Latest news with #RyanCrocker
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Amid rising anti-globalism, Baumgartner defends U.S. role in the world
May 28—Four months into a presidential administration that has sharply pivoted into a more aggressive stance with foreign nations, slashed foreign aid and proposed deep cuts to the State Department, Rep. Michael Baumgartner met in Spokane Wednesday with former ambassador Ryan Crocker and retired Vice Admiral Mike LeFever to argue America should not retreat from the world stage — though largely without any pointed criticism of the White House. "America today faces a more complex set of national security challenges, I think, at any time since World War II," Baumgartner said. "There's almost no issue that happens anywhere in the world that doesn't have impacts everywhere else, so, truly, we are all connected." The freshman GOP congressman expressed concern that Americans, including those in Eastern Washington, have become increasingly detached from world affairs, such as the war in Yemen, simmering tensions between Israel and Turkey, counterterrorism operations in Syria, the likelihood of increased refugee emigration in the future and more. The invite-only panel, hosted by the international affairs-focused organization U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, drew a relatively small crowd of business, military, religious, university and political representatives. In info sheets laid out on each guest's seat, the coalition laid out Washington's dependence on international trade — $61.2 billion in exports in 2023 supporting more than 930,000 jobs — and made arguments in support of international aid that appeared tailored to try to appeal to a White House that has gutted USAID, placing nearly all of its staff on leave and terminating 85% of that agency's outstanding grant awards and 80% of its global health awards. "MYTH: All U.S. foreign assistance goes to 'woke' or progressive programs focusing on cultural issues that many partner countries don't want anyway," one pamphlet read. "FACT: The vast majority of U.S. international assistance programs strongly align with Secretary (Marco) Rubio's imperative to make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous." The coalition argues that foreign aid and civilian initiatives can buoy the country's global position alongside its military operations, encapsulated in a banner outside Wednesday's event, in which former Secretary of Defense James Mattis was quoted as saying that cutting the State Department's budget meant the military needed to buy more ammunition. LeFever strongly agreed, saying that U.S. relief efforts in Pakistan following the devastating 2005 Kashmir earthquake had boosted America's approval rating in that country to its highest ever. Crocker noted he still saw the positive impact of that operation in America's standing in that region 20 years later. Baumgartner agreed that foreign aid could be strategically beneficial to the U.S. and argued that Rubio and the White House fundamentally felt the same, but echoed the sentiment that "identity politics" in USAID's programming had burdened the office's budget and caused domestic sentiment to sour on foreign aid. "I mean, I certainly am not in favor of some of the transgender operas in Peru and this sort of thing that the previous administration has done," Baumgartner said, echoing and somewhat garbling a claim made in February by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. A $25,000 grant awarded in 2021 under the Biden administration was for a university to produce an opera that would "raise awareness and increase... transgender representation," though it was in Colombia and not issued by USAID, but by a different office in the State Department. That same office also issued a $32,000 grant to a Peruvian organization to fund a comic book that featured "an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues." In 2024, USAID's budget was $21.7 billion. Overall, foreign spending totaled nearly $72 billion, according to the Pew Research Center. As the coalition emphasized in one of its packets, the U.S. international affairs budget accounts for roughly 1% of the federal budget. Baumgartner did praise certain USAID programs, including the 2003 "President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief," or PEPFAR, which the congressman called "the best thing America has done, from an altruistic standpoint, in the last 20 years." "And my early indications from Secretary Rubio or in the administration is that — obviously there's a lot of high-profile political stuff going on, but they fundamentally understand the need to fund assistance as well," Baumgartner said. The Trump administration's February stop-work order initially froze funding for PEPFAR programs, though the State Department did issue a limited waiver specifically for PEPFAR, allowing certain treatment programs to continue but not others, such as HIV prevention and ones for orphans and vulnerable children, according to a May report from health policy organization KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. Hundreds of other HIV-related USAID grants were terminated. In one of the few critical comments of the event, Crocker argued that the White House's efforts to use Biden-era programs to justify gutting USAID was an example of the "extreme polarization that we're seeing in American politics." "The USAID, like any executive agency, is the tool of the executive," Crocker said. "That's what it exists to do, to carry out the policies of the president of the United States as resourced by Congress." "What we've now gotten ourselves into, I think, and as we look at the wholesale destruction of USAID, I think it is unfortunately the poster child for polarization," Crocker continued. "Those programs were not the creation of USAID, they were the creation of the previous administration. And I greatly fear at this juncture we are doing ourselves great institutional damage by effectively eliminating USAID, and fasten your seatbelts at the State Department; that's happening next." Baumgartner did caution against the "lure of isolationism," which he argued both parties faced. "I think everyone in this room understands that there's some ongoing political challenges for both parties on this lure of isolationism, that if we just come home, we can save money and we won't have to get trapped and everything will be fine," Baumgartner said. "And I think it's just an illegitimate viewpoint and a misunderstanding of the world." The U.S. needs more foreign alliances, not fewer, Baumgartner said — and one way to do that, he argued, is cutting red tape that slows down the sale of military equipment to foreign countries. "We sell equipment to other countries, we bind them to us," he said. "We can work with them, and we help our local economy, and people really want American military equipment." But Baumgartner lamented that "like many things in the U.S. government," the process to sell weapons overseas had become too "bureaucratic and problematic to actually implement," adding that he was working in Congress to make that process speedier.
Winnipeg Free Press
23-05-2025
- General
- Winnipeg Free Press
Civic perks weren't always considered frivolous
An excerpt from You'll Pay For This (Great Plains Press) by Michel Durand-Wood, the first book in The City Project series. The series, with Winnipeg as a case study, reflects on the struggles all North America cities are dealing with, and what needs to change to create a happier, healthier and more resilient city 50 years from now. A book launch will take place May 31, 7 p.m., at McNally Robinson. I often think about the gardener in Elmwood Park. If you don't know it, Elmwood Park is a small neighbourhood park. Locals like me lovingly refer to it as Roxy Park, even though that's never actually been its official name. It's always been Elmwood Park. Aside from having two names — the real one and the one people actually use — it also has a sandbox, an aging wading pool, a swing set and play structure, a couple of benches, and an open area that can serve for pickup games of soccer, outdoor movie nights or winter skating. Like so many places in the city, it's definitely looking a little worse for wear, a result of decades of neglect from municipal budget cuts. Many of the structures are nearing, or well past, the end of their useful lives. The lighting is insufficient, and there are often weeds, and garbage, and overgrown brush. But many of my neighbours pick up garbage there on their daily walks, or spend time during the summer pulling weeds, planting community gardens, and adding public art. It's where children play and dogs are walked. As a park, it's pretty unremarkable, but it's ours and we love it. Ryan Crocker photo Elmwood Park is commonly known as Roxy Park. Ryan Crocker photo Elmwood Park is commonly known as Roxy Park. But for nearly 60 years starting in the early 1900s, Elmwood Park was a shining gem. My next-door neighbour, who has lived here since their childhood in the 1940s, remembers it being a common location for people taking wedding photos. No doubt because, until the mid-1960s, the park had a full-time gardener who maintained it and planted up to 1,200 flowers every spring. The park also had a lily pond and fountain, a lot more seating, and amenities such as barbecue pits. It was picture-perfect, worthy of a postcard. I know because I actually found a literal postcard from the 1940s featuring Elmwood Park. I know, right? Hard to believe ol' Roxy Park used to be that nice. But more importantly, that it wasn't the only one. A 1941 transportation map from the Winnipeg Electric Company (which operated the city's streetcars at the time) had this to say: Large parks such as Assiniboine and Kildonan are well-known but there are many other smaller parks distinct in their own special attractions, which are not so generally used by the citizens at large. A corner of one such park is pictured here. This quiet lily pool is in Elmwood Park on the banks of the Red River at Glenwood Crescent … There are scores of other small parks all within easy reach by street car or bus. You read that right. Scores. Scores! If Abe Lincoln has taught us anything, it's that a score is 20. And our city once had, not one score, but multiple scores (with an 's') of small neighbourhood parks that looked like this. Maybe not four score and seven, but scores nonetheless. The point I'm trying to emphasize here is that while this might seem outright luxurious to us today, there was a time in our city's history, which lasted many, many decades, when we could afford this. We could afford to pay staff to make even our small neighbourhood parks breathtakingly beautiful. The lily pool at Elmwood Park (a.k.a. Roxy Park) graces a postcard from the 1940s. (Martin Berman postcard collection) The lily pool at Elmwood Park (a.k.a. Roxy Park) graces a postcard from the 1940s. (Martin Berman postcard collection) And we continued to afford it through a world war, a global influenza epidemic, a general strike, the Great Depression, a second world war, and a flood of the century. But then in the mid-1960s, all of a sudden, we had to start letting go of our park gardeners. What gives? Instead of finding out the cause of our budget crunch, we just cut some services. After all, gardeners are nice to have, not critical to our city like roads are, right? And so it started, our journey towards decades of necessary cuts to services we used to be able to afford. Catherine Macdonald's 1995 book, A City at Leisure: An Illustrated History of Parks and Recreation Services in Winnipeg, has an entire chapter titled, Hard Choices: The '80s and '90s. In it, she explains: The necessity of funding these development schemes while also maintaining other needed services caused the city to dig itself badly into debt. At the end of the '80s, the Parks and Recreation Department found itself faced with some difficult challenges. Hard choices. Difficult challenges. We've been using these words with respect to our city budgets for so long, before a lot of us were even born, that it has become normalized to us. New budget, new budget cuts. Every year, we pay more taxes for fewer services. And this is normal. Yet today, it's about much more than gardeners: potholed streets we can never seem to get ahead of, decommissioned pools, the indefinite closure of the Arlington Bridge, the highest per capita debt in our city's history, and a rainy-day fund that is now empty. Worse even is that financial decline has not been felt equally by everyone. The generations of service cuts have taken their toll on our most vulnerable neighbours. And it's gotten to the point that it's impossible to look away, with some prominent Winnipeggers even going as far as calling it a humanitarian crisis. It would be wrong to blame the COVID-19 pandemic. It may have accelerated the decline, but it didn't cause it. As we can see, this was happening well before then. At least since we were forced to lay off the gardener at Elmwood Park. So then, why is it that every year I've been alive, and even for a decade before that, we have had to make new cuts? How is it that, despite 150 years of consecutive balanced operating budgets (as is mandated by provincial law), and despite a growing population, we can afford less and less with each passing year? That's the question I was trying to answer when I started digging into city finance nearly a decade ago. And it's the journey I'm hoping to take you on with this book. We deserve better than to live in a city that is in constant decline. If I'm being honest, I'd like to see a gardener in Elmwood Park again at some point. And I'm sure you can easily think of several things in your neighbourhood you'd like to see improved, if the money was there for it. We can get there. It obviously wasn't always like this, and so it doesn't have to continue to be. But for us to change the path forward, we'll need to follow the money. And not only follow it, but understand it. Now I know that learning about city finance sounds scary, or boring, or anxiety-inducing, or any number of other negative emotions. Kinda like watching a documentary on paint drying, or worse, not being able to watch it because your Wi-Fi is down. But trust me when I tell you that anyone can understand municipal finance. Anyone. That includes your great-aunt Helga, the teenager next door who mows your lawn (Connor, I think?), and of course, you. And not only can you do it, but you'll have fun doing it! Sounds unbelievable, I know. Well, what if I told you there's wine involved? I thought so. Let's get to it then! And don't worry if you don't drink wine, because we'll also be whipping up a batch of super-fun grape punch. After all, Connor's thirsty too. But before we get too ahead of ourselves, it's important to ask, what is a city for, anyway?
