Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (172043)	7/2/2006 3:56:18 PM
From: miraje	Respond to of 793896

describes U.S. farm subsidies as "a complex web that has little basis in fairness or efficiency." Recent editorial from Alexander Cockburn on the same subject... BUFFETT'S GIFT When Frank Gehry gets around to designing America's answer to the Sistine Chapel, I trust this postmodern Temple of Mammon on Las Vegas Blvd. will have a ceiling fresco depicting Warren Buffett's consignment of $31 billion to Bill and Melinda Gates. As the older billionaire sits on his pillow of cloud, his outthrust hand with its bag of securities is grasped by Gates -- the Adam of Software Commerce -- while seraphs and cherubs muse delightedly over the IRS regulations governing the sheltering of Buffett's swag in tax-exempt non-profit foundations. Let us not waste too much time here advising Mr. and Mrs. Gates how to spend Buffett's money. At the moment it seems that the Gates couple's core focus is the war on AIDS and malaria, both ravaging Africa. How to improve the Dark Continent's overall well-being? America's senators and representatives can be bought for bargain-basement sums. A modest disbursement by the Gates Foundation -- let us say $50,000 for each senator and $20,000 for each rep -- would most certainly buy enough votes to end the current government subsidy, $4.5 billion for 2004, to cotton growers. The entire crop that year, the last for which figures are available, was worth $5.9 billion, and the subsidy enables U.S. growers to export three-quarters of their harvest and control about 40 percent of world trade, thus destroying the farm economies of countries like Mozambique, Benin and Mali. The World Trade Organization found the United States in violation this spring, but the 10 largest cotton growers here -- virtuous Jeffersonian toilers such as Kelley Enterprises (Tennessee) and J.G. Boswell (California) -- have the necessary political clout to keep the subsidies coming. With overthrow of the cotton subsidy as a pilot program, Gates could launch a wider onslaught on the subsidies doled out to large wheat, rice and corn growers. Economists are slightly more costly than politicians, but generous Gates "scholarships" to prominent neoliberal economists would be contingent on these economists' swift revisions of their foolish theories. One particularly delightful aspect of Buffett's $31-billion transfer was its stately mime of the Great American Pageant. Here was no twitchy trader but Buffett the wise investor, cherishing his favored stocks over decades, ambling around his headquarters in homely Omaha. And here was the younger entrepreneur, Bill Gates, no longer the ruthless Master of Microsoft, but the Third World's Santa Claus... Rest of the article at: creators.com