THE GREAT ETHANOL FRAUD CONTINUES

THE GREAT ETHANOL FRAUD CONTINUES
Commentary by Richard D. Masters, ICHC April 8, 2007

Americans are slowly waking up to the energy fraud foisted upon them by a dangerous, rudderless presidential administration run by Big Oil.

    Because the energy to make corn ethanol is only about what one can get out of it, the billions of subsidy dollars poured into the Great Ethanol Fraud never could reduce our dependence on oil. In fact, without these bizarrely inflated subsidies which combined range upwards of a dollar per gallon, this artificial fabrication of an "ethanol industry" will completely collapse.
    The program is a giveaway to farm states, to the factory builders, to the unions.
    It is theft.
    It is killing the livestock industry and creating a complex nightmare of ever-greater fossil fuel usage, spiraling food prices and inflation, unprecedented global environmental destruction, as well as instilling a new sense of hatred for America in the world's poor. And because it is not a solution to anything, it can have no effect on lowering gas prices.
    Big Oil loves this.
    By funding a massive misinformation program with the collusion of officials in the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior, Big Oil led by ExxonMobil has successfully exploited the extreme gullibility of the public and the rampant stupidity, greed and dishonesty of our elected representatives to sidetrack the vital money for perfecting and expanding renewable energy - funding that would threaten sky-high oil profits - onto a dead end road where it is wastefully and unapologetically gobbled up by Big Agriculture. The advance of true renewable energy - wind, wave, river, geothermal and sun - as our "Energy Policy" demonstrates, has been thwarted once again. And the oil companies are laughing all the way to the bank as they pocket record profits while pushing our atmosphere to the brink.
    This graft and deceit is criminal. It is not a game. It is not a business tactic. Stealing the tax dollars that would have funded clean and abundant energy is a crime against our children, against future generations and against humanity.
    The great tragedy accomplished by these international fossil fuel and nuclear corporations and their bought-and-paid-for salesmen in the U.S. Congress - on both sides of the aisle - is a bleak future of eternal oil wars to seize resources and keep prices high; a dying environment as safeguards are relaxed for oil or coal or nuclear power at any cost; increasing asthma and cancer from fossil fuel and biofuel pollution; the loss of high-tech employment opportunities as the energy sector contracts from diminishing resources; as the manufacturing sector moves off-shore; as the tech sector out-sources jobs that were once America's pride to the Third World, and replaces the promise with a low wage service industry where our disillusioned, under-educated, bitter children will struggle to repay consumer and national debt for the rest of their lives.
    Even the independent farmers of the corn belt, now riding high and expanding their croplands, buying fleets of new tractors on credit as they expound about the wonders of the New Ethanol Age, are in for a rude surprise when the corn subsidies and sugar tariffs are inevitably cut - and they are forced to sell out to Big Agriculture.
    And the unions - what a tragic misjudgment they have made! Instead of holding out for wind farm expansion, which could have spread cheap energy and high-tech jobs across the Midwest - jobs that would last forever! - they foolishly allowed themselves to be suckered into the ethanol fiasco, built on a sand foundation of governmental largess that will end in a few years, leaving them desperate, unemployed, with nothing.
    Sometimes stupidity has its own just dessert. Sadly, this is best evidenced in the way our government responds to the perceived enemies of its people. Since 911, six thousand Americans have died from acts of terrorism and and the ensuing military response, accompanied by a total investment estimate at over 2 trillion dollars. Yet over 60,000 Americans have been killed in the same period by the fuels we use for energy and this has been virtually ignored.
    Renewable energy is the technology of salvation, yet we are driving it overseas with myriad prohibitive policies, such as feed-in caps, that prevent it from gaining a real toehold. The Energy Renaissance will reinvigorate the countries where it grows - as we now see exploding across Denmark and Germany - but it will not happen in countries where citizens allow themselves to be ruled and deceived by oil.