Suggestion for Ted the Good: Buy American

Well now, look what America’s greedy and decadent free enterprise system has done for CNN founder Ted Turner. Turner, owner of prized possessions such as the Atlanta Braves and Jane Fonda, woke up recently to find that his portfolio stuffed with Time Warner stock from the sale of his cable empire was a billion dollars fatter since Jan. 1 and weighed in at $3.2 billion, plus or minus a few bucks.

So, in a burst of major league philanthropy, Turner announced that he would give $100 million per year for 10 years to the United Nations. OK, it’s his dough. But why the United Nations? At his press conference, Turner’s response demonstrated why he’s earned the sobriquet, “Mouth of the South.” He claimed that he was trying to “set a standard of gallantry,” and that “the world is awash in money, with peace descending all over the Earth. We can make a difference in the future direction of the planet.”

Turner told reporters that Mother Teresa and Princess Diana were his inspirations, along with--and this is a direct quote as reported by the Wall Street Journal--”the little colored lady-washer who gave away everything.” The latter referred to Oseola McCarty, a Mississippi washerwoman who donated her $150,000 life savings to finance scholarships.

(I digress here to wonder why louts like Turner can engage in racial crudities with impunity while a legion of other public figures are routinely pilloried by Jesse Jackson and his camp followers in the media. I eagerly await the billionaire’s abject apology, the absence of which would suggest the need for a Rainbow Coalition boycott of all things Turner.)

But leaving aside the ugliness of his demeaning “little colored lady” remark, Turner stumbled upon the kernel of an idea with far greater promise than shoveling greenbacks into the U.N. treasury. Oseola McCarty’s commitment to scholarships--and thus to education--speaks volumes to extraordinary needs here at home.

The worthier recipients of Turner’s billion-dollar binge would be the children in America’s urban areas who are warehoused through broken school systems which rob them and our country of hope and promise. His $100 million a year could support scholarships of $2,000 each to allow 50,000 kids to escape the clutches of government school educrats. Their parents would then have a choice that is not stifled and crushed by failing schools in the grips of unions and unimaginative administrators.

McClatchy Newspapers writer Peter Schrag--a committed devotee of public schools--nevertheless wrote in the wake of Proposition 174’s defeat--”The most persuasive moral logic favoring the voucher proposal . . . concerns the plight of poor inner-city children and parents desperate for a decent education who are assigned to dreadful schools and have no way out.”

But Chelsea Clinton had a way out, and Al Gore’s children had a way out, as did Jesse Jackson’s children. All went to exclusive private schools because their parents had the resources to send them. Rich liberals never allow their kids to stay in horrible schools; they much prefer to bestow that honor on the powerless whom they so righteously claim to represent. Nor is their rancid hypocrisy so much as dented by their slavish devotion to anti-choice dogmas set out by the teachers unions in whose grip they remain.

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The still greater hypocrisy lies with those public school teachers who unify to keep poor kids in bad schools while treating their own children to private or parochial education. The Hudson Institute’s Denis Doyle published an exhaustive study showing that in major cities across the country public school teachers enroll their own children in private schools in far greater percentages than the general public. Thirty percent of such teachers in Los Angeles, 36% in San Francisco, and even 18% in Turner’s own backyard of Atlanta--all “choose” private over public school instruction.

Doyle concluded: “We are left . . . with a striking spectacle. By and large, it is the poor and dispossessed, particularly in large, troubled urban areas, who are forced into public schools.”

Could anyone seriously wonder on which side the sainted Mississippi washerwoman would come down if she had to choose between hapless American kids versus international do-gooderism?

Ted, take the advice of some of America’s other trade unions. This time, buy American.