn to what degree mismanagement of nature or of people brings on doom. As a result, when Diamond ventures into systematic analysis of historical questions that he knows nothing about, he has a predictable propensity to say things that are not simply wrong but hilarious.

Yes, Americans once clear-cut the northeast, but now it has more forests than ever — because, among other things, technology moved us beyond wood-burning fuels. Iceland lost its topsoil and trees and thus many of its early settlements — but modern technology, liberal government, and Western jurisprudence ensure that its current Scandinavian descendants inhabit a successful society despite its cold, denuded, and unfertile island. And if Diamond believes that is so because Icelanders finally got smart and now follow his environmentally correct nostrums, he should ask why that is so — or what would happen in a decade should they magically be transferred to Haiti or Yemen and, in turn, Haitians and Yemenis were to take over Iceland.

Perhaps the wealthy, pampered 9/11 terrorists did count on the teeming slums of the Middle East for their base of support, and no doubt Rwanda’s genocide likewise had elements of too many people expecting too much from too few resources, but such environmental explanations are in the end fatuous when seen in larger and far more important political and economic terms. A Singapore or South Korea — or Manhattan — shows that modern technology, free markets, and the rule of law create a fluid and ever responsive social structure that can trump tribalism, religious fundamentalism, and the miseries of material poverty, limited resources, and an unforgiving nature.

Diamond also fails to see that his “masquerading” works both ways. If we historians are fooled into thinking environmentally degraded societies lose wars owing to military ineptness rather than resource depletion, then he is utterly incapable of seeing that material want is often a mere pretext for national delusion and aggression. Germany is more populous today on smaller territory than in 1939, when it advanced the bogus notion of Lebensraum; overcrowded contemporary Japan, Inc. does fine within its smaller borders without warring for a Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere. Few think that the Falklands were vital to Argentina’s food supply.

In an age of sophisticated fertilizers that can implant huge amounts of nitrogen into the soil through a variety of mechanical, chemical, and “organic” mechanisms, it is simply not true — as I can attest from 30 years of farming trees and vines — that in Montana “apple orchards, which were initially very profitable, collapsed, due to in part to apple trees’ exhausting the soil’s nitrogen.” Diamond laments that out-of-state homeowners are “careful to stay in Montana for less than 180 days per year in order to avoid Montana income tax and thereby [not] to contribute to the cost of local government and schools,” but ignores the logical corollary that many of his maligned affluent Californian interlopers (and other commuters like them from other states) already pay almost 10 percent of their salaries back home for services that they, as absentee residents, do not fully use.

Diamond idealizes the Netherlands as one of the world’s most environmentally sound countries, where the need to manage the tides has made it an especially communitarian culture of the “polter” — as if resource management will address unassimilated Islamic ghettos, or as if such environmental sensitivity extended to the more mundane task of cultural integration. (In any case, that country is in near paralysis from, and now furious at, the murder of Theo Van Gogh and Islamic fundamentalist threats to its democracy.) Similarly, Diamond’s idea that the Australian continent not only cannot support its present small population, but is doomed unless it reverts to a more natural human community of 8 million is ludicrous. The recent history of Australia has actually seen a steady rise in the standard of living, directly connected with growing population and a newfound allegiance to free trade, open markets, and foreign investment — all of which have capitalized on the rich Australian environment in novel and often sustainable fashion.

Finally, the moral lectures about contemporary Western dissipation are sadly compromised by occasional hypocrisy. While I think Diamond is absolutely right that “wealthy people” often “insulate themselves from the rest of society” and “use their own money to buy services for themselves privately,” I also know that his own environment of Westwood and UCLA is not quite Bakersfield or Memphis, but one of the most affluent and secluded in the world. Diamond’s ample reference in the text to dozens of overseas trips, and numerous sabbaticals and research grants the world over, testifies not merely to his privilege, but also to the success of the modern Western world in altering the environment. Safe and rapid global travel, modern medicine, and the security brought through jurisprudence — all developed over the same 2,500 years of Western exploitation that Diamond takes jabs at — are a world away from the brutish, more natural world of New Guinea that in the past he has often romanticized, but ultimately chooses to visit periodically rather than raise his children in on a permanent basis. Indeed, the exploitation of fuels, ores, and soils that Diamond seems to think is so often reckless and presages our own collapse is very often not reckless, and thus inseparable from his own current enlightened and rich existence.

Parts of Collapse are a therapeutic and salutary reminder to recycle more, trade in our gas-guzzling SUVs, and cut back on the parathion, but sound history this book unfortunately is not.

— Mr. Hanson, a contributing editor of National Review Online, is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.