Big Agriculture's handout
We have been long saying that most of the money spent by the government goes to the already-haves, even the money supposedly targeted at encouraging small business. For example, government subsidies for training new employees often gets diverted to high-turnover fast food restaurants - after all, thanks to incredible turnover, they are always "training" new fry-machine operators and McMuffin assemblers.* Money encouraging the development of new drug solutions go directly or indirectly to bloated drug companies that have proven themselves to be sadly poor of real innovation. Iraqi recovery project funds go to big companies that turn around and cheat the government.
Nowhere is this as striking as in agriculture. Every year, enormous subsidies are raised for agriculture, under the guise of preserving the sacred family farm. But as Dan Owens, a farm policy organizer, most of the money goes to the megafarms.
As Owens puts it
The current system of unlimited subsidy checks for large farms increases land prices, puts family size farms at a disadvantage, and ultimately undercuts rural communities."
Repeated attempts to put a cap on farm subsidies, to say a modest $250,000 per farmer) so that the biggest farms won't get fortunes get defeated in Congress.
Again Owens:
Unlimited payments that subsidize large, aggressively expanding operations are a fundamental cause of family farm decline. They exacerbate the family farm decline that farm programs were supposed to address.
Money buys this influence, and Big Agribusiness has loads of it. In 2006 it spent $91 billion in lobbying funds to help "persuade" legislators. Not only are the biggest companies involved in price-fixing, environment catastrophe, screwing small competitors, sqiueezing suppliers, and notorious employment practices, they are happily subsidized by the government to wipe out smaller competitors.
* These are the guys who want to have the word McJobs removed from the online OED.
