Harvey Washington Wiley, Chief Chemist of the Department of Agriculture’s Division of Chemistry (third from the right) with his staff in 1883 – Public Domain
Harry Truman once proclaimed: “No man should be president who doesn’t understand hogs.” That might explain the calamitous mess that President Trump and Elon Musk are making of our government today.
Clearly, Trump and Musk know nothing about four-legged farm animals. But they certainly know how to squeeze the government to fatten their own two-legged breed of corporate swine. Thus, the billionaire hucksters are bulldozing agencies that serve people’s real needs, while preserving those that subsidize corporate greed.
For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a once-proud agency created by Abraham Lincoln to serve tillers of the soil. But today’s USDA has become a bottomless feeding trough for agribusiness giants and other financial powers that “till” taxpayers.
Our country’s Farm Program, meant to be a safety net for hands-on dirt farmers, is now a $20-billion-a-year subsidy that pays nothing to the vast majority of farm families. Instead, 75 percent of our money goes to the biggest and richest 10 percent of corporate fiefdoms, including billionaire speculators who never get any dirt under their fingernails.
Actually, the Trump-Musk chainsaw crew is whacking some USDA programs — such as food stamps for poor families, helping school districts buy from local farmers and ranchers, and other efforts providing modest help to grassroots people and communities.
But there’s not a peep from the duo about the bales of taxpayer cash hauled every year to their own class of rich elites.
A Department of Agriculture is as needed today as in Lincoln’s time. But an honest overhaul is necessary to return it to its democratic roots of serving the workaday people of rural America, freeing it from the corporate interests now running roughshod over those same people.
For more information, check out the Environmental Working Group at www.ewg.org.
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