August 30, 2010
Feeding the World
When I lived in Brazil twenty-five years ago, I was only vaguely aware that the Brazilian agricultural frontier was pushing west. I knew about a significant number of farmers from Rio Grande do Sul moving into western Parana, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso & Goias. But Brazilian agriculture was not efficient and I heard the soils out west were acidic, poor and subject to rapid exhaustion. Lately, I have been watching Globo Rural (a Brazilian agricultural TV show) on Internet and have been impressed by what looks like efficient and forward looking agriculture. Today I read a really good briefing article on Brazil’s agricultural miracle. It is a good news story thirty years in the making and it sort of crept up on us such that we didn’t notice. But it is big, a game changing development.
The way I think of a place like the Brazilian states (such as Mato Grosso) story is to compare it to what it must have been like in Ohio in the early part of our Western expansion. Ohio entered the Union in 1803 and at that time was largely potential. Twenty-five years later, it was a settled and very productive part of the United States. The transformation was fast and so big that it was not properly noticed because by the time it was finished it seemed so inevitable. But it wasn’t. The same goes for Brazil.
I went down to the State of Parana last year to look at some Brazilian forestry operations. I was massively impressed. They were taking timber in a sustainable manner and were heavily into improving silvaculture. The Amazon, BTW, is up north and the deforestation is not related to the developments I am talking about. That is a serious problem, but a different one. In fact, good silvaculture and agriculture in the south and central west takes the pressure off the rain forests.
They used to joke that Brazil was the country of the future and always would be. Looks like the future might be now. I have to admit that I was not optimistic twenty-five years ago, but all that I read and see has changed my mind. It gives me lots of hope for turning around what is so far the world’s biggest failure – Africa. Maybe in twenty-five years we will be talking about the African miracle.
Let me excerpt from the story from the briefing from the “Economist” and we can talk about it. You can read the whole thing at the link above.
"In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais to 108 billion reais, or 365%.
"No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union.
"Since the biggest single agricultural failure in the world during past decades has been tropical Africa, and anything that might help Africans grow more food would be especially valuable. In other words, you would describe Brazil.
"Since 1996 Brazilian farmers have increased the amount of land under cultivation by a third, mostly in the cerrado. And it has increased production by ten times that amount. But the availability of farmland is in fact only a secondary reason for the extraordinary growth in Brazilian agriculture. If you want the primary reason in three words, they are Embrapa, Embrapa, Embrapa.
"Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable.
"Embrapa received enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution.
"When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.
First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers.
"Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd.
"Embrapa has recently begun experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger increases in forage.
"Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a tropical crop. Soyabeans are native to north-east Asia (Japan, the Korean peninsular and north-east China). They are a temperate-climate crop, sensitive to temperature changes and requiring four distinct seasons. Embrapa worked out how to make it also grow in a tropical climate, on the rolling plains of Mato Grosso state and in Goiás on the baking cerrado. More recently, Brazil has also been importing genetically modified soya seeds and is now the world’s second-largest user of GM after the United States. This year Embrapa won approval for its first GM seed.
"Such improvements are continuing. The variety of soya now being planted [in Brazil’s Northeast] did not exist five years ago.
"Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat of organic material. Next year’s crop is then planted directly into the mat, retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.
"Embrapa’s latest trick is something called forest, agriculture and livestock integration: the fields are used alternately for crops and livestock but threads of trees are also planted in between the fields, where cattle can forage. This, it turns out, is the best means yet devised for rescuing degraded pasture lands.
"The fields of Mato Grosso are 2,000km from the main soyabean port at Paranaguá, which cannot take the largest, most modern ships. So Brazil transports a relatively low-value commodity using the most expensive means, lorries, which are then forced to wait for ages because the docks are clogged.
"Partly for that reason, Brazil is not the cheapest place in the world to grow soyabeans (Argentina is, followed by the American Midwest). But it is the cheapest place to plant the next acre.
Big is beautiful
"Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms. According to Mauro and Ignez Lopes of the Fundacão Getulio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro, half the country’s 5m farms earn less than 10,000 reais a year and produce just 7% of total farm output; 1.6m are large commercial operations which produce 76% of output. Not all family farms are a drain on the economy: much of the poultry production is concentrated among them and they mop up a lot of rural underemployment. But the large farms are vastly more productive.
"From the point of view of the rest of the world, however, these faults in Brazilian agriculture do not matter much. The bigger question for them is: can the miracle of the cerrado be exported, especially to Africa, where the good intentions of outsiders have so often shrivelled and died?
"There are several reasons to think it can. Brazilian land is like Africa’s: tropical and nutrient-poor. The big difference is that the cerrado gets a decent amount of rain and most of Africa’s savannah does not (the exception is the swathe of southern Africa between Angola and Mozambique).
"Brazil imported some of its raw material from other tropical countries in the first place. Brachiaria grass came from Africa. The zebu that formed the basis of Brazil’s nelore cattle herd came from India. In both cases Embrapa’s know-how improved them dramatically. Could they be taken back and improved again? Embrapa has started to do that, though it is early days and so far it is unclear whether the technology retransfer will work.
"A third reason for hope is that Embrapa has expertise which others in Africa simply do not have. It has research stations for cassava and sorghum, which are African staples. It also has experience not just in the cerrado but in more arid regions (called the sertão), in jungles and in the vast wetlands on the border with Paraguay and Bolivia. Africa also needs to make better use of similar lands.
"Still, a word of caution is in order. Brazil’s agricultural miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather, Embrapa’s was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the interventions worked together. Improving the soil and the new tropical soyabeans were both needed for farming the cerrado; the two together also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields further.
"Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn’t work and it took us 30 years to create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won’t take them so long. We’ll see.” If we see anything like what happened in Brazil itself, feeding the world in 2050 will not look like the uphill struggle it appears to be now."
This is a very uplifting story to hear! All my life I have heard the U.S. is the only place technological advancement has been made. That and the constant barage of the “giant sucking sound” of jobs being shipped overseas has put a damper on the expectations of this country. It’s good to know other parts of the world are stepping up and taking the bull by the horns.
Posted by: Weary Willie at August 30, 2010 08:56 PMWeary
I think it is interesting that other parts of the world are beginning to do their parts. It is an amazing change down in Brazil.
Posted by: C&J at August 30, 2010 10:13 PMI remember when I first learned that McDonald’s was purchasing it’s beef from Brazil. It sent a chill up my spine because I foresaw the inability of our country to produce enough to sustain itself. We should/must provide enough food for our own consumption. To think we are going to be dependent on other countries for our food is chilling.
Posted by: Weary Willie at August 30, 2010 10:45 PMWeary
The U.S. is still the world’s largest agricultural exporter and our farms remain among the most productive in the world. The fact that we buy some products from other countries is not a problem. The idea that a country needs to be self sufficient in anything is just a holdover from the mercantilism of the 18th century.
The fact that Brazil is getting better at sustainable agriculture is a good thing for us too. We can learn some things from them, just as they learned some things from us. It is not a zero sum game.
Posted by: C&J at August 30, 2010 10:56 PMI hope you’re not saying self-sufficiency is obsolete!
Posted by: Weary Willie at August 30, 2010 11:04 PMC&J,
Why it may seem 30 years is a long time and most of us only live long enough to see 2 cycles of change in our lifetime. It should come as no surprise to everyone that what works in one 150 mile area will not work in an other. Yet, it amazes me how many experts still believe there is one global solution to the issues facing the Human Race.
Instead, I do believe most people would be surprised to learn what has been done over the last 30 years by Government and Society to answer the questions asked by the Youth of the 60’s and Silver Spoons of the 70’s. Now the question is will they step aside and permit the Children of the 21st Century show the Children of the 70’s that a Green Sustainable Government and Society can be built in order to allow the Children of the next Generational Change explore the Art of Self-Sufficiency.
Posted by: Henry Schlatman at August 31, 2010 01:42 AMC&J, wrote: “The idea that a country needs to be self sufficient in anything is just a holdover from the mercantilism of the 18th century. “
Like Republican’s idea that each individual in a society should be independently providing for themselves, or suffer the degradations that attend not doing so, right? There is a blatant contradiction here for Republicans subscribing to your comment, C&J, while calling for privatizing S.S. and an end to Medicare (now dubbed ObamaCare by some Right wing extremists) as the new Alaska Tea Party candidate and many others now do.
It is illogical to postulate that nations don’t need independence of food supply, but individuals do need independently obtained resources to obtain food. When one, nation or individual, is dependent upon others for food, is that one not more vulnerable to the manipulations of the supply providers? Are consumers not inherently at greater risk if those who supply food fail in some way to do so? And have we not constructed legal systems and treaties to effectively deal with such manipulations by suppliers?
Nations have been interdependent upon each other for trade since nation’s came into existence. Lacking a WTO, U.N., G20 and G8, and international legal system, history is filled with breaches of treaties and agreements as pretext for war and territorial confiscation.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with your statement., C&J, The world has changed radically, such that, what one nation does, can have dramatic consequences for many other nations depending on it, in a global market. National interdependence is a direct result of overpopulation and free market enterprise taking root in nations with abundant resources of one kind or another. This is not a world I would have designed for my daughter to grow up in, but, it is what it is, and we all have to live with and manage what we have created as a species.
Consistently, I also subscribe to the analogy for individuals in a society. If those making decisions for many err or become corrupt, the consequences for those living with their decisions can be enormously negative. Conversely, to neglect the welfare of individuals in a society can, and will, produce very costly consequences like Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, the Unibomber, and the urban rioters of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, and organizations like the the KKK, Aryan Nation, Weathermen, Black Panthers, or, on an even larger scale, the Confederacy, threatening to tear our nation apart.
A society is only as great as the least of its own citizens. A society that ignores and neglects the plight of its members, has neither peace nor civil order in its future. A concept many Republicans cannot, and will not, subscribe to the wisdom of, unless and until, they become the neglected and ignored.
Adam Smith discusses such concepts at length in his brilliant 18th century treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiment. Ironic that such Republicans today are of the same party as Abraham Lincoln, one of the Party’s and nation’s greatest presidents.
The N.Y. Mosque protesters don’t even realize the potential consequences of their actions down the road, let alone their growing role in aiding and abetting our enemies in the Taliban and al-Queda, giving credibility to their propaganda to enlist more enemies of the United States. The consequences of such ignorance can only be mitigated by a national rebuke of such ignorance. Seems the GOP is not willing to support our nation’s future even in this, for political short term gains.
Evil will grow in strength when good people stand silently and fearfully by. America’s great destiny depends upon taking care of the least and most vulnerable insuring dignity and liberty for even these. But, it also rests upon its courage to denounce those within it, who would subvert that destiny with cowardly and aggressive prejudices and bigotry that would cast all of a skin color, or religion, or economic class in the same mold as the derelicts within those groups.
Now is the time for all good folk of the Republican and Democratic parties to rise united in denunciation of those who would take us back to our darker history of internal conflict, deprivation, and inhumane treatment of each other. The political parties have ample common enemies of our state to unite around, and fight side by side against. The offer to do so has been made by President Obama, repeatedly. None from the GOP have risen from the adolescent shame of electoral defeat, to become great again in accepting that offer, proud and good American to proud and good American. Where are the GOP’s Ronald Reagan protege’s, who would put nation and future first, rising above politics, to tend to our common enemies in united fashion?
Resentment over having lost the majority in government, and internal warfare between moderates and far right conservatives within the Party, keep the short sighted GOP leaders and potential leaders from rising to the occasion. And such petty and small minded rivalries will again cost the GOP in November in adolescent shame. Our nation continues to suffer the consequences of the GOP’s inability to bring forth great American leaders. They fight pettily over the paltry prize of Party leadership instead.
Posted by: David R. Remer at August 31, 2010 03:51 AMC&J,
Good Post, I learned some stuff about Brazil I didn’t know.
I quibble a bit with the characterization of little government subsidy. The agency you seem to most be bragging about seems like a well chosen and effective government subsidy, even if it is now public traded.
Funny how government seems to be needed to set a course above the short term almighty buck of business.
Posted by: gergle at August 31, 2010 12:07 PMC&J,
Excellent post, I really enjoyed learning about the transformation Brazil has undertaken. I just hope that these agricultural reforms are sustainable and will not lead to a dust bowl or something similar a few decades from now. However, I get the feeling the Brazilians are concerned with this sort of thing because they are adopting strategies (such as no-till agriculture) to preserve their success.
Posted by: Warped Reality at August 31, 2010 06:28 PMDavid
I really don’t think that liberals understand conservatives. Conservative have to swim in liberal lakes if they go to college or if they consume main stream media. But liberals can mostly remain among their own where they nurture stereotypes about conservatives based on their own fears and the selective processing of the most extreme comments by conservative pundits.
Conservative believe in individual responsibility, as you imply. That does not mean that we believe that individuals should be hermits w/o significant contact or responsibility for fellow humans. On the contrary, conservatives tend to be more involved in charities, churches (which are intensely social) and they even give blood more often. We just don’t believe government should be involved with providing these things to individuals.
We also understand the two-way street. I want to help people, but I expect that they will help themselves. There is reciprocity. I don’t believe in victims. Everybody should try to make some contribution.
This is probably not far different from the “liberal” point of view. The big difference is how much we want government involved. I believe that the more government does for people, the less people will do for themselves or each other.
Please also see below to Gergle.
Gergle
I think that the way the Embrapa works is how government should help. Embrapa helps create methods and technologies for the people to use, but it doesn’t dictate results or manage the economics. Government has the role to create conditions that allow individuals and firms to create prosperity and wealth.
BTW – our own USDA and state/university extensions do very similar good work. I worry a little about USDA lately, since it is straying from its mission (help farmers grow more and more sustainably) and have wandered into the morass of racial justice.
Warped
I think that we and the world learned from the Dust Bowl. I have not actually visited any of those farms in the cerrado, but all that I read and hear indicates that they are doing a good job of protecting soils and working on flexible approaches to growing crops. Of course, there are downsides. The cerrado is a high plain with a diverse & unique ecology. Much of this will be lost, much like the tall grass prairies in Iowa were replaced with cornfields. They may create a sustainable agriculture but the natural environment will be altered. My friends at the Nature Conservancy as less enthusiastic about these developments and I respect their integrity and intelligence. There is usually a loss that goes with every gain, we have to consider the net value.
Posted by: C&J at August 31, 2010 09:02 PMC&J,
I was reading some interesting articles on restoring the prairie grasses in the Edward’s aquifer. They have cleared the brush and reduced the trees to the savannah like plains of central Texas and replenished the aquifer on some ranches. The brush and trees tended to dry up the water table.
Artesian springs which had dried up were restored due to the change in the way the land was managed.
I’m practical in nature, and often agricultural production is more important than returning to some Eden like dream environment, but the more we learn about the complexities of ecosystems sometimes the best way to maintain production is to work with the environment rather than against it.
Posted by: gergle at August 31, 2010 09:21 PMgergle
it is often very simple. My USDA guy in Iraq just would run a kind of disk over hard packed slopes. They made little divits about the size of soup bowls. When it rained, water pooled there instead of running off in sheets. This simple thing helped restore aquifers and control runoff.
You really cannot be successful if you work against the natural processes, but the nature process provided naturally is not always the optimal one.
We are learning a lot about how ground water functions.
I am going down to Texas at the end of the month. Among other things, I want to look around on the llano Estacado. I have been studying up on two unrelated things that apply: Comanches and dry land agriculture. I will come down from Dodge City Kansas, on the road that goes through Borger (to see some of the Comanche sites), past Amarillo and finally ending up in Clovis, NM before heading toward Arizona. I will hit southern Texas on the way back. Any suggestions?
Posted by: C&J at August 31, 2010 10:28 PMC&J,
Look at the watering systems and how over the last 30 years great progress has been made. For although I can’t remember the name given to the system which individually waters the plants and recover the runoff. I do believe you will find the amount of water saved holds its roots in the Government taking interest in saving water for Space Flight.
C&J,
I’ll be working in College Station. The Aggies are the bee’s knees when it comes to agricultural research. I worked there a year ago, building the Ag Dept Visitor’s center and Headquarters, and now they are adding another building (administration building). I start tomorrow. The Bush Library is there, as well.
Come by and say, Hi, We can have a beer in the Dixie Chicken. It’s an old bar that has been there for ages. It’s sort of an Aggie tradition.
I was in Austin over the week end. Barton Springs on the west side is beautiful country with spectacular canyon views. And, of course, in San Antonio…remember the Alamo!:)
The river walk is nice, too.
Be careful in the Valley (the border area). It is a large agricultural area, with year round growing season.
Posted by: gergle at September 1, 2010 12:00 AMC&J wrote: “I really don’t think that liberals understand conservatives. Conservative have to swim in liberal lakes if they go to college or if they consume main stream media.”
I think your comments are delusional. Polls show the vast majority of America leans more conservative than liberal. The media provides incredible and sometimes even disproportionate coverage of conservative candidates. Sharon Angle shouldn’t be known to anyone outside Nevada. But, her name is nationally covered in the news. Sarah Palin gets coverage in media wherever she goes.
Boehner and McConnel appear in the news on MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, frequently, more frequently than any Democratic Congress persons as of late. And then the Fake News network covers conservatives constantly.
You may feel you are a minority fish in a liberal school, but, the fact is, registered democrats outnumber registered republicans by only a small percentage. Subtract conservative democrats, and registered republicans might outnumber the non-conservative democrats. As for schools, the reality is, there is a correlation between education and liberal political lean, slightly greater than that between education and a conservative lean. But, it is a correlation, not a cause and effect.
I have spent many years in America’s schools and colleges, I recall only one instructor ever proffering anything remotely like a partisan flavor to their teachings, and that was a lawyer teaching a Government class in Jr. College back in the 1980’s. He was a Republican who taught us that politics was all about money and credit. It was a valuable lesson and I learned it well. He knew what he was talking about.
I think those calling themselves conservatives today suffer the delusion that because they can’t hold on to majority power in government, that somehow the rest of the nation is arrayed against them and outnumber them. I assure you, it is a delusion, brought on by a self-induced inferiority complex.
If the GOP spent a quarter of its time and resources finding and promoting outstanding candidates with a logical and rational head on their shoulders, as they spend on lies and misinformation and deceiving the public, they just might be able to heal their neuroses. But, then, any candidate with a logical, well-educated and rational head on their shoulders would never meet with the approval of the far right hysterical wing of the GOP, which the rest of the Party now caters and clings to, in order to stay in the game.
Sen. Orrin Hatch denounced those who would deprive the Muslims their Mosque in NYC, and said if American Muslim citizens choose to build there, on their own property, he defends their rights and prerogative to do so, citing religious freedom and private property rights as hallmarks of our founding principles, to be defended.
Why is the GOP so devoid of this kind of courage and defense of America’s conservative principles, these days? Conservatives are supposed to be about protecting and defending the Constitution, aren’t they? So, why are Republicans not denouncing these so-called Republican paranoids burning private property at a Mosque site, and terrorizing fellow Americans wanting to expand their place of worship in Murfeesboro, Tenn?
Mark my words, Hatch, who stands alone in the GOP on this, will become a target of the Tea Party anti-incumbent movement. The GOP is at war with itself, and the extremists in the party are winning an awful lot of the battles, of late. Why is Mitt Romney so silent on this issue? He fears the extremist wing of his party and the damaging effect they could have on his next presidential run. Romney is a Mormon. Above all others, he knows well that if the extremists are allowed to deprive rights to Muslims, Mormons will be added to their list. No courage, I suspect. Political expedience triumphs over conservative principles, yet again.
I don’t think informed liberals misunderstand conservatives. They simply don’t agree. Ron Paul is an excellent example of a conservative with enormous integrity and political courage, whose understanding of economics belongs to the land of Narnia, not the real world of trade and global market interdependence and economic management.
I respect Ron Paul enormously on a personal basis. But he is a fruit cake on the topic of economics, who would destroy our economy and cause immeasurable suffering for more than 90% of Americans in his pursuit of restoring an 18th century economic model to the modern 21st century America.
McCain is a man without any integrity as a politician, but, enormous balls and courage. He knows personally the value of religious freedom and First Amendment implications of Mosque protesters. The man is silent as far as I can tell, so far.
Extremists began taking over the GOP in 1994 when the Party’s leaders embraced the Fundamentalist Right Evangelical Christian movement and welcomed the former Democratic racists into their party with open arms for political expedience. Well, that’s a bed Newt Gingrich et. al, made for the GOP, and now they all have to rise each morning with extremist parasites tugging and pulling and pushing the GOP policy agenda.
That FREC component was single most potent electorate factor in electing Peter Principle’s poster child, George W. Bush, to the presidency. And look at what it has cost the GOP and the nation.
Obama has worked around the extremist progressive wing of his Party, and denied them their extremist agenda, which has cost his Party the voter enthusiasm factor. But, they will still vote Democratic. There is a lesson here for the GOP, if they dare to learn anything from Obama.
By all statistical probability based on historically similar election years, Republicans should have a landslide victory in November. But, the more I dig down into the polling, the surer I am, Republicans will not take a majority in either house of Congress. The GOP is at war with itself, and lacks the leaders capable of taking on the extremists and denying them control of the party while leaving them no choice but to vote Republican, anyway.
Conservatives are themselves, contradictory. Conservative is to be anti-monopoly. Yet, Republicans welcome the support of, and pay back that support coming from, monopolistic corporations and their oligopolies with legislation favoring their monopolistic interests. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was just such a bill put forth by Republicans in direct contradiction to the anti-monopolistic Glass-Steagal Act. Conservatives should have opposed that bill from the outset. They didn’t.
Conservative philosophy demands that war, always a drain on domestic resources and economy and tax payers, be engaged in only for national self-defense purposes. Yet, Republicans took our nation to invade Iraq, which posed NO threat to America, and cost us more than 3/4 of a trillion dollars during a time of record deficits and debt growth, at the hands of Republicans.
Sorry, but, I think you are mistaken that informed liberals don’t understand conservatives. They do. They see conservatives supporting the Republican Party and appreciate the contradiction and hypocrisy of doing so, placing political expedience always above conservative principles. PayGO is a conservative concept. Democrats for it, Republicans fight it.
Taxes adjusted to meet the needs of the economy and prevent deficits and debt is a conservative principle. Democrats legislating for it. Republicans fighting it.
Promoting education as a basis for improving public wealth, self-reliance, innovation, and entrepreneurial activity is a conservative principle dating back to Adam Smith and Abraham Lincoln. Democrats promoting it, Republicans calling for an end to the Department of Education.
What I find fascinating is how Republicans manage the cognitive dissonance of calling themselves conservatives and opposing Democrat’s attempts at instituting some of these conservative principles. Even more fascinating is how real conservatives continue to support the GOP, though many with integrity have left the GOP to register as Independents, though a great many still vote Republican.
Democrats propose a Congressional Commission to establish a policy to end deficits and reduce national debt. Republicans voted against it. Looks to me like there are more conservative principles being observed by Democrats today, than by Republicans in government.
While Republicans fight over who is a true conservative, Democrats maintain a higher public approval rating as a Party than Republicans in poll after poll. No doubt partially a result of Democrats actually pushing for some conservative principles, instead of bragging about them falsely as Republicans now do.
There is no integrity within the GOP, anymore. They have lied so much and so long, they now believe their own lies and act on them as if they were real. The GOP grows less and less conservative and more and more radical and extremist year after year, election after election. Replacing John Warners and Joe Scarboroughs with the likes of Rand Paul and Sharon Angle, spells nothing good for the GOP going forward. And that is going to cost America as a nation, sadly.
Democracy can only work if the people are well informed, and not misinformed, and if they assume the responsibility of holding their representatives accountable for the government the voters have to live under. What we have in America today, is ass backwards. When the infotainment sophists out to enrich themselves like Glenn Beck, Sara Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, and extreme PACs like MoveOn.Org, and the LaRouche PAC, become the titular heads of political parties setting the party’s agenda and compromising it, that Party ceases to be functional and will suffer a loss of confidence by those voters who exert the effort to be well informed.
Both parties are struggling with this. The GOP however, is failing in their struggle.
Posted by: David R. Remer at September 1, 2010 02:08 AMDavid
It is true that conservatives outnumber liberals in the general population by about two to one. But liberals have a greater than proportional membership in the chattering classes, such as journalists and college professors. They tend to talk to each other and consume each other’s writing. That is why they were surprised at the great popularity of Ronald Reagan. Today they cannot figure out why so many people prefer Fox News.
Re the Muslims – almost nobody thinks they don’t have the RIGHT to build. But as Harry Reid & Howard Dean have said, it is probably not wise to do it.
BTW – speaking of the mosque, I bet those guys don’t have enough money to build the thing anyway. There is a lot of sound and fury, but I think the good Imam is hoping the controversy helps his fund raising. That mosque will never be built there because they don’t have the cash and I doubt if local unionized workers will work on the site.
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