Pork and Dogs - 8 February 2002

Bang! Or rather 535 bangs - echoing the landing, last Monday morning, of an encyclopaedia-sized book on the doorsteps of 100 senators and 435 congressmen and women.

It was not an encyclopaedia but it might well have been for all the likelihood that the 535 members of the United States Congress would read it through or perhaps ever do more than glance at a chapter or a clause of its 1500 pages that might affect them.

At this point in my meditations a domestic voice pipes in from an adjoining room: "What are you going to talk about?"

I usually hedge by saying something like: "Who knows?" Anything to avoid being picked on later in the day: "I thought you were going to talk ...?"

Well this time I didn't pussyfoot. I shouted: "The president's budget."

Fatal error. The voice drifted closer.

"How do you expect to interest anybody abroad in the president's budget?"

It's a good point.

"Ah, on Mark Twain's principle," I snapped, "that the job of a journalist is to attract people to read something they haven't the slightest interest in."

"Rots of ruck" was the affectionate rejoinder.

So where were we before being rudely ... ah yes, the encyclopaedia, a budget which every senator and congressman and woman is supposed to have read and digested and especially to have seized on items that will excite their constituents.

This time there are two elements one old and one new, they are pork and dogs. I doubt that any voter in any country listening to me now expects next spring, or whenever, to pay taxes for pork or dogs.

Pork I'm not sure about, in your country it may go under a fancier, more deceptive, name.

Anyway to tell you how much the president wants and for what let me begin by saying he wants 1.2 trillion dollars - and since a trillion in the United States is different from its value in the UK and Germany I'd better say that here a trillion is one plus 12 zeros.

Instead of breaking the percentages down into billions and millions of dollars, let alone cents, let's just agree that 1.2 trillion dollars is an awful lot of money.

Usually the day the book has been distributed you'll hear a loud protest from the Democrats that there's too much money for the military and too little on health, old folk, social services - and the Republicans always retort that if we'd had a stronger military when the Democrats had their men in the White House four of the last five wars wouldn't have happened under a Democrat president.

The Republicans always add that there's too much money being asked for doles, welfare, give-aways, that the Democrats have taught people to think of government as, in old HL Mencken's phrase, "a milch cow with 10,000 teats".

Well this time for the first time in my memory the Democrats haven't said a mumbling word about the size of the defence budget, for reasons rising up like a prairie fire from what is now generally known as 9/11.

The biggest slice of the president's pie - 58% - is for social security, government pensions, Medicare - which is health of the old folks - Medicaid - health of the very poor - and other entitlements and doles.

Nineteen per cent is for what is masterfully called "discretionary spending" for unidentified programmes that may come popping up, including the greatly various pork bills members put up to help their folks back home. And 17% for the military.

Before we come to succulent pork and the dogs I must make the point that for the first time in the history of the United States perhaps of warfare the word defence covers weapons and preventive weapons that I doubt one in a hundred of us ever dreamed would have anything to do with a military budget.

Personally I'm very surprised the defence budget is so small - only 17% of the whole - when every day we read a new precaution - in an airport, in a chemical lab, in a factory, an office, a church, in the halls of Congress - a new precaution against a terrorist strike.

I should remind that although most of us have given thought to terrorists and their weapons and methods only since 11 September lots of people in government and outside have been concerned about them and working on them - Secretary Rumsfeld for instance - for 20 years.

President Clinton, I'm told, more than once thought of an armed attack on al-Qaeda.

But I don't ever remember a president campaigning, so to speak, in a biological lab as President Bush was doing this week, explaining why so much of the defence budget has to do with discovering, manufacturing and storing vaccines against disease germs that a terrorist organisation might use at any minute on a chosen large gathering of Americans.

The bill for securing, as the word goes, the stadium of the Salt Lake City Olympics would have staggered Franklin Roosevelt if it had been the national budget in a year of peace.

After the precedent set at the Super Bowl in New Orleans the care and protection of the athletes and the helpers and the audiences has been taken over by the Secret Service which until now, historically, has been reserved for the personal protection of the president, vice president, ex-presidents and their families.

Apart from the cost of airport and stadium screening of everybody and his or her shoes and bodies, the night and day policing of every locker, hotel, motel, the searching of every truck, van, car, the storing of enough anthrax and smallpox vaccines to rush to the entire Salt Lake population, the Federal Aviation Authority, along with the Air Force, has set up in the sky a no-fly and protection zone within 200 miles of the stadium in every direction. It all costs millions.

Now let's go to the dogs.

Ever since - oh I should think ever since we first saw on the television nightly news scenes in the Middle East of places bombed by terrorists - we've seen shots of policemen reining in sniffing dogs.

Since 11 September we've seen them everywhere and every airport in the United States, from early morning on, looks like the rehearsal centre for a dog show.

The government alone - the military, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Energy, which guards power including nuclear power plants - employ 8,000 dogs and are begging, at soaring costs, for at least 10,000 more.

Why in this age of super-high technology? Because no human and no machine can begin to match the range or delicacy of a dog's sense of smell.

The most favoured, the most gifted, are German Shepherds, known elsewhere as Alsatians.

Deep inside their nasal passages they have an estimated 220 million smelling cells.

In three months they can be trained to identify, at long range, 10-15 types of explosives of a great variety of shapes.

After the German Shepherd the sniffer of choice is a Border Collie, which though having only about half the smelling cells of Alsatians has a matchless gift of concentration and is brought up to respond to human command.

Before 9/11 a German Shepherd could be bought for something over $2,000. Today, 10,000 short of their needs, the government is paying as much as $20,000 each.

The FAA - the aviation authority - can't wait to go bargaining for new recruits. It has started its own breeding project.

Now, how about pork? I use the word in a very special American political sense.

Before the American civil war southern plantation owners would at regular intervals lay out a row of huge barrels from which the slaves were invited to grab slices of salt pork.

In the lively and corrupt political decade of the 1870s an American fiction writer published a story called The Pork Barrel.

It was a metaphor for the rush of politicians - once a budget was coming up for debate - their rush to compose or amend a bill which would guarantee a fat slice of "pork" for their constituents.

We've just had a wonderful example of pork barrelling which brings the metaphor vividly to life.

I should say that all the best pork barrelling is done in the form of suggested amendments to important bills.

Four years ago Senator Lott, a Republican from Mississippi, joined with a Democrat, Senator Inouye of Hawaii, to introduce a bill as an amendment to the Defence Bill which would give one company a monopoly on cruise ships that work the Hawaiian islands.

Obviously very pressing interest to the senator from Hawaii. But a landlubber from Mississippi, 8,000 miles away?

Well the big shareholder in the cruise company was a billionaire from Chicago who had contributed lots of lovely money to both senators - campaign money.

As the quo for the quid of the monopoly, the Chicago man ordered two $459m cruise ships from a shipbuilding company in Pascagoula.

And where, pray, is Pascagoula? Well, well: It is the birthplace and hometown of Senator Lott of Mississippi.

Last October the cruise ship company went belly-up.

The Chicago billionaire didn't lose everything. The government's maritime administration had handed out a loan of over a billion dollars.

All that was left for the American taxpayer to contribute was a paltry 367m.

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