Saturday, October 27, 2007

That all powerful lobby...


Yes there is a lobby that represents just two-percent of the population, but it throws its weight around Congress with impunity. No, it's not the "Israeli Lobby," but the Farm Lobby, as Steven Plaut explains:

For decades, the American consumer has been fleeced by the farm lobby. Agricultural policy is one of the last bastions of socialist control in America. Congress has long feared applying free market economics to agriculture lest it enrage the Farm Lobby. Farmers are only 2% of Americans, a number almost exactly the same as the proportion of Americans who are Jews. And in Europe the situation is even worse. There the European Union has been largely a program of agricultural Bolshevism, with a thin political superstructure federation grafted on top of it.

Now if the Farm Lobby is so powerful, why is the press so devoid of any discussion of it? These are the same media who rarely miss a day in which they are not lambasting the "Israel Lobby." There are no books by ex-Presidents denouncing the excessive powers of the Farm Lobby. Respectable professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago do not churn out books and articles demonizing farmers for their lobbying efforts.

It's a good article, but I'd like to add one more source of power for the Farm Lobby. The first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses, which gives the Farm Lobby one more bullet in its arsenal.

Technorati tags:

No comments: