Word: butz
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...public official has displayed a remark able lack thereof. The first offender had been the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George Scratchley Brown, with his remarks about Israeli and Jewish influence that sounded anti-Semitic (TIME, Nov. 25). This time it was Agriculture Secretary Earl Lauer Butz, who in ten ill-chosen words managed to insult both Italians and Catholics everywhere. At a breakfast meeting with newsmen, Butz set forth his belief that population control would be necessary to meet the rising demand for food by the world's hungry. A reporter reminded Butz that Pope...
Monsignor Eugene V. Clark, a spokesman for Cardinal Cooke of the New York archdiocese, fired off a heated telegram of protest to President Ford, demanding that Butz "apologize immediately or resign." A chastened Butz is sued a statement saying that his gaffe "was not intended to impugn the motives or the integrity of any religious group, ethnic group or religious leader...
...Butz's refusal was predictable. The American government has traditionally directed its aid program not towards the people it's ostensibly designed to help but towards holding back political change in developing countries. This is a goal that by itself would make nonsense of even a sincere aid program. China has shown that the changes the United States opposes can mean leaping toward economic self-sufficiency. And the defoliation and destruction of agriculture the United States has visited on Indochina makes a mockery of its supposed commitment to feeding people, just as its reluctance to feed them in the short...
Even the food aid programs the United States has implemented in the past have not done a particularly good job of feeding starving people. One of Butz's boasts at the conference was that "last year when there was no grain surplus we programmed $67 million worth of food under Public Law 480." What Butz did not mention was that 43 per cent of the 1974 deliveries under P.L. 480--otherwise known somewhat euphemistically as the Food for Peace program--went to only two countries, South Vietnam and Cambodia, where much of the money was used for military purposes...
...Butz should resign--although if rumors that Ford is preparing for Butz's dismissal are true his resignation may not even be necessary. Ford will have to contend with a constituency that remains fiercely loyal to Butz--the farmers, a group whose interests he has served diligently. Certainly, the Secretary of Agriculture should not ignore the interests of American farmers, but he should not serve them to the detriment of farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America. American agricultural policies must begin to take the rest of the world into account. One of the Norwegian delegates in Rome suggested that...