We have come to expect political sniping of one party's candidates by the other party's hopefuls. we also expect print and broadcast media to follow the same process, based on publisher's political leanings. Happens all the time, too frequently and too blatantly nasty, skewed and about half the time, untrue. However, what is of much more interest is when a candidate finds themself being called out by a respected national publication which had typically supported persons of that party. I know, you think I'm referring to Trump and the Wharton School of Business or some such....but no, it's even more fun than that. Trump has been called out by many for what he is - rude, obnoxious, divisive, with a monstrously inflated sense of self.
No, I'm referring to Florida's would be and self styled Golden Boy, Marco Rubio. The one descriptor which comes to mind is simply "whore." That definition is typically related to female prostitutes, but reading on a bit, the phrase "sells oneself for money" pops up. That's our boy! So who called out Mr. Rubio? None other than that bastion of conservative commentary, The National Review! This is almost akin to having Bernie Maddoff call Rick Scott a cheat.
In full disclosure and in defense of the "Review", they are generally civil and as objective as their political bias allows, but even they have "called bullshit" on Rubio and his slavish devotion to the Lords of Sugar. Before describing what the Review has to say, let's review the "problem with sugar."
There have been farm subsidies in the USA since the Depression. Their "necessity" has been debated long and hard and the considerations , especially in some areas are a source of concern as they cost the nation more for food than a free market would command. A parallel concern is that they reward what are in many cases big agribusinesses with the tax dollars of the rest of us. In the case of corn and ethanol production mandates, they reward corn producers with a guaranteed market at a guaranteed price, a "sweetheart deal" no other American production sector (other than agriculture) is provided.
One can, however, make the case that the USA's staple starches, corn, wheat, and to a lesser extent rice, are so essential that the domestic production of said crops could be vital to the nation. Sugar, however, is another matter altogether.
There is no economic defense of the sugar program, which every year provides nonrecourse loans to sugar processors at a guaranteed price-per-pound. If the market price is below the guarantee when they want to sell, the processors simply dump the crop on the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the loan repayment. Regardless of current sugar prices, they get a guaranteed value per pound in repayment! Understand, this is analogous to taking out a mortgage with a monthly repayment of $1000 and when the economy dips, getting to pay it back with $600, and the bank counting that $600 as $1000! You and I can never get that "good deal" but US Sugar growers do, to the tune of an average of $85,000 per grower (big and small) per annum! To avoid that outcome, the USDA holds sugar prices artificially high by imposing tariffs on imports above an annual quota. The result is that we Americans pay almost twice what the rest of the world pays for sugar. As of my last calculation before polishing this essay, it's only about 38% more.
So you're asking yourself, "Why do I care, I don't grow sugar." You're correct, but you certainly buy it, and lots of it! There’s no free lunch, and this sweet trade protection comes at the expense of American consumers and U.S. sugar-using businesses, who have been forced to pay twice the world price of sugar on average since 1980
Due to quotas, in 2014 Americans were only allowed (meaning, for example, Nicaragua produces it, they want to sell it, we can't buy it!) to purchase 6.94 billion pounds of world sugar, or about 29% of the total sugar consumed. Domestic sugar producers (“Big Sugar”) are allowed to control more than 70% of the sugar market every year through protectionist sugar trade policies that limit foreign competition. If sugar quotas were eliminated, and American consumers and business had been able to purchase 100% of their sugar in 2014 at the world price (20.05 cents per pound average) instead of the average U.S. price of 30.72 cents, they would have saved about $1.8 billion collectively. In other words, by forcing Americans to pay 30.72 cents per pound for inefficiently produced domestic sugar, Americans paid an additional 10.67 cents per pound for the 16.91 billion pounds of American sugar produced annually, which translates to $1.8 billion in higher costs for American consumers and sugar-using businesses. This impacts American consumers and businesses this year with more than $3 billion in spending on US sugar at prices that are more than double the world price.
The cost of most trade protection is largely invisible and hard to calculate in many instances (cars, consumer electronics, etc), but the cost of sugar protection is directly visible and measurable. Sugar tariffs solely exist to protect an inefficient domestic industry from more efficient foreign producers at the expense of the U.S. consumers and the American companies using sugar as an input, and make our country worse off, on balance.
Most legislators , even former Florida governor Jeb Bush, favored ending sugar subsidies. Former Governor Charlie Crist even negotiated a deal to buy out Big Sugar's Florida holdings as part of an overall plan to save the Everglades and restore lake Okeechobee, now a cesspool. (not entirely sugar's fault, but their presence on former wetlands south of the lake are a huge factor in limiting the state's ability to reclaim and restore.)
But Marco... there's another story. For him, Sugar subsidies and. more to the point, continued protection of Big Florida Sugar is, wait for it......... a "matter of national security." Huh? This is especially confusing because The Senator has consistently opposed almost all other forms of trade protectionism, sacrificing them on the altar of free trade. What follows is edited (only for brevity) from an August, 2015 National Review article entitled: Rubio: Our National Security Depends on Sugar Subsidies. That title statement is the only portion of the article not specifically critical of Rubio and his stance on sugar subsidies.
According to Rubio (it says) . "Brazilian sugar is a threat to U.S. national security. Asked this month about his support for sugar subsidies, Rubio said he would eliminate them if “the countries that export sugar into the U.S. get rid of theirs as well, and here’s why: Otherwise, Brazil will wipe out our agriculture and it’s not just sugar.” If we eliminate our sugar subsidies first, Rubio warned, “other countries will capture the market share, our agricultural capacity will be developed into real estate, you know, housing and so forth, and then we lose the capacity to produce our own food, at which point we’re at the mercy of a foreign country for food security.” "Rubio called the sugar industry “an important job creator in Florida.”
It would be more realistic to say that the sugar program is critical to the sugar industry. Period! But....... For every sugar-related job created, three jobs in confectionery (sweets) manufacturing are forfeited, and currently being shipped offshore as a result of the high prices. The other less mentioned fact is that the ability to buy cheaper imported sugar would actually create more jobs in refining that would be lost in agricultural production. The National Review ends with: "We have as much reason to grow our own sugar as Lithuania does to make its own cars: none. The fact is that other countries produce certain things more cheaply and efficiently than we do. That is why we trade with them."
"The Cold War is over, but the excuses for sugar subsidies persist. If protecting Americans’ lives were the goal, Rubio would be calling for a ban on sugar, not a subsidy. After all, sugar kills more Americans than terrorists do. According to a recent study published in the journal Circulation, sugar-sweetened beverages account for one in every 100 obesity-related deaths. Each year an estimated 25,000 Americans die as a result of consuming them. Obesity causes deaths. Sugar causes obesity. The government subsidizes sugar. You subsidize the government. You subsidize death. The terrorists win. This syllogism makes at least as much sense as what Rubio said."
Whew, that was harsh, and the National Review is a conservative publication!
So why does Marco Rubio continue his support of subsidies? Three words The Fanjul Family, Florida sugar barons who load many Florida candidates for public office with campaign contributions. (This is the "whore" part I alluded to!) According to former Rubio staffers, The Fanjuls summoned Rubio to run against then-governor Charlie Crist in 2010. They were outraged when Crist in 2008 had offered to buy US Sugar lands — more than 125,000 acres at a projected cost to the state of about $1.2 billion — without consulting them. The reason for the fury: if the Florida state government built wetland marshes using US Sugar lands to store and cleanse filthy agricultural waters, then the state would be a step closer to key parcels owned by the Fanjuls in the Everglades Agricultural Area. It is, as a side issue, worthy of note that the paterfamilias of the Fanjul clan, Alfonso "Alfy" Fanjul, is a Spanish citizen, who used pre Castro Cuban sugar profits to buy land in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) , which land was protected (at an estimated additional cost of $63 million annually) from Okeechobee overflow, the traditional source of the water in the "River of Grass." This non- citizen has no problems, however, taking huge sugar subsidies from a Government to whom he professes no allegiance. What was once the northern 'Glades is now phosphate fueled sugar farms, the majority Fanjul controlled, criss crossed with irrigation ditches which, in times of high rainfall, are back pumped into the lake, fueling algae growth. Fun fact: although Sugar comprises a mere 2% of US crop industries, it is responsible for over 40% of political donations to government officials. Hmmmm.
Of the top 10 contributors to the Rubio campaign(s) seven are banking related, , two are conservative PAC related, and just one - Florida Crystals, owned by "you- know- who" is from any other industry! Just eight days after Rubio announced his now defunct presidential candidacy, Pepe Fanjul Jr. and his wife, Lourdes, hosted a fundraiser for Rubio at their Palm Beach home, where tickets ranged from $1,000 to $2,700 a pop.
Of course Rubio has really never had any other real job but political office, excluding a sinecure college teaching job which he failed to actually show up for 40% of the time. In his defense, he was a US Senator and was supposed to be in DC at the time, but he only actually showed up for 7% of roll call votes in the Senate, so who really knows where the f**k Rubio was? If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's probably a duck, unless, of course, it's a whore to the sugar barons of South Florida.
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