Obama Learns Bureaucrats Matter

That's the thesis of this politico article:

The Gulf crisis has shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of Obama’s unique management style, which relies on a combination of his own intellect, a small circle of trusted advisers and a larger group of outside experts. But it’s also driven home a more generic lesson all presidents learn sooner or later: Administrations are defined, fairly or not, by their capacity to control stagnant backwater agencies, in Obama’s case the Minerals Management Service, which failed to detect problems with the Deepwater Horizon well.

“This is a centralized government power guy from the word go, and this may be the best education Obama may get on the ineffectiveness of government and just how hard it is to get the bureaucracy to solve problems,” said John Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor who was an iron-fisted, chief of staff to President George H. W. Bush.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38161.html#ixzz0q6c8tCP0

White House Garden Progress

Don't see an update on the White House garden on the website, but Obamafoodorama has a couple posts showing people in it harvesting. Looks as if it's doing well; the greens are in good shape.  However, by now their peas are probably finished and some of the lettuce has bolted (judging by our garden in Reston).  And I wonder how they harvest: do they get a bit each day to feed the First Family or do they wait and harvest lots to serve at dinners?  At least on this the Obama administration isn't very transparent; fellow gardeners want to know these things.

The Fat Chinese and Not a Corn Subsidy in Sight

Prof. Pollan blames federal farm program subsidies of corn and soybeans for our obesity, at least in part.

The Newshour had a piece last week on the growing obesity problem in China, which doesn't have the same sort of subsidies.  The reasons include the one-child policy (lots of adults to spoil the kids), lots of cars and less exercise, urbanization, fast food.  To the best of my knowledge the Chinese don't subsidize corn production.

Government and Wikipedia (Warning: Off-Color Word)

This New York Times article describes a deal between the British Museum  and Wikipedia.  It seems the Museum has realized that people go to Wikipedia to look up information on the Museum, much more than they go to the museum's web site.  So the museum decided: if you can't fight them, join them (or something like that). By cooperating with Wikipedia, they can get more info and more accurate info into the browsers of the users, which presumably in the long run benefits the museum.

The lead guy says: "“Ten years ago we were equal, and we were all fighting for position,” Mr. Cock said. Now, he added, “people are gravitating to fewer and fewer sites. We have to shift with how we deal with the Web.”

I don't know why the same logic doesn't work for all official sites which try to push information--put a good deal of effort into upgrading the Wikipedia pages and, in a pet peeve of mine, making your pages accessible to Google.  Of course, Wikipedia is skeptical of having bureaucrats updating pages on their own bureaucracy, but this is, I think, the wave of the future.

Column on Pigford Claims

Interesting column in the High Plains Journal, with which I agree:

If the Ag Census data is correct, it still seems difficult to understand how the number of people filing Pigford claims could be more than double the number of black farmers in the U.S. Unfortunately, few people at USDA are willing to even discuss this topic for fear of appearing racist.
In the interest of transparency, it would seem helpful to have USDA provide the names and more information about who has or will be receiving payments under the Pigford cases. Adding more "sunlight" to this issue might help close another heart-wrenching chapter in farm loan history.

Unfortunately the "table" of payment data she refers to does not appear.

USDA Rulemaking

From Chris Clayton:

One thing I asked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack about at the Rural Summit was the complexity of rules, and delay getting rules out. He responded there were a lot of rules that certainly have been issued from the 2008 farm bill and that the department had more than 600 such rules to issue from the bill.

That sounds high to me, but what do I know.  I hope that's 600 in all stages of completion, and that most have notices of proposed rulemaking.  I'd hope the new Administrative Conference would work on helping to streamline the process, but I doubt it.  Most Congress people are happy to pass stuff they can point to with pride, and are much less concerned about actual implementation.

The Power of the Food Movement?

According to this article (HT Farmpolicy), consumption of high fructose corn syrup is down by 11 percent from 2003 to 2008.  The only thing in the article to explain the drop is consumer, and hence processor, resistance.  I know corn prices jumped over the same period, so it might be that "pure sugar", nature's food, processed from sugar cane or sugar beets, became a better buy over the time period.  But regardless of the explanation, the food movement will take credit and thus become more powerful in the eyes of other players in the food arena.

Just Another Washington Bureaucrat, Lenny Skutnik

Lenny just retired from the Congressional Budget Office, as noted on the Director's Blog. He didn't jump in the freezing icy Potomac for some "polar bear" stunt, but to save people from the Air Florida crash.

Optics of Cotton and Chickens

Two items froms Farm Policy: (Drafted this a while back, just finished it today.)


“To wit: our crusading president is going to send $150 million of your tax dollars to subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry. Why? so that he can continue to spend several billion more of your tax dollars subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers.
“Reps. Jeff Flake,R-Az., Ron Kind, D-Wisc., Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and Barney Frank, D-Mass. (find the last time Barney Frank and Paul Ryan agreed on anything) have penned a note to the prez suggesting that perhaps the way to fix the problem is to end the U.S. cotton subsidies.”


Chickens are not nice people.
“Scientists and egg producers warn that deadly skirmishes that start with feather-plucking and turn into bloody frenzies when a bird’s pecking breaks a flockmate’s skin will increase if those same aggressive hens are moved from small cages with five to 10 birds to open pens that can hold dozens.”

Who Do You Have to Outrun When You're a Cotton Farmer?

The Post gets around to writing an editorial on the compensation the US government is giving Brazil for violating WTO rules on cotton subsidies. As you might expect, they condemn it. 

For some reason this sentence hit me: . "Thanks partly to the subsidies, U.S. producers can outcompete lower-cost producers on the world market; American farms account for about 40 percent of global exports."  Now it's the way we usually talk about international competition.  While it's accurate enough for casual talk, when you think about it, and when you remember the joke about the bear in the woods, it needs refinement.


The joke about the bear?  Two campers were in the woods in their tent, just waking up from sleep. All of a sudden across the clearing a bear appeared, obviously feeling as mean and unhappy as Mitch McConnell after the Kentucky primary. The bear starts towards the tent.  One camper opens the tent flap on the opposite side, the other starts putting on his shoes. The first camper says: "Run, we've got to outrun the bear to our car."  The second camper says: "No, I've only got to outrun you."  [Bad joke, I know.]

What's my point? The US has some efficient cotton producers and some not so efficient.  Other countries, like Burkina Faso, or Brazil, have some efficient producers and some not so efficient.  The subsidies we give to our cotton producers help the less efficient (usually the smaller and older ones) stay in business longer.  They also tend to keep people in cotton, rather than switching to other crops, like soybeans, though that effect is much less true that it used to be, say in the 1960's.  To the extent that the subsidies keep our production up, it means the less efficient producers in other nations are under more pressure, either to switch crops or to give up and let more efficient producers in their nation take over the land.

Given these interacting relationships it's difficult to say how badly the subsidies may hurt producers in other countries. So my refrain: "it's more complicated than you think."