How Do You Tell The Corrupt Politicians From The Honest Ones?

Across the big river from me, New Jersey State Senate President Stephen Sweeney has just created a big stir by calling on New Jersey's Attorney General and U.S. Attorney to investigate the New Jersey Education Association (teachers union) and Fraternal Order of Police for what he calls a "clear case of extortion."  NJ.com has the story here.  

This is not a small deal.  Sweeney is of course a Democrat, often referred to as the most powerful Democrat in the state (the current Governor -- Chris Christie -- being a Republican).  But more than that, Sweeney's background is as a unionized construction worker.  Before going into politics, he started in the Ironworkers union in 1977, and held several positions in that union, including serving as an organizer.  So it's quite something for Sweeney to take on the most powerful public employee unions in this way. 

And what have the teachers and police unions done to be on the receiving end of a charge of "extortion"?  It seems that the unions want a particular piece of legislation passed (setting up a referendum they think they will win on a constitutional amendment to get increased pension funding), and they orchestrated a series of calls to legislators threatening to withhold campaign contributions from anyone who did not support the legislation.  From nj.com:

Representatives from the powerful teachers' union contacted Democratic party leaders Monday and said unless and until there is a vote on a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing billions of dollars to the government worker pension fund, they would not make campaign contributions this year.  Sweeney also told reporters his legislative office had received a direct threat from Bob Fox, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. Fox said no state senator would receive a contribution from the union until the resolution to put the referendum on the ballot is passed, according to an internal email describing the phone message.

OK, here's your quiz for today:  Crime, or not crime?  How do you tell?

As a clue, I will give you the quote from the expert on the subject chosen by nj.com. He is Jeffrey Brindle, executive director of New Jersey's Election Law Enforcement Commission.  If anyone is in a position to know whether this is OK or not, he would be the guy -- right?  Well, he doesn't know:

"It doesn't look good," said Jeffrey Brindle, . . .  "[But] political scientists have had to wrestle with this for some time: What is quid pro quo? A contribution in exchange for supporting certain policies and legislation? I think it's pretty close."

And he's right.  The law is a complete mess.  For more on the totally muddled legal situation, see my posts here and here.  The short statement of the law is, a "quid pro quo" payment to a politician in return for some "official act" is a crime.  So, is a legislator who takes a campaign contribution from someone who hopes he will vote a particular way on some piece of legislation guilty of a crime?  Unfortunately, it is inevitable that every single legislator will at some point vote on some piece of legislation in a way favorable to some campaign contributor.  Are they all criminals?  How do you tell which are which?

As readers here know, my position is, government is inherently corrupt.  There is no way around it.  That's just one of the reasons (although perhaps the most important one) why we are complete fools to entrust to the government more and more power to redistribute the wealth of society, supposedly to create more fairness and justice in the world.  What this process actually creates is more corruption.  And does this process create more fairness?  If it did, why does Manhattan -- the jurisdiction with the highest taxes and the most extensive suite of progressive welfare and redistributive government programs in the whole country -- have the highest income inequality?  

Meanwhile, kudos to Mr. Sweeney for calling out these corrupt union thugs.  The fact that their conduct may not be criminal does not make it any less disgusting.  People, this is how the government operates out of your sight.  Once in a while you get a little peak at the inner processes.  

What Does It Mean For A Politician To "Move To The Left"?

Much of the talk about Hillary Clinton's positions in the campaign has been about whether she has "moved to the left."  For example, here is an article from NPR on March 31 titled "Has Bernie Sanders Moved Hillary Clinton To The Left?"  Sometimes in these discussions the word "liberal" is used as a synonym for "left," as in this article from the Washington Post in April ("Sanders wasn’t the only force pushing her to the left.  Democrats, in general, have become much more willing to embrace liberal policies over the past couple of decades.")  

In this context, what does it mean to be "further left" or "more liberal"?  As far as I can see, the terms refer to very little more than merely the blind faith that more government spending, mandates and rules can cure all the perceived unfairness and injustice in the world without any negative consequences to speak of.  And since there are no negative consequences, why are we wasting our time worrying about things like budgets, deficits, debt, or crowding out of private activity?  

And thus Hillary's campaign has consisted of gradually going along with every big new idea for more spending coming out of the Sanders/Warren wing of the party, with not a moment's worth of discussion of costs or limits:

• Elizabeth and Bernie say that Social Security should be expanded?  OK, I'll get on board with that.
• Free college?  Why not?
• A student loan forgiveness program?  Hey, what's a trillion or so dollars?
• Minimum wage?  Maybe we should be a little modest and only go to $12 for now.  No, forget about that, make it $15.
• A new blowout government "stimulus" program to create millions of new jobs?  Hey, all wealth comes from the government spending the free money, right?

Now here's the problem:  As soon as one concedes that the government has a legitimate role in providing a so-called "safety net," there immediately will be a line that needs to be drawn between those that get the handouts and those that pay for them.  And there will be pressure from all those not getting the handouts to get in on them.  So, what's the basis on which the line gets drawn?  Have you ever heard anyone on the Left, any liberal or self-described "progressive," ever so much as considering the need for a line or a limit, or a reasoned basis on which such a line should be drawn?

If you think that the Sanders and Warren (and now Clinton) proposals constitute the high bid on potential government blowout spending, then perhaps you haven't seen the new manifesto that came out from the Black Lives Matter movement a few days ago.  It's called "A Vision for Black Lives."  Here is a link.  A short summary is:  We'll see Sanders and Warren, and raise them several trillion more!  For starters, there are healthcare demands and education demands to make Sanders and Warren look ridiculously cheap by comparison.  For example:

Real, meaningful and equitable universal healthcare that guarantees: proximity to nearby comprehensive health centers, culturally competent services for all people, specific services for queer, gender nonconforming, and trans people, full bodily autonomy, full reproductive services, mental health services, paid parental leave, and comprehensive quality child and elder care.

Or this on education:

[A] free education for all, special protections for queer and trans students, wrap around services, social workers, free health services (including reproductive body autonomy), a curriculum that acknowledges and addresses students’ material and cultural needs, physical activity and recreation, high quality food, free daycare, and freedom from unwarranted search, seizure or arrest.

Hey, we're just getting started.  How about "universal" jobs programs:

Federal and state job programs that specifically target the most economically marginalized Black people, and compensation for those involved in the care economy. Job programs must provide a living wage and encourage support for local workers centers, unions, and Black-owned businesses which are accountable to the community.

Oh, and did I mention "reparations"?  They don't give us any numbers.  Will $1 trillion do?  How about ten?  A hundred?  And then plenty more on environmental regulation (ban fossil fuels!), "economic justice," and more.

So Hillary, are you on board with all of this?  Or is there a limit somewhere?  If there is a limit, can you kindly enlighten us on how to find it?

Meanwhile, how's it going with the trillion or so per year of current government spending supposedly designed to combat poverty?  I think that's what the BLM manifesto characterizes as the "War on Black People."  Somehow government spending in the real world not only doesn't cure the problem, but makes it worse.

Where Are The "Millions Of Full Time Workers Living In Poverty"?

The famous Bernie Sanders quote when he advocates for his socialist-model government programs and a greatly increased minimum wage is this one:  "It is a national disgrace that millions of full-time workers are living in poverty . . . ."     That phrase has been repeated by Bernie multiple times in multiple venues.

When you hear this line, what image comes to your mind?  Typically, the image would be of a hard-working twenty- to thirty-something, striving at a job all day every day and struggling single-handedly to support him/herself, one or more children, and maybe a spouse, and coming up with not enough to eat or pay the rent.  Oh, and receiving little or nothing from the government to alleviate the poverty.  What kind of cold-hearted person would be OK with allowing "millions" of people in this very affluent country to suffer such deprivation despite their hard work?

But is that image that I depicted really a fair characterization of any significant number of people in this country, let alone millions of people?  Remember, as I have pointed out many times on this site, "poverty," as defined by official federal criteria, is almost completely unrelated to your mental image of what it means to be poor.  You are thinking of a state of physical deprivation -- insufficient food, clothing, or shelter -- but the official definition is talking about a statistical artifact that considers only one piece of the resources available to low income people ("cash income"), while ignoring the bulk of their means of support in a cynical game to inflate the numbers.  Now, of course I am not saying that there are no people in the United States who work full time for the whole year and yet are in a bona fide state of physical-deprivation poverty.  But if we actually look at the statistics for the number of people in this country in full time minimum wage and other low-wage jobs, and we consider the benefits already provided to them by existing federal programs, how many people can we identify who are in poverty as defined by the federal government's own poverty line (FPL)?  Is it millions, or only hundreds of thousands, or maybe as few as tens of thousands?  

You will not be surprised to learn that in the reams of federal statistics that supposedly address this issue, it is remarkably difficult to get real information that goes to the answer to this question.  The best we can do is nibble around the edges.  So, let's start nibbling away:

• First, how many people earn the federal minimum wage (currently $7.25 per hour) or less?  According to Department of Labor data here, there were just about 3 million people in the U.S. who were paid at or below the federal minimum in 2014 (latest data).  This was 3.9% of the approximately 77 million people in the U.S. paid by the hour, but barely over 2% of the approximately 144 million total jobs.
• But at least all of those 3 million are in poverty -- right?  Wrong.  First of all, a single person working full time for the whole year at $7.25 per hour, and receiving no other government benefits of any kind, earns about $14,500 for the year -- against a federal poverty level threshold of $11,770 (2015 level).  Second, most of those minimum wage workers are second and third workers in larger families with other earners (e.g., dad and/or mom) and other income.  According to data at the Foundation for Economic Education here, fully half of all minimum wage workers are age 24 and less, aka "kids," most of them still attached to the families in which they have grown up.  The average income of a family with an under-25 minimum wage earner is $64,500.  And by the way, most of the 25-and-up minimum wage earners are also in families with other earners.  The average income of a family with a 25-and-up minimum wage earner in 2013 was $42,500.  
• So how many minimum wage earners are the sole earner for a multi-person family?  The Washington Policy Center put out a report addressing that issue in October 2013.  They found that 15% of minimum wage earners were sole earners in families with children.  That would be about 450,000 people; but, of course, most of those were working part time, rather than full time, and so don't fit Bernie's description.  The percent of minimum wage earners who were full-time workers and also single parents of children was 4%.  That would be about 120,000 -- a far cry from Bernie's "millions."
• The statistics for minimum wage earners typically include workers earning less than the minimum wage.  What, you say, how could anyone earn less than the minimum wage -- I thought it was the "minimum"?  You will be surprised to learn that about half of the workers earning "minimum wage or less" actually earn less.  The reason is that there is a patchwork of exemptions from the minimum wage that cover surprising numbers of people.  But when you start looking at the categories, you quickly realize that this again is not what you had in mind when you think of hard-working people in poverty.  One large category is disabled people who work in so-called "sheltered workshops."  The Washington Post reported in February that there are approximately 228,000 such people in the U.S.  In some cases they earn as little as $1 per hour or even less; but of course, these people rarely are supporting anyone else, and their needs are generally provided for from other resources.  Other large exemptions include things like camp counselors (but, of course, they get free room and board) and agricultural workers employed by their own families.  The largest category is "tipped workers," who, under federal rules can be paid well less than the $7.25 -- but, of course, they get the tips in addition.  The tips can take them well above the $7.25 -- in many cases, to a multiple.
• And finally, how about the big one?  For that small number of multi-person families with only one earner making at or near the minimum wage, are there other resources already provided to such people that would take them above the FPL if only the additional resources were counted?  Let's consider just the two biggest such programs -- food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.  Annual federal spending for food stamps ("SNAP") is around $75 billion; for the EITC it is around $70 billion.  As discussed on this blog many times, although these two programs are very much the same thing as cash (the EITC is actually paid in cash), and are often described as "anti-poverty" programs,  both food stamps and the EITC are arbitrarily excluded from the definition of "poverty" when poverty statistics are reported, in a cynical effort to keep the numbers up.  But how would these programs affect the numbers if we just count them?  Consider one of those 120,000 families that we identified earlier as having children and also a sole earner working full time at minimum wage.  The earnings from the minimum wage job are about $14,500.  The FPL for a family of three is $20,090.  So, at first blush, this family is in poverty.  But wait.  According to the EITC calculator here, they would be entitled to an EITC of $5548.  And according to a food stamp calculator here, they would be entitled to food stamps worth about $1800.  So those two items alone, if counted, would take them to an income of $21,848, which is above the poverty threshold.  And this is before getting to other handouts.  As just one example, such a family is likely to be entitled to another $2000 of the so-called "additional child tax credit."  And then there are other nutrition programs like WIC, energy assistance, clothing assistance, and public housing.  Many low-income families in my area get public housing benefits worth $50,000 per year and more.

As you think about the numbers here, you will quickly realize that there can be very few full time workers, even ones with substantial families with no other earners, who will fall below the federal poverty threshold once the already-available cash-like benefits are taken into account.  As far as I can work the numbers, I think it is almost impossible for any family to be in this position with three or fewer children.  (Over three children it becomes possible because the EITC stops growing after three children.)  

So where does that leave Bernie and his "millions of full-time workers living in poverty"?   I have no idea where he even comes up with such a number.  He can say it over and over again like it is true, and he gets away with it because nobody is willing to challenge him on it.  Who would be so cruel as to criticize those of the poor who are also so hard-working that they work full-time jobs?  But the fact is that this is a complete fraud.  

And here's why it matters.  It matters because the theme of the "millions of full-time workers living in poverty" is used to advocate for more and yet more government programs supposedly to address this scourge.  And then the government programs either make the problem of poverty worse (e.g., the minimum wage, by eliminating jobs) or are not counted in the statistics.  We get more and more programs, at greater and greater cost, and "poverty" never goes down.     

A Few Comments On Hillary's Big Speech

I tried to watch Hillary's acceptance speech on Thursday night, but I could only stomach about half of it.  Which is just as well, because in the oral delivery, all I could focus on was the hectoring humorlessness of it all.  And you already know how hectoring and humorless Hillary is, so you don't need me to tell you about that.  (To my surprise, some people -- my wife among them -- even seem to find Hillary not to be hectoring and humorless at all.  There's no accounting for taste.)  Anyway, if the goal is to focus on the substance, it's better to wait for the full text and have it in front of you when you comment.

Of course, that's assuming that the speech had at least some substance.  This one has the look that someone went through it and scrubbed out of it any hint of any kind of a definitive statement with a meaning sufficiently precise that a commenter could criticize it.  Really, how could someone utter this many meaningless platitudes is one short speech?

But even amidst the torrent of meaningless platitudes, it is possible to discern a political vision in this speech:  It is a vision where government -- the federal government of the United States -- has the solution to every human problem, big, small and medium.  A vision where the government can eliminate all down side risks from life by just spending a little more of the free money from the infinite credit card.  A vision where the fundamental role of the politician is to promise goodies to pass out to buy the votes of the electorate.  And a vision where we pretend that essentially everybody but a few bogeymen ("Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich") can be a net gainer from the government handout game.  

• There aren't enough good-paying jobs in the country?  We'll create them with a big blowout of federal spending!  ("In my first 100 days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II.  Jobs in manufacturing, clean energy, technology and innovation, small business, and infrastructure.") I previsouly noted here that every idea on Hillary's website for "creating jobs" consisted of the federal government spending taxpayer money to hire people.
• Existing jobs don't pay enough money?  The federal government will decree that employers will have to pay more!  ("If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage . . . join us.")
• College costs too much?  We'll make it free!  ("Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all!")  You're burdened by student debt?  We'll "liberate" you from it!  ("We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt.")
• You didn't save enough for retirement?  Don't worry -- we're going to have a big expansion of Social Security!  ("If you believe we should expand Social Security . . . join us.")  Has she heard that Social Security is basically already broke and headed for bankruptcy at the current level of spending?  If so, that didn't get any mention in this speech.
• "Affordable" health care is of course another top priority.  ("If you believe that every man, woman, and child in America has the right to affordable health care . . . join us.")  No specifics, though.  Is she aware that a previous plan of Democrats to create "affordable health care for all" required a federal takeover of a seventh of the economy and vast new spending, but it has actually made health care less affordable for all except those getting government handouts to cover their premiums?  No mention of that here.  Anyway, why is it a problem for the government to just pay everybody's health care premiums?  
• Is there any human problem or issue that is too personal, too local, too intimate to justify the involvement of the behemoth U.S. federal government to solve it?  How about taking care of children?  No, in Hillary-world, that is a core function of the federal government as well.  ("[I]f fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the 'woman card,' then Deal Me In!")

And when she talked about things other than massive new government spending programs, it didn't get any better.  I'll take a couple of examples:

• "I believe in science. I believe that climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs."  Apparently Hillary thinks that science is a belief system, rather than a process by which hypotheses are tested against data from the real world.  That's rather a fundamental thing to get completely wrong in somebody seeking the presidency.  And even more fundamental is that she does not understand that "creating . . . good-paying clean energy jobs" with government subsidies is a form of impoverishment of the people.  Supposedly, the strongest selling point that this woman has is her "competence."  Now, I'm not saying that everybody running for the presidency should have a Ph.D. in economics -- far from it.  (Lord help us, that would get us Krugman!)  But it's just basic competence for the job to understand that government subsidies for expensive versions of things that the private sector can produce more cheaply without subsidies impoverishes the people.  Could somebody really be "competent" and not understand something so obvious and so fundamental to the job?
• And finally, this doozy:  "[W]e need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics . . . .  And we'll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!"  Omitted from the speech: "But of course the Clintons get to keep the $2 billion donated to the 'Foundation' and the $153 million for their speeches, essentially all of which came from people with interests before the government."  And why not leave that out?  I can get away with it!  Did you notice a single mainstream media outlet criticizing me on this point?  True, but at some point this becomes insulting to the intelligence of the listener.

OK, the other candidate is pretty bad too.  But could he really be this bad?

Government 101: How To Get Yourself More Money By Failing

At this blog, we have repeatedly pointed out the most fundamental difference between private and government endeavors:  In private endeavors, when you fail, you lose your ability to get more investors and keep going, and you go out of business.  In government endeavors, when you fail, you proclaim that you just need more money to accomplish the mission.  Somehow, the citizens, through their legislators, always fall for it.  So you get more money, and you grow your staff and your budget.  In fact, the best way to assure the growth of your organization is to fail, and you can grow even more if your failure is even worse.  As a result, no government bureaucracy ever fixes the problem that it was created to fix; indeed, all the problems at which the government throws money always and inevitably grow worse over time.  Extreme examples of this phenomenon covered at this blog have included the poverty scam and the food insecurity scam.

For today, let's consider the War on Drugs.  The War on Drugs was officially launched in about 1970, during the first term of President Nixon.  In the intervening 46 years, as far as I can see, no progress of any kind has been made (unless you count well over a million people behind bars at any given time as "progress").  Sure, usage of some specific drugs has waned marginally (cocaine is an example), but only because other drugs have emerged and become suddenly popular.  A few years ago there was a surge in usage of crystal meth.  Today the surge is in opioid pain killers.  For marijuana, the authorities basically seem to have given up after decades of jailing millions of people.  Overall?  From the government's drugabuse.gov website:

Illicit drug use in the United States has been increasing. In 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older—9.4 percent of the population—had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002.  

And what are we spending to achieve these stellar results?  Drugpolicy.org has a collection of statistics here.  They put annual spending (all levels of government) at about $51 billion.  Most goes to law enforcement, but large chunks also go to things like prevention and treatment.  For a post a few days ago I found a figure of over $12 billion annually for just the federal piece of prevention and treatment.  And the costs are not just direct expenditures.  The drugpolicy.org compilation has other statistics that include: 1.6 million annual arrests for drug law violations and $46 billion of government revenue foregone (from potential legalization).

Yet, with this enormous ongoing effort, suddenly in the last couple of years an unexpected epidemic of abuse of opioid painkillers has exploded upon the scene.  Here is a "facts and figures" sheet from the American Society of Addiction Medicine.   According to that document, use of prescription opioid painkillers surged by a factor of four between 1999 and 2008, after which use of heroin began a 37% per year surge from 2010 to 2013.  The two are related because, once addicted to the painkillers, users report that they switch to heroin because the prescription opioids are "more expensive and harder to obtain."  Overdose deaths from opioids (both the painkillers and heroin) reached 47,055 in 2014.

Of course, even as this was happening, the very drugs whose use was surging were primary and specific targets of the Drug War.  The painkillers have long been subject to very tight restrictions on doctors in their ability to prescribe.  Heroin has been absolutely illegal since the onset of the War.  We are paying $51 billion per year to employ thousands upon thousands of government functionaries specifically to keep the buying and usage of these substances under control, and instead the buying and usage of some of the very most dangerous drugs has surged on their watch.  They have had an epic, total and undeniable failure -- a disaster.

And of course you know the response of the government Blob to this epic disaster.  This is the most fabulous opportunity in a generation for us to hit the suckers up for more money to grow our staffs and our budgets!  We can just say that we need lots more money to address this epidemic!  And with thousands of families grieving over the loss of their promising teenagers and twenty-somethings to this epidemic, who will be uncouth enough to point out that we already were blowing $51 billion per year without even being able to see this epidemic coming?

As always, Congress has just rolled over and paid up.  We now have the brand new "Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016," signed into law by President Obama on July 22.  It's the usual: lots more money for lots more programs, without the slightest bit of accountability for prior failures.  There's a new "task force on pain management," new "awareness campaigns," new "community-based enhancement grants to address local drug crises," new "information materials," new "military emergency medical training to assist veterans," a new "FDA opioid action plan," new "improving access to overdose treatment," new "NIH opioid research," etc., etc. etc., etc.  In layman's terms, they're throwing another approximately $700 million per year at the problem and hoping that this time it will accomplish something.  (It won't.)

And in this process, did anyone so much as take a look at the $51 billion currently being spent on total failure to see if any part of that ought to be cut out as useless waste?  Of course not.  That's just not how this process works.  A couple of days ago the Federalist Society sponsored a panel on this new law, to which I listened in, and at the conclusion I asked that question:  if the prior spending had not been effective to prevent this problem from arising, what part of that prior spending (all of it?) should be eliminated as wasteful?  It was as if nobody had ever thought of the question.  Accountability for prior failure is just not part of the dynamic here.  Failure is how you grow your budget!  Everybody knows that!

How To Keep The Poor Poor, European Greens Edition

In the area of the ongoing progressive campaign to keep the poor poor, I tend to focus mostly on issues that hit close to home:  things like policies designed to jack up the price of energy in the name of "saving the planet"; policies designed to confine the poor into lifetime poverty warehouses known as "affordable housing"; policies designed to make young minority adults unemployable by making it illegal to hire them at a wage that any employer is willing to pay; and so forth.  All of these issues are currently playing out on my home turf in New York City.  But for today, I'll look at one farther afield: the apparently successful (at least for now) efforts of European Greens to stifle a major initiative to raise agricultural productivity in Africa.

If you study economic history at all, you know that there has been a great enrichment of people that has occurred in the Western countries over the last century or so, multiplying average real incomes by factors of ten and more and lifting the large majority of the people out of the poverty in which they previously suffered.  And you also know that one of the largest, if not the largest, contributors to that great enrichment has been the enormous technological transformation of agriculture.  People often refer to this change as the "mechanization" of agriculture, but mechanization (that is, the change from using draft animals to using machines like tractors and harvesters) is only one part of the transformation.  Other major factors in the transformation of agriculture include new and hugely improved seeds, fertilizers, weed killers, pesticides, and more.  As a result of all the technological advances in agriculture, countries like the United States have gone from having well more than half the population involved in the primary production of food, to today, when the comparable figure is under 2% of the population.  That has freed tens of millions of people from formerly backbreaking and minimally-paid agricultural labor to work at things like writing computer programs in cushy offices and earning many times the income.

Now, I do not mean to suggest that the process by which the United States and other Western countries went from Point A to Point B was easy.  The opposite.  Millions were forced off farms and into cities by powerful economic forces, including low prices for agricultural commodities that left farmers struggling to survive.  Millions lost their farms through bankruptcies and foreclosures and ended a lifetime in farming with nothing.  Still, nobody would remotely suggest today that we should go back to having half the population working in agriculture, with the attendant diminution of our living standards by at least half -- representing the production of the half of the population that we would no longer have producing other things.

But then, how about Africa?  There is some mechanized agriculture in Africa today, and there is some use of the new seeds and fertilizers, but by and large African agriculture is about where American agriculture was a century ago.  Tens of millions of people work the land in very, very, very low productivity jobs.  If Africans are to achieve average incomes anything like those of Americans or Europeans, a huge piece of that must necessarily come from transforming their agriculture in much the way that we transformed our agriculture.  Not necessarily exactly the same way -- indeed, they may well come up with some advances that we never thought of -- but definitely they must transform their agriculture in ways that overall increase agricultural productivity by a couple of orders of magnitude and free up the bulk of the population to do other things.

Which brings me to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.  This was a big initiative launched a few years ago (2012) by the G-8 to get lots of public and private entities involved to work on improving agricultural productivity in Africa.  Here is their website.  The initiative was actually launched at a summit held in the U.S. at Camp David and involving Barack Obama personally.  Here is the Fact Sheet on the initiative put out by the White House at the time of the summit.  As the Fact Sheet states, a big part of the initiative was the effort to get private capital involved in improving agricultural productivity.  Another significant piece was to encourage land titling and improved property rights.  These can't have been Obama's favorite parts of the initiative, but to his credit, he went along.

Now, my own view is also that the NAFSN had plenty of flaws.  In essence, it is one of those big "Public Private Partnerships" -- and getting into partnership with the corrupt African governments has caused many good intentions to founder.  But, for once in the international aid arena, NAFSN seemed to be getting many of the big things right, at least if the goal was to advance agricultural productivity in Africa.  Private land ownership and private investment are the two big ones.

And now to the latest from the European Parliament.  The Parliament's Committee on Development commissioned a report on the NAFSN, to be prepared by one Maria Heubuch, a member of the Parliament and of the Green Party.  I can't find much about the process of how such reports come to be undertaken, but this post from risk-monger.com ("How to Starve Africa") attributes the initiative to the Green Party and to "countless environmental NGOs."  The draft report is here.  Apparently the initial draft issued back in January, but it just came before the Parliament in June.

Here is the comment from risk-monger.com:

The report tabled by Green MEP, Maria Heubuch, is as vile as it is selfish in its neo-colonialist demands to impose peasant agriculture on a continent trying to develop and feed itself. The Greens are demanding that the European Union not be involved with the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition which is donating billions to create a green agricultural revolution in ten of the poorest African countries. Many identify what has been achieved in Asia today as due to the World Bank’s investments in agricultural technologies in the 1960s and 70s and what is sorely lacking in Africa today.

The report itself is too long to quote much of it here, but I'll give you some flavor:

[The Reporter] . . .

3. Notes with concern that NAFSN promotes intensive agriculture that heavily relies on chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds, with consequences affecting local communities such as soil erosion, ecological and health risks and biodiversity loss;

4. Warns against replicating in Africa the Asian ‘Green Revolution’ model of the 1960s and ignoring its negative social and environmental impacts; recalls that the SDGs include the goal of promoting sustainable agriculture, to be achieved by 2030;

5. Urges the EU Member States to strive to transform NAFSN into a genuine instrument of support for family farming and local economies in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), recalling that family farmers and smallholders produce about 80 % of the world’s food and provide over 60 % of employment in SSA. . . .  

Yes, they actually think it's a good thing that "family farmers" constitute 60% of employment in sub-Saharan Africa, and by God they are going to keep it that way!  Also pervading the report is patent horror at the prospective involvement of large multi-national agribusiness corporations.  For example:

Instead of supporting NAFSN’s model of ‘modern’, ‘business-oriented’ agriculture based on large-scale industrial farming, your rapporteur, in line with recommendations of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), calls on African governments to invest in family farming and agroecology. 

There's plenty more.  In many pages of bureaucrat-speak, the basic message is, we think Africans should remain forever on the edge of starvation in peasant agriculture, for the sake of the environment.

The European Parliament took up the Heubuch report on June 8.  Again, according to the post at risk-monger.com:

[I]n the European Parliament in Strasbourg, MEPs voted “overwhelmingly” by 577 MEPs, with only 24 against and 69 abstentions to accept the Green Party’s Heubuch Report and demand that the European Union stop funding the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.

They just have no concept of morality, at least as I understand the term.  Just one more reason why the Brits are doing well getting out of there.