Who Moved My Donut?

On the occasion of coming off my Lenten diet, I looked forward -- with Homer Simpson-like eagerness -- to my first Monday morning donut in many weeks. And I did manage to score said highly-refined toxic extravagance, but -- oh, woe! -- it cost 5 cents more than it did just a month ago. It took me about ten seconds to figure out whose fault that was, namely the Bush administration and "ethanol mania" which has, for some reason I don't fully understand, not only caused the price of corn to go sky-high, but has created a price jump in other grain products as well. The primary result of this to date has, of course, been to further aggravate third-world poverty. For the poor agrarian peasant, access to cheap grain products is literally a matter of life and death, and has been for time immemorial. As poor as many of those countries are, they have managed to develop a kind of dietary stability that often involves pairing grain-based and legume-based foods. Then along we come with massive subsidies for corn and for ethanol production, and guess what -- these folks find out they are sitting on a gold mine, and that it's owned by their corrupt governments and/or by American corporations. Good-bye cheap corn, hello malnutrition. Now, of course, when one detects an "unanticipated consequence" of this magnitude it's not -- nor is it ever -- too late to reverse course in order to minimize the damages. But our Department of Agriculture, Congress, and the administration show no signs whatever of doing that. The ethanol cartel is triumphant, riding high, crushing the poor of the world underfoot, and no one cares, _because_ the people who _usually_ care about these things -- namely, the liberals -- have committed themselves entirely to the ethanol myth, and no amount of counter-evidence is going to change their minds. (Similarly, if it turned out that "global warming" was actually _good_ for a lot of heretofore-"underprivileged" peoples, would they change their tune on that? Not bloody likely.) So you can expect the ethanol juggernaut to roll on regardless of consequences... and my Monday morning donut to keep getting more expensive. What a world, what a world!