RUSH: We’ve been watching the price of corn, ladies and gentlemen. It’s causing poverty, strife and near riots in
Not only is gasoline too cheap in this country, now corn is — and always has been, according to the New York Times. “But we are entering a new dynamic now. While there has been talk recently about refining ethanol from sources other than corn, that could take a while. So at the moment what we are trying to do is gratify those appetites from the same resource: agricultural land. No matter how high prices go, what will need to change isn?t the amount of corn acreage available or even the size of the enormous harvests we are already getting. What will need to change is the size of our appetites.” This, folks, is a heartless, heartless attack on poor people around the world who rely on corn as their food staple. The New York Times is basically saying, “(Raspberry) you, because we need the corn for ethanol, and we need higher prices on corn so people will eat less of it.” BusinessWeek, February 5th: “Food vs. Fuel —
“As energy demands devour crops once meant for sustenance, the economics of agriculture are being rewritten. Greg Boerboom raises 37,000 pigs a year on his farm in Marshall, Minn. Those hogs eat a lot of corn – 10 bushels each from weaning to sale.” That’s 37,000 pigs we’re talking about! “In past years he has bought feed for about $2 a bushel. But since late summer, average corn prices have leapt to nearly $4 a bushel. To reduce feed costs, he sells his pigs before they reach the normal 275 pounds, and keeps them warmer…” I wonder how that’s working this week. Remember, he’s in Minnesota. He keeps his pigs “warmer so they don’t devour more food fighting off the cold. Still, Boerboom hopes just to break even. ‘It’s been a pretty tight squeeze on pork producers,’ he says. ‘The next eight months will be really tough.’ The spike in the price of corn that’s hurting Boerboom and other pork producers isn’t caused by any big dip in the overall supply.
“In the U.S., last year’s harvest was 10.5 billion bushels, the third-largest crop ever. But instead of going into the maws of pigs or cattle or people, an increasing slice of that supply is being transformed into fuel for cars. The roughly 5 billion gallons of ethanol made in 2006 by 112 U.S. plants consumed nearly one-fifth of the corn crop. If all the scores of factories under construction or planned go into operation, fuel will gobble up no less than half of the entire corn harvest by 2008,” and then you wait and see what the tortilla price does. Ha! You think: My God, immigration is going to skyrocket to numbers we haven’t seen! “Corn is caught in a tug-of-war between ethanol plants and food, one of the first signs of a coming agricultural transformation and a global economic shift.”
It’s a long story, goes on with more numbers and so forth, but the basic point is by 2008, half the corn crop will be going to your automobile and other fuels. I’m telling you, we’re going to have riots over this stuff in these poor countries. It’s going to happen, and it’s these liberals that have a “oneness” with the common man and the poor. They blame the United States for stealing all the world’s resources; raping the planet of all its goodies so that we can engage in slothful, lazy, rich lifestyles — and for this we need to be punished! We are but what, 5% of the world’s population, they say, and we use 25% of the world’s goodies? We need to be at taught a lesson, and so they we ought to be taxed and we ought to sign the Kyoto accord, help out the Third World. The same liberals who want us to go into alternative fuels via ethanol like this are going to cause the result to be that the poor will get even poorer, the hungrier will become more famished, and the price of tortillas will equal that of caviar.
END TRANSCRIPT
*Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time.