Friday, February 8, 2008

The Harm Created by the Ethanol Scam

The Ethanol Scam has everything to do with money. Men are not evil to this degree just for the heck of it. The desire for wealth gives them an incentive to engage in this creation of hardship.

I've accumulated information (Click to see video) on some of the negatives associated with corn ethanol production. There's a lot. What I have is below. But there is much more information available.

With this information you are able to assess what the Bush Ethanol Scam has set upon you. You really need to take this personally. This was done to you.
You are going to hurt because of this. In fact you have already been hurt as the price of basic food stocks are rising now. That which you need the very most, food, has been made more difficult for you to obtain by the corn Ethanol Scam.

The harm caused by the promotion of Corn ethanol:

One way the American public has been harmed is by higher food prices. An injured aquatic ecology / fishing industry in the Gulf of Mexico is another way. There are predictions of much greater loss of farm land due to erosion associated with the intensive farming needed to produce corn.

Further, i
n the course of corn ethanol production chemical additives that enter the soil create risk factors impacting humans and others in the environment. It is not only fertilizers which cause the problems or create the potential that results in the problems.

There are the poisons deliberately put into the ground in order to produce your food. These present an additional hazard to the environment. It can end up in the water supply due to run-offs from the fields they're used on. It can end up in our bodies as well as the bodies of our pets. Our entire lifestyle is under attack through the activity relating to the production of corn ethanol.

The herbicides, the government has warned, represent a potential health risk. The agricultural herbicides that are used in the cultivation of corn and other crops end up in our bodies. They are of course toxic.

Along with herbicides, there are pesticides which can harm humans as well as the environment in general. The poisoning of wildlife and pets is an example of that. Corn is an especially large consumer of agricultural chemicals.

'Cide' seems to have shown up multiple times in the preceding paragraphs. It goes along with sui'cide', and homi'cide'. When you see it, it means somebody, something, died. One chemical used, Atrazine, is highly dangerous to humans. "This information is important because this substance may harm you." is the warning from a Department of Health and Human Services website.

So poison is one way we have been placed at risk by the increased production of corn for ethanol. It is reasonable to think that if your poison is ending up in my body that you are hurting me in some detectable way.

But perhaps the most palpable and immediate way in which the ordinary citizen is being injured by the logic of the Ethanol Scam is associated with what they pay for groceries. The price of food is rising and is expected to continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Ethanol claims priority over the traditional use of corn for food.

We all need to eat. This is our common need. Making it more difficult to obtain food is not in our best interests. The manufactured scarcity of food is a tool long used by oppressors when trying to control a population. The potato famine in Ireland is an example of that. Those are the 'knowns' about the harm of ethanol to the average citizen. The 'unknowns' may be found to exist in the inscrutable genesis of diseases.

"The enormous volume of corn required by the ethanol industry is sending shock waves through the food system.... This might sound like nirvana to corn producers, but it is hardly that for consumers, especially in poor developing countries, who will be hit with a double shock if both food prices and oil prices stay high."

Chicken is definitely going to cost more.

Tyson foods in their first quarter fiscal report in 2008 states: "The chicken segment struggled with more than $100 million in additional grain costs."

"In November, we projected an additional $300 million in grain costs for fiscal 2008," Bond said. "We now think this year-over-year increase will exceed half a billion dollars. Because of these unanticipated and extraordinarily high corn and soybean meal costs, we have no choice but to raise prices substantially.

"The continued escalation of grain prices, driven largely by government mandates for corn-based ethanol, has caused a domino effect for other inputs. Cooking oil, flour and other feed ingredients are all on the rise. For the foreseeable future, consumers will pay more and more for food, especially protein, because grain represents a proportionally higher percentage of input costs compared to other foods."
The same is true for beef prices, and any product remotely related to corn.

The cost in dollars to the consumer is already astonishingly high. The increased cost of living associated with the production of ethanol from corn makes it especially difficult for those of us who need to eat, and who have loved ones that need to eat. All have all been affected by this policy; more have been harmed than benefited. I think this is a BETTER WAY

According to a study conducted and issued May 17, 2007 by Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa: "...the study finds that the increase in U.S. retail food prices could reach $20 billion annually under a scenario in which crude oil prices range from $65 to $70 per barrel and U.S. corn prices reach $4.42 per bushel, compared to the $2 per bushel that existed in mid-August 2006.

Under the high-price crude oil scenario, the study projects that U.S. ethanol production could reach 30 billion gallons by 2016, consuming more than half of U.S. corn, wheat and other coarse grain production and triggering higher meat prices for consumers, reduced production across-the-board for all segments of the meat sector, and even greater reductions in grain and meat exports."


This goes back to the designation of a scam. You have been maneuvered into paying more for your food under the pretext of benefiting yourself with ethanol. It's going to cost the citizens of this nation
$20 billion more annually simply to eat so that the policies of the United States can go forward. I find this unacceptable. This is going to hurt people in other nations as well.

But who will benefit? (This question needs to be answered.) Who will benefit from imposing hardship on us? What is the benefit from doing something like this to the people that live on the planet? I do not believe it has anything to do with national security. The men and woman who conceived this plan are not going to feel the impact of their activity in any way but positive.

It is most of us who need to work hard and try our best to keep our heads above water that are going to be hurt. We have already been hurt by the judgment reflected in these policies.

Free from dependence on foreign oil. That was the 'con'. Being insecure regarding oil futures was the pretext of the danger we were said to have faced which made us vulnerable. Therefore we are going to use food to make fuel for machines. That seems to have been the thinking on the subject. It does not seem plausible that those making the plans overlooked the effects of their activities on the family budgets around the world. I think what is more likely they did not think it mattered all that much.

Read the snow job the Senate sent you so you'd agree to raise the price of food you eat by $20 billion annually. They must be spending a lot of money because they have gone to the expense of producing this. These guys are smart. They could sweet talk a kid out of his toy and the kid would never be the wiser. Because this is designed to harm, under the pretext of being a benefit, the Ethanol Scam is a crime against the people of the world perpetrated by a few who control the financial interests that govern life here. Here is what I would designate as a description of the crime.

"David Pimentel of Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has argued that ethanol is a lousy choice because it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than the ethanol ultimately yields. It also takes a heck of a lot of corn to produce very much ethanol.
11 Acres = One Year’s Fuel. "

You don't pick out technologies and give them incentives," he says. "What you do is you make it a fair playing field." Incentives frequently lead to bad technology, because there's an economic reason for their development, and some argue that's exactly what has happened with ethanol.

Pimentel, who chaired a U.S. Department of Energy committee that looked into ethanol several years ago, says relying on corn for our future energy needs would devastate the nation's food production.

It takes 11 acres to grow enough corn to fuel one automobile with ethanol for 10,000 miles, or about a year's driving, Pimentel says. That's the amount of land needed to feed seven persons for the same period of time." This information is from the Energy Bulletin.


This article is well worth reading. There are thoughtful people in this world, and there are people who can connect the dots and see what appears.

The relationship of higher food prices, along with higher fuel prices, combined with an economy fighting for its life against a recession makes this hard on families. We all have to eat. Having more expensive food in this type of economy is not a plus from the average person's point of view. So for whom is the increase in food a positive change? Our place here on the planet has been made a little more difficult by those elected to look after us. You might wonder why the Bush Administration would want to do this to us. I'd say that greed is the reason and you do not mean anything to them but a way to finance your own demise.

That's the way it looks from here, anyhow.