“I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the largest corn-growing state, just ahead of Illinois, said of Mr. Kennedy last month. “I’m willing to do that.” NY Times
That chilling statement from Senator Grassley should remind us that there is only one political party in America and it is the money party.
What Grassley is alluding to is the fact that American farmers in the mid-west grow a lot of corn and they need someone to buy it. That is why we have ethanol and corn syrup. There is no good rational reason for ethanol to exist except for the purpose of providing a rigged, locked-in market for corn farmers, who vote in the primaries in Iowa– among the first primary states in the Union– and basically control national policy by holding onto the agricultural dick of the Republican party. (And the Democrats.)
Mr. Kennedy’s critique is broad and deep. Generous federal crop subsidies of soy, corn and wheat artificially lower their costs, making byproducts like corn syrup cheaper for manufacturers who put it into everything from soft drinks to hot dogs to heavily processed bread.
What should freak most people out is the word “educate”. It is a very suggestive choice of language. It is Orwellian. It is not sufficient to say that we don’t care about the health of Americans or the nutritional value of all the foods processed corn syrup is added to. You must be “educated”: you must publicly offer your unconditional obeisance to the mantra. You must be seen to adhere to the perverse logic that provides massive government subsidies to a useless crop simply in order to keep those “hard-workin’ ‘mericans” juiced and happy.
Most of those farmers probably privately hold nothing but contempt for people on welfare. It’s one thing to take money for sitting around looking after your kids and quite another to work hard at cheating the system, which most of those corn farmers do. But you never know: maybe they have no problem with welfare. Maybe they recognize that government hand-outs are okay, as long as you get your share. Like Exxon and Tesla and the Tampa Bay Rays.
Fun facts:
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- fructose uses only about 4% of the nation’s corn product.
- ethanol consumes about 40%.
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Think about it: what if you (as government) decided– correctly– that ethanol was a bad product that should not be subsidized by the government. How would you make up for the deficit in the market for corn? What would you do about the corn farmers– who are generally massively in debt– who would be out of work? How would you deal with the political fall-out: you did something that hurt farmers? Those paragons of hard-working American virtue?