National farm care — and crop insurance fraud — vs national health care

As Congress faces a new farm bill, it's almost certain that members of both parties will "manage" to avoid discussing the crop insurance fraud current and past farm bills perpetuate. Yeah, the story is based on farmers and insurers who got busted, but? It took years to bust them and there's surely plenty of more subtle, unbusted fraudsters still out there.

This:

In an AgWeb article detailing how federal agents busted a record-breaking $100 million crop insurance fraud ring in North Carolina, Don Doles, the lead investigator of the case, said that despite his record-breaking case, he and his fellow agents “touched about a tenth of those truly participating at some level,” adding that “the scope of what happened is so much bigger than what could ever be included in a story.” To that end, it’s possible that crop insurance fraud costs taxpayers somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars a year. 

For Doles, the most frustrating aspect of the case was just how involved the big tobacco companies were in the fraud scheme. “The person acting as dealer hauls off the unaccounted [for] tobacco, bought at half price and sells it to a big tobacco company that snaps up great tobacco for $1.75, even though they know it’s shady,” Doles explained to AgWeb.

Confirms that. 

Subsidies from the USDA to help with crop insurance (how many "conservative" farmers rant against national health care?) make it worse.

So, why can't the Rethuglican half of Congress, most supportive of the fraud and largess, along with the Democrap half of Congress, generally being tolerant of this in exchange for scraps of TANF, SNAP and school lunch money, give us national health care?

Farming, farm bills, farm bureaus, climate change and Big Ag

I don't know if the Texas Farm Bureau here in the Pointy Abandoned Object state is being joined by its sister states in this one, but a Corpus Christi Caller-Times editorial cartoon, syndicated from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist, has the FB here up in arms:

My thought? If you don't like this, then don't endorse the likes of Eric Opiela for ag commissioner, when he calls it "welfare" on the food stamp side but doesn't talk about corporate welfare.

Or, put a membership cutoff in place. Farms and ranches above X thousand dollars of net profit don't qualify. Newspaper orgs in most states differentiate between the larger seven-day dailies and smaller ones, for example.

The fact of the matter is that crop insurance is tilted toward a few crops and isn't much different than direct payments. And, the new farm bill is no better than the old one on getting farmers to do more on how they farm and what they farm, and ranch, to address climate change. And, the Texas Farm Bureau may be denialists (as may be a few others), but a lot of individual farmers already accept the reality there.

By the way, Rob Rogers has some other good stuff here. (It's free to see, again leading to questions of the self-inflicted wounds of newspapers, but that's another story.)

Let's connect the food-oil dots

First, the idea of daily energy calorie labeling?
I like the idea of putting an oil needed to produce label on food, plastic and anything else necessary. After all, as far as carbon emissions content, it's already available in Europe.

Of course, that's just one more reason a lot of American conservatives would oppose such an idea.

But, could it work? Well, early evidence indicates that it works with stuff like sodium and saturated fats.

That said, it would have to be an average of American mass-ag vs. American sustainable/craftsman farms. This wouldn't work on a farm-by-farm basis. And, it would take regulating.

Or, it could be done with the "carrot" of farm bill subsidies.

A great idea would be to tie subsidies to the petroleum-use-reducing sustainability of an individual farm, certified on an annual basis.

And, speaking of that sustainability issue, maybe it's time to be rethinking organic farming's production level. Maybe semi-organic, at least, can actually do better than we've been told.

What next on the farm bill?

Congress left 34 pages out of what it sent Bush for his eventual veto.

It looks like it will have to vote anew on the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Bush’s Deputy Agriculture Secretary, Charles Conner, has objected beyond BushCo’s original objection to the bill leaving rich farmers eligible for subsidies, that the new bill sets payment baselines too high:

A blog item posted Monday by the agricultural magazine Pro Farmer described the new program, known as Average Crop Revenue Election (ACRE), as “lucrative beyond expectations,” and said it is a “no brainer” for farmers to sign up for it.

I don’t want to stint farmers, certainly, but I don’t want to give corporate farmers a bushel of money in a silver bushel basket.

The real reason Bush wants to veto the farm bill could be …

The closure of the “Enron loophole” that it contains as an amendment.

The “Enron loophole” is the loophole that exempts e-trading energy speculators from regulatory oversight:

Some argue that the unregulated energy speculation, codified in 2000, can account for $20 to $25 in the jump in oil prices.

Fortunately, the farm bill passed both House and Senate by veto-proof margins.

Frankly, the “Enron loophole” is much more of a benefit to rich people than is the higher-income farm subsidies Bush keeps bitching about.

Plenty of pork in new farm bill

The political payola includes a tax break for race horses for friends of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, timber interest friends of Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, and a refusal to cut or cap subsidy payments to higher-dollar farmers making more than $200,000 a year.

It did cut the ethanol subsidy from 51 to 45 cents per gallon, but in today’s fuel prices, the Senate could have passed a more comprehensive rider eventually phasing out the subsidy.

Obama: Bit of a hypocrite on Cokes in school?

He says we could help children’s health a lot by getting sodas out of schools.

True indeed. But, has he made efforts to seriously reform farm legislation so monocrop Big Ag corn doesn’t get so much subsidies, which then help make high-fructose corn syrup in those sodas so cheap? Has he fought against the tariff on Cuban sugar, which allows HFCS to undercut it and make Cokes so cheap?