YOUNG MACDONALD HAS AN AGRIBUSINESS, E-I-E-I-OH!

When a farm become an agribusiness, do they have CEO's instead in a farmer in charge? And how many Senators and Congressmen are getting in on the huge amount of free money the government hands out every year to subsidize agribusinesses, getting paid obscene piles of money not to grow alfalfa on their tennis courts? Maybe I can declare my little yard in Brooklyn a farm and apply for government aid since I don't grow a damned thing there. I'll assure the government they won''t have to worry about me producing a glut of soybeans on the world food markets.

But that's not the way it works in the food politics industry.The United States hands out over 300 billion dollars a year in farm subsidies, more than half of it going to 19 out of 435 Congressional Districts. And a lot of that dough (our dough, by the way, tax dollars) doesn't even go to farmers. There was that 93 million bucks in tax breaks given to horse breeders, even though most farms haven't had a single horse on their premises for generations. When it come to food legislation, business as usual in Washington produces many a back room deal so that timber companies, wealthy food conglomerates and other non-farmers receive a whole lot of our money.

Which comes as no surprise with a Congress that loaded the 9/11 emergency relief bill and the Hurricane Katrina funding bill with tons of pork barrel earmarks having nothing to do with those national disasters. Remember all those Dunkin' Donut franchises and tanning salons in the sunniest parts of our country funded by the 9/11 legislation? How having more Dunkin' Donuts equated to a serious response to the most devastating attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor is anyone's guess, as long as that guess involves criminal bribery and influence peddling at the expense of others. So when Congress gets near the national cookie jar for just about any reason, you can pretty much guarantee that they themselves will emerge from those sessions with sugar coated lips and cookie crumbs all over them.

Funny how with worldwide food shortages and 36,000 people a day dying from starvation we pay farmers not to grow food so as not to glut the market with one commodity or another. Not ha-ha funny either.You think some guy who lives half a world away in a tin hut would worry that America is producing too many soybeans? Not when he's watching his children waste away from hunger. So if you let the Dunkin' Donuts franchises, the horse breeders, the tanning salons, the timber mills and the giant food corporations fend for themselves, there would be many millions left over to ship the extra food to people who are dying.

But I suppose I'm being naive here, right? I'm just an unsophisticated observer who knows nothing about farming or the way Congress operates. Well, guilty on the lack of farming expertise, but I know pretty much how our Congress operates. Being from New York City I have long observed how the 5 Mafia families around here split up the turf and extract millions of dollars from the economy which they have not earned. Congress is pretty much ehe same, with "Made" men and women on the inside making deals with one another and lobbyists, who are basically their co-conspirators, siphoning off huge chunks of money earned by the sweat and smarts of somebody else.

All the while these made men and women rant and rave about waste in government, meaning of course, the money that doesn't go to their pet projects on their turf. Sometimes they have sit-downs like the Mafia bosses to hash out these territorial disputes, making sure the gravy train stops at every station, whether or not that station has plenty of gravy already. And if anyone calls for giving the president a line-item veto to pare the legislation down to it's original proposed purpose, they shriek like banshees that such a move would curtail their civil rights. What, their right to pass hidden legislation in an open society? Bullshit!

If some guy want to Feds to pay for a cheese museum in his state, let him propose a bill that states just that. If somebody thinks the taxpayers ought to fund a tanning salon in Las Vegas where's here's more sun than gamblers, let him put that proposal out in the open and debate its merits like any other law. And when Young MacDonald wants three-quarters of a million dollars every year to not grow food on his farm, let him explain exactly how that works. That ought to be pretty amusing.