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The federal structure of the U. S. might be our undoing. Robert Barone has a scary post in Minyanville about relative levels of debt between us and say, Greece. An analysis that imputes to Americans all debt; federal, state, and local, puts us in the spendthrift lead.
… All of the public debt was originated by governments and most of the private debt by banks or other financial institutions. In feudal times, serfs owed a significant portion of their toil to their lords. Have times really changed? The lords are now the politicians and “Too Big to Fail” bankers. Many ordinary people are serfs, highly indebted either voluntarily (private debt) or involuntarily (public debt). Looking at debt in this way helps to explain the unholy alliance between Washington and Wall Street (see The Unholy Washington-Wall Street Alliance) and why the “Too Big to Fail” and Washington politicians get richer and richer at the public’s expense.
While US citizens are drowning in debt, the political system appears incapable of reducing it. In fact, the politicians continue to expand it in the erroneous belief that more debt will help. There are only two ways out: years of austerity or currency devaluation/inflation. The political system won’t allow the former. Buy Gold!
Jay Nordlinger has two fascinating Corner posts that start with Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winning agriculturist and end with Andrei Sakharov’s Oslo tribute to the green revolutionists who were just then going out of fashion with the genetic food fascists.
Here are some comments Nordlinger posted from Norman Borlaug:
…“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny [the miserable] these things.”
Can I give you something else? Borlaug was asked what he had to say to advocates of organic farming. He replied,
“God bless you. Use all of the organic matter you want. But don’t deceive the world into believing that we can feed 6.2 billion people with organic matter alone. If we tried to do this, we would plow up all of these marginal lands, cut down much of our forests, and much of that would be productive for just a few years. Without chemical fertilizer, forget it.” …
And here is part of Nordlinger’s post discussing Andrei Sakharov.
…And I have something extraordinary for you. Five years after Borlaug won the peace prize, Andrei Sakharov won it. He was not allowed to travel to collect it, of course. But he wrote a Nobel lecture, delivered by his wife, Yelena Bonner, who happened to be out of the country anyway: She was in Italy, for medical treatment. As you can imagine, Sakharov had a lot to say, about the Soviet Union, human rights, nuclear weapons, and geopolitics. But he also found time for the Green Revolution, and its attackers:
“It is not so very long since men were unfamiliar with artificial fertilizers, mechanized farming, toxic chemicals, and intensive agricultural methods. There are voices calling for a return to more traditional and possibly less dangerous forms of agriculture. But can this be put into practice in a world in which hundreds of millions of people are suffering the pangs of hunger? On the contrary, there is no doubt that we need increasingly intensive methods of farming, and we need to spread modern methods all over the world, including the developing countries.”
Isn’t that something? With all the rest that Sakharov had to think about . . . (For his complete lecture, go here.)
Let me add this, please: Because Sakharov was one of the greatest dissidents, resisters, and human-rights champions of all time — because he was one of the most noble human beings we have ever known — we tend to forget that he was one of the greatest scientists of his age: the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicist, the father of its thermonuclear weapons. He sacrificed his scientific career — his privileges, his dachas, his laboratories, all of it — to do what was most right. What a man.
Roger Simon wants you to vote for Helen Thomas’ press credentials to be withdrawn.
…As for myself, I wish I felt I had that luxury. Unfortunately, I don’t. The vitriol is too much, not just from one old lady, but from too many corners of the globe. This is not a time for intellectual parsing, but for action — action against anti-Semitism before we are returned to an era we thought we would never see again.
Toward that end, PJTV has put up a short survey. It asks the question “Should the White House revoke the press credentials of Helen Thomas?” I guess you already know how I voted. If you would like to vote, please go here.
At the close of this post, Marty Peretz reminds us that the president’s first trip abroad was to Turkey. So they knew first what a jerk he is. We should have a law requiring him to stay home.
… But, for the moment—the long moment—the story is Turkey and its prime minister, the more-than-nutsy Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is dragging his country backwards, backwards, backwards. To long before the Ataturk era. Robert L. Pollock has a devastating column, “Erdogan and the Decline of the Turks,” also in this morning’s WSJ.
You may think that “backwards” does not mean the Islamic orbit. But I do. In any case, it means the route away from reason and scientific civilization. The road to darkness, where the Muslim world has been stuck for centuries.
Barack Obama put his trust in Erdogan on his first trip abroad. Two days in Turkey. What a waste.
Mark Steyn comments on recent anti-Semitic events.
In contrast to the general directions of Helen (“Go back to Germany and Poland“) Thomas, the peace-lovers aboard the Mavi Marmara were more specific:
In response to a radio transmission by the Israeli Navy warning the Gaza flotilla that they are approaching a naval blockade, passengers of the Mavi Marmara respond, “Shut up, go back to Auschwitz” and “We’re helping Arabs go against the US, don’t forget 9/11″.
Such amusing conversationalists.
These are not “humanitarian” “peace” “activists”. These are, in any objective sense, a party to the conflict. They’re not trying to bring “peace”, they’re trying to help their side win. That’s their choice, and may the best man win, but the media collusion in presenting them as “humanitarian” “aid” workers is Orwellian – and all the more so in a world in which the Turkish Prime Minister accuses Israel of killing children on the beach and in which the doyenne of the White House press corps no longer recognizes Israel’s “right to exist”. …
We also have Mark Steyn writing about the changing tactics of anti-Semitism.
…There is a kind of logic about this. As paradoxical as it sounds, Muslims have been far greater beneficiaries of Holocaust guilt than the Jews. In a nutshell, the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe. Without post-war guilt, and the revulsion against nationalism, and the embrace of multiculturalism and mass immigration, the Continent would never have entertained for a moment the construction of mosques from Dublin to Dusseldorf and the accommodation of Muslim sensitivities on everything from British nursing uniforms to Brussels police doughnut consumption during Ramadan. Holocaust guilt is a cornerstone of the Muslim Europe arising before our eyes. The only minority that can’t leverage the Shoah these days is the actual target. …
…when the flotilla hit the fan, a couple of readers wrote to me to ask why the British and European media were always so eager to be led up the garden path. Because, when it comes to Israeli “atrocities,” they want to believe. Because, even in an age of sentimental one-worldism, the Jews remain “the other.” If old-school Euro-Judenhass derived from racism and nationalism, the new Judenhass has advanced under the cover of anti-racism and multiculturalism. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt.
In the NY Post, Kirsten Powers discusses the executive branch law-breaking actions.
…Many Beltway talkers are claiming that the president actually has the “right,” as head of the party, to clear the field in primaries. Sorry, the only people with the right to choose a nominee are primary voters. We live in the United States, not some Middle Eastern dictatorship (or, apparently, Chicago).
When I voted for Obama, I voted for him to be president, not for him to use government jobs or perks to drive out qualified challengers in Democratic primaries. …
In the WSJ, Kimberly Strassel writes about another law that was broken by the enthusiastic Obami job recruiters.
…No phrase is more feared in Washington than “quid pro quo,” and Beltway politicians carefully avoid any hint of it. There are winks and nods, yes. But you’d have to be crazy to put something in an email. Crazy, or from Chicago, where it is simply understood that the political machine decides elections and hands out consolation prizes accordingly.
…Yet as Scott Coffina, associate counsel to George W. Bush, has noted, the White House may have blundered into a separate charge.
“The Hatch Act,” writes Mr. Coffina in National Review Online, “makes it illegal for a federal employee to use his official position or authority to interfere with or affect the result of an election.” He notes that among Mr. Bauer’s justifications for the Sestak talk was that Democrats had a “legitimate interest” in avoiding a primary. “Advancing the interests of a political party is not a ‘legitimate’ use of one’s official government position,” says Mr. Coffina, yet Mr. Bauer is on record saying that was the goal. …
Michael Barone offers insights into how Obama’s behavior in office has been a demonstration of Chicago politics, where the ruling class has legalized their larceny.
…Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.
One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America’s boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation’s railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.
…So it’s natural for a Chicago Way president to assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will not make a perceptible dent in the nation’s private sector economy. There will always be plenty to plunder. …