Eating America’s Seed Corn

[Mazeppa]

August 23, 2012 12:00 A.M.
Eating America’s Seed Corn
We have chosen to imperil the future out of greed and foolishness.

By Victor Davis Hanson

As gas prices climb back toward $4 a gallon, the Obama administration — facing a tough reelection campaign and rising Middle East tensions — is once again considering tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For years, administrations have bought and stored oil for emergencies, in fear of a cutoff of imported oil, as happened during the Arab embargo of 1973–74.

But since 2009, the U.S. government has declared most federal lands off-limits to new oil and gas exploration — despite vast recent finds of energy and radically new means to tap it. President Obama also canceled the most vital sections of the Keystone pipeline, a proposed conduit from the Canadian oil fields into the heart of the oil-consuming U.S., while preventing production on existing oil and gas reserves in northern Alaska and offshore. In the midst of a crop-killing drought, we are diverting about 40 percent of our shrinking corn crop to produce high-cost ethanol fuels.

Apparently, Americans are not willing to produce enough new available oil to meet our always growing gasoline appetites. Yet to keep gas prices manageable in an election year, we will surely tap what our predecessors banked for us.

The same shortsighted selfishness characterizes debates over entitlements and the deficit. Republicans accuse Obama of transferring more than $700 billion out of Medicare to help fund his new federal takeover of health care. Obama counters that Representative Paul Ryan’s budget plans would either privatize or end Medicare as we know it. But either way, without revolutionary changes, Medicare’s costs will almost double in the next ten years and bankrupt the system.

Periodic tax hikes to support Medicare have never quite caught up with ever-growing expenses, as the pool of elderly recipients exploded and the number of younger payers shrunk. Baby boomers insist that politicians keep Medicare payouts untouched, but that unrealistic demand will ensure that millions of mostly poorer younger people will pay more and receive less — if anything — themselves.

Since 2001, the federal government has added more than $10 trillion to the U.S. debt. Even the supposedly toughest budget cutters admit that they cannot realistically balance the budget within the next ten years, much less pay down what may soon reach $20 trillion in aggregate national debt.

The generation now in charge of the country can afford such reckless borrowing only because interest rates remain at historic lows. But should inflation mount, the cost to service this enormous borrowing will ensure that generations to come will have to sacrifice to pay back what others long gone spent so recklessly.

Americans have rarely questioned the value of a college education — until now. Tuition costs are soaring and jobs for those with bachelor’s degrees grow scarcer. Yet campuses have added layers of unnecessary administrative bureaucracy and offered student services more akin to spas than institutions of learning.

Teaching loads are generally less than they were 30 years ago, while opportunities for faculty travel and release time are far greater. The result is that collective student indebtedness has reached $1 trillion, with the cost of financing college similar to taking out a huge home mortgage.

Yet few universities seem willing to freeze or reduce tuition costs by slashing unnecessary administrators, having faculty teach more courses, and cutting back on perks such as student unions that resemble Club Med, superfluous and trendy “studies” classes, or redundant campus “centers.” Spiraling costs for the higher-education industry are serviced by ballooning student debt that will take decades to pay down.

There is more talk of our deteriorating roads, bridges, and dams than there was during the 1960s, a far poorer era. But again, such erosion is no accident. While our grandparents sacrificed to leave us spectacular freeway interchanges and new airports, we allowed it all to decay without worrying about who will restore the infrastructure after we are gone.

Examine the annual rates of budget increases in Medicare, Social Security, unemployment and disability insurance, food stamps, and public pensions. The common denominator is redistribution and consumption right now for us — investment and maintenance later for others.

“Eating seed corn” is a metaphor for being forced into the no-win situation of imperiling the future to survive the present. So the allusion does not quite work with contemporary America. Unlike the proverbial farmer who loses his crop to drought or pests, and thereby is forced to live on next year’s planting seed, Americans are under no such coercion.

We were not forced into our dilemmas by nature, but simply by choice — and our own greed and foolishness.

[I Am Right]

No, I want it now, its my money! I want it when I want it.

[SanJoaquinSooner]

New Rule: If your entire party tries to get rid of you, and you stay in, you can't talk about how easy it is for a woman to push a stupid prick out of her body.

I don't want to waste another second thinking about Todd Akin, and his theory that you can't get pregnant unless your eggs are asking for it. Here's the only thing you need to know about Todd Akin and human anatomy: he's an a$$hole. What I want to talk about is how it's not a coincidence that the party of fundamentalism is also the party of fantasy. When I say religion is a mental illness, this is what I mean: it corrodes your mental faculties to the point where you can believe in tiny ninja warriors who hide in vaginas and lie in wait for bad people's sperm.

Evangelicals might like to pretend that the magical thinking that they indulge in at home doesn't affect what they do at the office, but it absolutely does. The brain that believes in angels and miracles and Jesus riding a dinosaur is trained to see the world not as it is, but as you want it to be.

Republicans would like to pretend like Congressman Akin's substitution of superstition for science is a lone problem but it's not: they're all magical thinkers, on nearly every issue. They don't get their answers on climate change from climatologists, they get them from the Book of Genesis. Hence Sharia Law in America is a dire threat, and global warming a hoax.

Or take the issue that consumes the right these days, our sea of red ink: Republicans are united in their fervent desire to reduce the deficit, but they want to do it in some magical fashion that doesn't involve raising taxes or cutting any spending. When given a choice in polls between these two options, a majority of Republicans check "none of the above" as a way to reduce the deficit. That's like deciding to pay off your student loans by daydreaming.

Or as it's known on Capitol Hill, supply-side economics. Remember that magic beans theory? That you actually bring in more revenue by bringing in less? Ronald Reagan believed it. But at least back in the '80s it was new. The thing is, we tried it, and it doesn't work. Yet, Paul Ryan, who every ****-for-brains pundit in America keeps telling us is a "serious" guy, still believes in the supply-side theory. All the Republicans do. They all believe in something that both science and history have shown to be pure fantasy. The symbol for their party shouldn't be an elephant -- it should be a unicorn.

Paul Ryan is their tough guy on spending but he doesn't want to touch defense -- that's right, a budget hawk who doesn't think there's anything bloated about the Defense Department's budget. It's like being a health inspector and finding nothing wrong with the Asian place that has the chicken hanging in the window. This is how low we've put the bar for political courage -- that you can just write, "I want a pony" in a binder and call it the "Plan For Restoring Vision For the Future of America's Greatness" or some ****, and then everyone has to refer to you as the serious one in Congress. It reminds me of health care. Republicans are for all the popular things, like covering people with pre-existing conditions, but they're not for the part where you pay for it, like the mandate. Just like they were for our recent wars, but not for paying for them. For the prescription drug bill, but not for paying for it.

How do they get away with it? They know that, because we're already such a religious country, our minds are primed for magical, fantasy thinking. The gullibility comes factory-installed. They've learned that you appeal not to an American's head, but to his gut -- it's a much bigger target. But here's the problem: life is complicated. I mean, I know we know some things for sure, like why Jesus put us here on Earth: to watch Here Comes Honey Boo Boo on a 50-inch TV screen. But what about the Chinese slaves who made the TV? What about carbon from the coal that generated the electricity? What about the Walmart where we bought it, where the workers don't have health insurance? What about racism, or the oceans turning into nail polish remover? The grown-up answer is: identify problems scientifically, prioritize and solve. The Republican answer is: there isn't a problem. And anyone who tells you different is a liar who hates America. We don't have to make hard choices. We just have to ignore the science and the math -- that's why God gave us values.

If rape babies throw a monkey wrench into the whole right-to-life pitch, just make believe rape babies don't exist. If you want to cut down on teen pregnancy, just tell curious kids with raging hormones to practice abstinence. Until they get married. Because everyone knows, that's when the ****ing never stops. Health care? Not a problem if you just keep repeating, "We have the greatest health care in the world." Even though the U.N. ranks it 37th.

What's the solution to global warming? It's that it isn't real, and even if it is, big whoop, just buy an air conditioner, you *****. Republicans also believe that putting the word "clean" next to the word "coal" creates something called clean coal. Even though there's the exact same amount of evidence for clean coal as there is for Todd Akin's mistaken baby makin' theory.

Republicans also believe if they kick all the Mexicans out of the country, the strawberries will pick themselves, and that if they cut the safety net all the poor blacks are "resting" in, they will fall gently to the ground, stand up, dust themselves off, and get good-paying jobs as Olympic gymnasts.

Next week in Tampa the Republicans must admit that the difference between a GOP convention and Comic-Con is that the people at Comic-Con have a much firmer grasp of reality.

Bill Maher is the host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

[SanJoaquinSooner]

Thucydides vs.
Victor Davis Hanson

Bogus scholarship in support of
a failed policy

by John Taylor

Victor Davis Hanson, previously a classics professor at Fresno State specializing in the military history of ancient Greece and currently embedded at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is a fervent apologist for the Bush administration's interventionist foreign policy. In his enthusiasm to transform the Islamic world by force and serve his new political patrons, Hanson has shamelessly debased his own scholarship. And how ironic that military historian Hanson, like his fellow neocons who urge violence to remake the Middle East, has never served in the U.S. military. Hanson truly has much in common with the administration's corps of instant Middle East experts: He has never lived or worked in the Arab world and has no specialist knowledge of the region. He speaks no Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, or Farsi. At least when Trotsky set out to create the new Soviet man, he could speak Russian.

Hanson has been an indefatigable cheerleader for the Iraq war. He's not as quotable as Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman. He's not as humorous as William Kristol, who claimed on NPR "that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of fundamentalist Islamic regime" was merely "pop sociology." Hanson's clangers, nevertheless, illustrate just how much of an administration shill he has been. Before the war Hanson declared ponderously, "The EU, the UN, NATO, the European street, the American Left … by failing to understand the post 9/11 world and its requirement to neutralize Saddam Hussein, have unnecessarily put their perceived wisdom, prestige, and influence in jeopardy – and with the liberation of Iraq they all are going to lose big time." His other predictions were no better: "oil production will rise to over three million barrels. That would help to allow the world price to decline – or at least stabilize" and the "Marines will find more deadly weapons in the first hours of war than the UN did in three months. "

Even as the America's Iraq adventure began to fail, Hanson followed the administration's lead and blamed the press for failing to report the "good news" from Iraq: "It is good to remind Americans that the news from Iraq is far better than the gloom and doom promulgated by the press and the political opposition, many of whom are tied inextricably to their past predictions of failure." And Hanson did not shrink from praising the president, although one is tempted to conclude Hanson had developed a certain sense of irony:

"[A] country that was the worst in the Middle East [is] evolving into the best. … [A] reborn democratic Iraq will overturn almost all the conventional wisdom, here and abroad, about the Middle East, the nature and purpose of war in our age, the moral differences between Europe and America – and the place in history of George W. Bush."

Hanson made his reputation in academia studying the warfare of ancient Greece. His most recent book, A War Like No Other, has as its subject the Peloponnesian War, that 5th-century B.C. struggle between Athens and Sparta for mastery of the Greek world. Hanson's title is a quote from the redoubtable historian Thucydides, who fought for Athens during the war and whose history of the conflict, The Peloponnesian War, is the world's first and perhaps still greatest political history. Academics and general readers esteem Thucydides for his critical approach to his sources, his accuracy, and his lack of overt prejudice. Unfortunately, Hanson's unqualified endorsement of the administration's foreign policy and his pleasure at being treated as the administration's tamed academic and house historian have led him to sacrifice intellectual rigor and honesty to shoehorn the Peloponnesian war into the neocon world view.

The Peloponnesian War was fought between 431 and 404 B.C., with a truce that suspended most hostilities from 421 to 415 B.C. The war pitted Athens, its maritime empire, and its allies against Sparta and its allies. Athens was strong at sea while Sparta had the best land forces in Greece. They fought on land and at sea all over the Greek world, including the island of Sicily, where the Greeks had established colonies as early as the 8th century B.C.

Hanson associates Athens and its democratic system, limited as the Athenian franchise may have been, with the United States and links the Athenian struggle against an oligarchic, militaristic Sparta with America's efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Hanson equates Osama bin Laden's 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington to the Spartan invasion of Attica, which began the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. Because Hanson is keen to attribute the 9/11 attacks to the failure of previous administrations to retaliate strongly after terrorist strikes against American interests in Beirut, Aden, Khobar, and Tanzania, he claims both events, 9/11 and the Spartan invasion, flow from the same inability to deter the attacker. "They [the Athenians] lost the deterrence, and the war started," said Hanson in a 2006 speech. Thucydides, however, attributed the Spartan decision to attack to fear of growing Athenian power.

Who is right, Thucydides or Victor Davis Hanson? The years prior to the start of the Peloponnesian War witnessed a tremendous expansion of Athenian wealth and power. The Athenians transformed the Delian League, which originally functioned as a voluntary alliance against Persia, into an Athenian empire. Athens forced member states to pay an annual tribute to the Athenian treasury, and membership ceased to be voluntary. Concurrently, Athens extended its influence by fostering democratic revolutions in states that had been neutral or friendly to Sparta and throttled Sparta's remaining allies by restricting their rights to trade with Athens and its dependencies. Did Sparta attack Athens because it was weak and unwilling to defend itself? On the contrary, Sparta attacked Athens because Athens was strong and getting stronger.

Hanson has said repeatedly that the United States should continue military intervention in the Middle East until all the countries in that region have bent to the American will. Thus it is not surprising that one of Hanson's "lessons" from the Peloponnesian War is that Athens should not have accepted a truce with Sparta in 421 B.C. In reaching this conclusion Hanson reveals clearly that he either fails to understand the nature of the Peloponnesian War or that he is prostituting his scholarship to support neocon intentions toward Iraq, Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so on. By offering Athens a truce the Spartans were essentially admitting You are already too strong. We cannot defeat you and your sea borne empire. By accepting the truce the Athenians knew they would not have to risk their empire to the uncertainties of war and that its favorable political and financial arrangements would remain intact, enabling their city to grow stronger each year.

In 415 B.C. the Athenians, enjoying the fruits of their truce with Sparta but with Sparta still a threat, attacked the city of Syracuse in Sicily, some 700 miles from Athens. After several years of fighting, the Athenian expeditionary force, the flower of the Athenian army and navy, was totally destroyed. Now if America equals Athens and Sparta equals the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the unprovoked and disastrous Athenian attack on Syracuse, a city that in no way threatened Athens, is difficult for Hanson to fit into his lessons from ancient Greece. Although Hanson tries to avoid equating the Athenian attack on Syracuse with the American invasion of Iraq, Thucydides betrays him.

The American debate about the wisdom of attacking Iraq is uncannily similar to the debate in the Athenian Assembly about whether to invade Sicily. The Athenians questioned the motives of Sicilian refugees pressing for war, "these exiles, whose interest is to lie as well as they can, who do nothing but talk themselves and leave the danger to others, and who if they succeed will show no proper gratitude." How reminiscent of Ahmed Chalabi and all the bogus intelligence sources he provided. Remember too that ultimately Chalabi showed his gratitude by betraying American secrets to Iran. Thucydides also reported that Athenian envoys sent to Sicily claimed falsely that the Athenian invasion would be self-financing, an assertion eerily similar to Paul Wolfowitz's testimony before Congress in March 2003: "The oil revenues of that country [Iraq] could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years. … We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." In the end the Athenian Assembly voted overwhelmingly for war, although Thucydides noted that many who opposed the Sicilian expedition voted for it anyway so as not to be labeled "unpatriotic."

As for the war itself, Nikias, the Athenian general appointed to command the expedition, warned that it would be unwise to attack Syracuse with the Spartans still a threat. But one will never find Hanson asking whether it was wise to attack Iraq with the Taliban resisting in Afghanistan and bin Laden at large. Nikias also doubted the wisdom of invading a place as large as Sicily and warned prophetically against attacking people that even if conquered could not be controlled. And perhaps most insightfully of all for both the Athenian adventure in Sicily and the American adventure in Iraq, Nikias, who was to be killed in Sicily, observed, "Sicily would fear us most if we never went there at all, and next to this, if after displaying our power we went away again as soon as possible."

Ultimately Sparta prevailed over Athens with help from the Persians. In return for financing the Spartan fleet, Sparta recognized Persian suzerainty over the Greek cities in Asia Minor. How ironic that the Spartans, who gained immortal fame resisting the Persians at Thermopylae, should just two generations later betray their fellow Greeks for Persian gold. The greatest beneficiaries of the Peloponnesian War were the Persians, just as they are today from our fiasco in Iraq.

[SoonerBread]

...

Bill Maher is the host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.

The main difference between Akin and Maher? While Akin may indeed be an *******, Maher has his head firmly installed inside his own *******.

Maher is a horrible example for the left.

**** him.

[cleller]

Corn/Ethanol=buying the votes of Midwesterners who would otherwise not support you.

[SoonerProphet]

What a chump. Guess he thinks warfare-statism pays for itself.

[soonercruiser]

I'm hungry!

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