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President Trump's farmer bailout flows to city slickers (large corporate entities and wealthy absentee landlords)
 [The Hill] We’re learning the first details of the Department of Agriculture’s bailout for farmers whose exports were hit by President Trump’s trade war. Department records show that more than 1,000 payments were made to "city slickers" who live in the nation’s largest cities, according to information the Environmental Working Group has obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.So far, the USDA has pledged to provide up to $12 billion to offset the impacts of Trump’s trade war. The first round includes $4.7 billion in direct payments to growers of soybeans, corn, cotton, sorghum, wheat, hogs, dairy, sweet cherries and shelled almonds. The data includes almost 88,000 payments made through Oct. 31, totaling $356 million. That’s less than one-tenth of the amount the administration expects to make through Trump’s Market Facilitation Program. But our analysis of this small slice of data reveals that 1,142 bailout payments were made to "farmers" in the nation’s 50 largest cities, including nine residents of San Francisco, four residents of Los Angeles, five residents of New York City and four residents of Washington, D.C. Based on this sample, it’s reasonable to expect that more than 20,000 big-city "farmers" will ultimately receive bailout payments. That number would be consistent with an earlier EWG analysis, which found that nearly 20,000 people living in the nation’s largest cities received farm subsidy payments in 2017. How is this possible? It would be easy to blame Congress, as Congress has consistently failed to require that farm subsidy recipients contribute personal labor to the farm. The Government Accountability Office recently found that nearly one-fourth of farm subsidy recipients do not work on the farm. Posted by: Besoeker 2018-11-25 |
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