Link: Kolbe: GOP on wrong path. I was gratified and impressed by some of Kolbe’s candor upon retirement. I found myself strongly in agreement on his views on the theocrats’ misguided culture war and his realization that the Iraq war must be ended. Why is it that Republicans seem only to be able to tell the truth upon their retirement or death?
However, one item struck me as clearly fallacious. Kolbe spoke of his role in creating NAFTA and the supposedly unintended, though not unforeseen, consequences of the economic changes it wrought:
"A consequence, which was predicted, was that cheap U.S. agriculture devastated Mexican farmers in the southern states. Many can no longer make a living and are coming to America illegally.
Negotiators on both sides knew that was coming, Kolbe said, and gave Mexico time to enact land reform to stop it. It never happened.
"Politically, Mexico didn’t do what they needed to do," Kolbe said. He had a plan to deal with increased illegal immigration, too."
This strains credulity. Kolbe must have known quite well that the real damage to Mexican maize farmers would come from the perverse financial incentives we give to American farmers to overproduce cheap commodity corn as a result of the dismantling during the Nixon years of the production dampers, market normalization, and land conservation policies of the Roosevelt years.
We started paying American farmers to massively overproduce via the direct strike price subsidies on certain agricultural products – corn chief among them. There is no way that Kolbe could be unaware of the perverse financial incentives, and the strong downward pressure on world prices for agricultural commodities that resulted. The idea that the Mexican government could address this market deformation we created with our farm policy through land reform in Mexico is totally absurd.
To blame the massive failure of centuries old sustainable food production systems on a failure of political will on the part of the Mexican government is an affront to historical truth. The simple fact is that the U.S. government is paying over 5 billion dollars a year to ensure that it is uneconomic for Mexican farmers to compete with American commodity corn that is sold on world markets at a price lower than cost of production. We are spending our taxes to force Mexican subsistence farmers off their land and then over our borders to find work, in order that ADM and Cargill can buy corn cheaply to fatten American livestock and create high markup processed foods from it.
If Kolbe, after a quarter-century in Congress, doesn’t know or recognize these basic facts, he wasted his time in Congress and will never be a useful elder statesman. If we really want to restore stability to Mexican agricultural economies, and incidentally ease the obesity crisis here at home, we need to change our current farm policy of subsidizing cheap feedstock crops back to production controls, conservation, and price supports.
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Neither, I think, was Eisenhower anything like a modern day Republican. Nor Goldwater.
Gail,
I can think of one Republican who does not fit the description – Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, the rest of them have pretty much been cut from the same cloth.
Candor? More like a little self serving truthiness after he no longer gains from lying and pandering.
For all their bluster about national defense, a strong military and how cowardly Democrats are, the last few years have shown that there are no more dispicable cowards than Republican politicians. They apparently lie because they are Republicans and tell some of the truth when it’s too late. I’m not even sure that ‘coward’ is the right word. They are completely self serving. It serves Kolbe’s interest to now be more truthfull.
What happened to Republicans? I still don’t believe this is what they always were …