Say Anything

If there was any evidence needed for the fact that the government uses social programs and subsidies to control us, consider how Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad and now Senator Al Franken have threatened that program as a way to try and push American Crystal into caving into union demands to end a months-long lockout.

“I can’t pass legislation to make a private company settle with their workers,” Senator Franken told the Grand Forks Herald. Which is true. But he can use federal policy to threaten that company. That he’ll do gladly on behalf of his union cronies.

The situation has caused “real pain” for the workers and their families, Franken said, but it also has “undermined” the sugar program.

The “three-way cooperation” in the Red River Valley between growers, labor and business at American Crystal helped give the sugar program broad support in Congress, he said. “And now that’s being torn asunder and I fear for the sugar program.”

The sugar program, to be accurate, is not direct subsidies. The sugar program protects domestic sugar markets from foreign competition with trade barriers, and controls the amount of sugar farmers can sell to sugar companies so that increased supply doesn’t drive down prices. It is a government-controlled market, operated to the benefit of American sugar companies, and what Franken is threatening to do is exercise that political control to the detriment of companies like American Crystal because they won’t give Franken’s union buddies what they want.

It’s out-and-out corruption. Shocking to see in a “free country” like America.