RUSH: Berwyn, Pennsylvania, I’m glad you waited. Tom, it’s your turn on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Is the president not aware of the catastrophic economic effects of trying to switch to E85 which, by the way, is doomed to fail? Corn and corn products are in everything we eat!
RUSH: Wait a second. You’re talking about ethanol here, right?
CALLER: Yes, sir.
RUSH: You gotta speak language people in Rio Linda understand. They don’t know what E85 is.
CALLER: Corn is in everything we eat. Prices for food will skyrocket.
RUSH: It’s already started! Look, the price of tortillas has skyrocketed in Mexico and there are going to be riots down there. I’m not making it up! Look, I agree with you. I predicted this. By the time you start taking all this corn for fuel, which costs more than gasoline!
CALLER: It’s ridiculous.
RUSH: Ethanol gasoline is going to cost more than regular gasoline because it’s a shipping thing. It’s a storage and a shipping thing. It’s a liberal idea. It’s a lib idea. Like all these “alternative fuel” ideas, it’s a typical liberal idea. You come up with something, you “save the planet” and you hurt the very people that libs claim to love and support, the little guys! There will be riots in the Southern Hemisphere over the price of corn before this is all said and done, and here’s the evil United States — thought of as compassionate United States when liberals run it — selfishly, selfishly cornering the corn market.
CALLER: Well, it benefits about 12 big farmers like Archer Daniels Midland.
RUSH: I know. That’s the way of the world. It’s the way of Washington. I don’t have time to back up. We’ve gotta go to a break. Ask the question in the next hour. This ethanol business, I’m telling you, the unintended consequences are going to be devastating, not just to people in the Southern Hemisphere. You know, wait ’til Orville Redenbacher prices go up!
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
Okay, let me draw the circle, if I may, on liberals and alternative fuels such as ethanol. So we have a problem. Gasoline prices sometimes go up. They spike, and when this happens, the liberals immediately blame Big Oil and Cheney and Bush, and anybody in the Republican Party that has anything to do with oil, for “gouging the little guy.” It happens every year. Sometimes two or three times a year. When prices go down and the oil price plummets, there is very little praise for the work done on the part of people that make it happen because the market does it. But even when the price goes down the left is suspicious, and they think that the price is being manipulated down so as to help Republicans’ electoral chances! The only problem is: the price of oil has been plummeting after the election, which the Democrats won. So in the midst of all these rising prices — and, of course, the greenhouse gases and the manmade global warming. Oh, by the way, speaking of that, story after story today about how wine, California wine (the wine grapes) are now the canary in the mine on global warming. 
If the warm keeps up, Napa could be as warm as Lodi in the next 50 years, and if that happens, it’s going to wreak havoc on the Napa and surrounding region wine business because they need a certain kind of climate. If the climate gets too hot, oh, no! It’s going to be problematic. But at the same time, if there is warming in Bordeaux, which is the primary wine growing region of the world, well, they’re all happy as clams, because they’ve got climate challenges. They’re very close to the ocean, and they don’t think global warming is ever going to affect them because they’re going to be close to the ocean, but they love it! They say the more warming we get, the greater vintages we get every year. Every year could be a vintage of the century for us. But we’re watching the Californians. So now wine, the wine grape, is the canary in the coalmine on global warming. I thought it was the polar bear! I thought it was the melting ice sheets! I thought it was expanding and shrinking ice caps at the
But now it’s wine grapes, folks. So all these things combine to create panic — and, lo and behold, alternative fuels enter the scene, also as a way to rid ourselves of dependence on those meanies in the Middle East. Okay, so somebody comes up with the idea of ethanol, a way to dilute gasoline with product made from corn, which makes gasoline golden. Further, it is a little cleaner to burn, we’re told, and all of this — and the libs jump all over this. “Great! Alternative fuels, we love it,” just like they love the Prius; just like they love the Segway, that two wheeled thing you drive around, that little hand cart, (that was called IT, and was going to revolutionize everything, and it didn’t), the electric car, all of these things, because there’s a hand-wringing panic out there over oil and energy and global warming and planetary destruction and you name it. So the ethanol thing sets in. Of course the corn producers love it! States that produce corn like Iowa, they absolutely love it because it turns corn into a product for something other than food products — and of course we need a lot of fuel in this country to power our cars, the diesel trucks and so forth.
So the process starts, and what happens is that the intentions here are to provide cleaner exhausts, less pollution, less global warming, cheaper fuel! It fits the requirement of alternative, and, of course, it benefits states that grow corn. What could be better? Well, it breaks down this way. All of these things are intended to help “the little guy,” the victim that we all are, from being victimized by Big Oil and pollution and planetary destruction and global warming! Then we find out that ethanol, gasoline with ethanol, actually ends up being more expensive than gasoline itself. We find that there are — and I’m my memory is unclear on this, but — we find that there are some distribution challenges with this stuff. I’m going to have to double-check this. You cannot put if through a pipeline. It has to be trucked. It is a food product. It has not a shelf life per se like preservatives and/or the, but it just can’t be shipped and tried to around the country like oil can. It has to be sent on trucks, and that led to a shortage of this stuff in New Jersey late last year — and, of course, shortages led to the prices going up even higher! 
Then what happens to the commodity known as corn? Well, the more demand for a product, what happens? The higher the price. So when you introduce a new use for corn like this into our fuel system, which ain’t tiny, then you have the need for a lot more corn! In this case, so far the Mexicans have been hardest hit, but the further south you go in the Southern Hemisphere, it’s going to be even worse. And the high prices of corn products in food in this country are going to go up as well. So you and the Mexicans and the Columbians and the whoever elses that rely on corn as their bread… The tortilla prices — I know this sounds funny, but tortilla prices — are up 400%. I had the story only two days ago, and they’ve been predicting riots in the streets on this. (interruption) The Indians are not…? (interruption) Well, you mean the Native Americans? Maize and so forth? Well, they’re not going to like it. Orville Redenbacher is not going to like it. Nobody’s going to like it. So what starts out as the wonderfully great intentions, “saving the planet,” is going to cause riots among the very people the liberals claim to champion, “the little guy,” the downtrodden, the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the dirty.