Run Cindy, Run!

Pelosi and the Farm Bill

7/24//07

All of those emitting screams of outrage at Cindy Sheehan's prospective challenge to Nancy Pelosi would do well to refer to Pelosi's support of the Farm Bill which passed out of the house agriculture committee last week.

A blatantly transparent payoff to agribusiness and large landowners masquerading as reform, family farm advocates had unsuccessfully lobbied committee members to address the worst provisions of the bill.

Tantamount among these recommendations was to set a cap on those receiving benefits from the multi billion dollar pool of crop subsidies so as exclude large landowners who have been driving small farmers out of business and off their land for generations. In a typically deceptive maneuver, Ag committee chairman Petersen finally agreed to a cap but at the absurdly high taxable income level of 1 million dollars for individuals, 2 million for married couples. Large landowners many of them residing in enclaves of plutocracy far away from their holdings will continue to enjoy subsidies which were explicitly designed to preserve and benefit small farmers. In many cases, landlords will use this cash further consolidate their dominance of rural economies in which they have little stake.

Activists had also pressed to increase the current meager support to the Conservation Security Program which provides for environmentally sustainable farming practices and which has been universally embraced by farmers. Chairman Peterson effectively torpedoed the program shunting the funds into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program. Green in namely only, EQIP functions primarily to subsidize feed lot operations, environmental atrocities producing rivers of animal waste often in violation of federal and state environmental law. Fines which are accrued make the operations, many of them owned by large meat packing firms who are major contributors to Peterson's campaigns, uncompetitive. EQIP comes to the rescue by providing billions of dollars for the construction of concrete moats to contain the millions of gallons of urine and feces.

Pelosi's capitulation to big money on the Farm Bill is one more indication of many of who Nancy Pelosi really serves-her success in pulling to wool over the eyes of her left wing San Francisco constituency notwithstanding.

A crack in this façade appeared three years ago with Matt Gonzalez's Green Party campaign for Mayor of San Francisco which came within 1,000 votes of thwarting the aspirations of Pelosi's hand picked candidate, Gavin Newsome.

No Democrat is more representative of the cynicism, greed, and depravity of Democratic Party politics than Nancy Pelosi.

And no American speaks for the huge majority victimized by Democratic Party capitulation with more authority and authenticity than Cindy Sheehan.

If the same coalition which supported the Gonzalez insurgency can reassemble itself around Sheehan, the speaker may by in for a rude shock.

John Halle

John Halle is a former Green Party Alderman from New Haven.

He lives in the Hudson Valley and teaches music at Bard College Conservatory.