Polls show that foreign aid is opposed by many Americans as a giveaway to other countries. But it gets support from the major media, who typically suggest we're not spending enough on the rest of the world. This bias was on display when the U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan gave a speech at Notre Dame and accused the U.S. of having a "shameful" record on sharing with the world's poor. Major newspapers like the Washington Post, and even the Washington Times, gave heavy coverage to Annan's claim that the U.S. is "one of the least generous in terms of the share of its gross national product it devotes to helping the world's poor."

The stories were both from the Reuters wire service and undoubtedly appeared in newspapers around the country. But let us share with you some of the facts behind this claim. Annan is focusing on the official foreign aid budget that is largely funded through the State Department. He ignores additional assistance to such organizations as the U.N. that is sent through other agencies, such as the Pentagon. During his speech to the U.N. Security Council, Senator Jesse Helms noted that, in 1999, almost $9 billion was diverted from the Pentagon to support U.N. humanitarian and military operations. Yet the U.N. gave the U.S. no official credit for that assistance. That was on top of the billions that were spent separately on behalf of the U.N.

The reference to less than one percent of GNP sounds small, but the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a report in 1995 which revealed that the actual cost of foreign aid provided by the U.S. to the rest of the world since the end of World War II is nearly $2 trillion.

The stories about foreign aid simply assume that the aid has done good. But the Senate report noted a lack of evidence that it actually benefits poor nations. It did find that some of the aid props up regimes which are undemocratic and violate the rights of their own citizens. A Clinton Administration Task force on Foreign Aid Reform stated that, "despite decades of foreign assistance, most of Africa and parts of Latin America, Asia and the Midle East are ecnomically worse off today than they were 20 years ago."

Marcel Adam, an international business consultant who has worked with the U.N. in many foreign countries, can testify about how foreign aid is diverted into bank accounts of corrupt leaders. He says the main problem is that the aid is sent to countries with very few financial controls over the money. He believes that almost $1 billion of aid has been stolen from Haiti alone. There are two excellent books on this subject -- The Lords of Poverty by Graham Hancock, and The Road to Hell by Michael Maren. Both authors worked in the international aid business and have documented its corruption.

So why does foreign aid continue? There' a major lobby here in Washington called InterAction, a coalition of over 150 different groups, which devotes its energy to dispensing misleading figures like those used by Kofi Annan at Notre Dame. It has a lot of clout with the major media.

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