It Takes A Village Idiot

Barack Obama has once again spoken about the wisdom of his family in ultra-modern, high-tech, super-productive Kenya. The Kenyan Obamas told him that “economic growth can’t just be for the lucky few,” and he repeated that complicated and prescient economic theory last weekend at the G-8 Global Agriculture and Food Security symposium

Individual thinking and theorizing is a great thing, but when you put the entire Obama family together, the thinking becomes sharper and the collective IQ rises almost to room temperature. Said Obama: “Most of the world’s unused arable land is in Africa. Fifty years ago, Africa was an exporter of food. There is no reason why Africa should not be feeding itself and exporting food again. There is no reason for that.” He concludes that the successful non-African nations are “lucky,” but it seems to me his own statement says there’s something more than bad luck involved in Africa’s poverty.

Did the land become less fertile over the past fifty years, thereby requiring that the lucky folks share their bounty with Africa? Or are other factors at work? Say, incessant civil and tribal warfare that takes the young men who could be working the fields off the farms and onto the battlefields? Or how about Muslim warfare on infidels, which includes mass murder of Christians and Animists and the destruction of their fields and industries? How about inattention to all the modern agricultural techniques available to everyone and ongoing adherence to proto-communist tribal ownership of land and the means of production?

Obama sends out the clarion call and a plan for African victory over poverty: “So even as the world responds with food aid in a crisis—as we’ve done in the Horn of Africa—communities can’t go back just to the way things were, vulnerable as before, waiting for the next crisis to happen. Development has to be sustainable, and as an international community, we have to do better.” Shouldn’t the Africans do better as well?

Couldn’t they go back to the way things were fifty years ago? Back to the time that Africa was an exporter of food by Obama’s own admission? Or have they done so much damage to their own infrastructure that only the lavish gifts of the “lucky” can put them back on track? They used to blame it on colonialism, but that magic fifty years has passed, and most Africans have never seen a European colonial government. Obama added that "growth shouldn't be reserved for those who already have enough." And who, Mr. President, gets to determine what is "enough?"


Naturally, we all know what this is leading to. Confiscating other people’s money and bounty to help people who have largely brought their misfortune on themselves. To be "fair," the Africans should eat the lucky rich (figuratively, I think) And let’s not forget the damage caused by drought and global warming. He has a remedy for that. More money. I hope his plan for Africa is better than his plan for California. Obama troops at the EPA and other regulatory agencies have turned America’s food basket in California’s San Joaquin Valley back into the desert it was over 100 years ago.

Pioneers and visionary statesmen saw the potential in the fertile valley, so they found ways to get water to the area, and the desert bloomed. Water is still abundant, but it can no longer reach the Valley because of EPA and state restrictions on the flow of water to protect a useless fish species. And if the Africans don't want to learn from earlier Californians, maybe they and their Arab neighbors could learn from Israel. Oh, scratch that. They're Jews.

Obama threw in pretty much everything except the kitchen sink. “We see an Africa that still faces huge hurdles, stark inequalities, most Africans still living on less than $2.00 a day; climate change that increases the risk of drought and famine (at least there is natural), all of which perpetuates stubborn barriers in agriculture, in the agricultural sector—from bottlenecks in infrastructure that prevent food from getting to market, to the lack of credit, especially for farmers, most of whom are women.” I doubt that his solution will be to impose a minimum wage, carbon offsets, work requirements, and income equality for women. That only works in successful economies that need to be brought down to third-world levels.

But he does allude to his one [temporary] success. “When there is good nutrition, especially in those thousand days during pregnancy up to the child’s second birthday, it means healthier lives for that child and that mother—and it’s the smart thing to do because better nutrition means lower health care costs and it means less need for assistance later on. Aha! More arugula. He will impose Obamacare on people who can’t fight back, then send Michelle to teach them what to eat and how much. Then, when the birth rate goes up and infant mortality goes down, we can introduce them to assembly-line abortion.

That means that only one “fix” remains. Billions of American tax dollars to feed Africans the right diet. The food and the money will come from the “lucky”nations, which largely means the United States. In other words, give them a fish, but don’t teach them how to fish. And make sure it’s not an endangered species, it is mercury-free, government-certified and politically-correct. No California Delta smelt for the Africans.