Why President Obama Should Veto the Farm Bill

Carl Gibson | Reader Supported News | February 6, 2014

n the passage of the current farm bill, Congress literally just took $9 billion in food stamps from hungry and poor families and gave it out to big agribusiness giants in the form of more corporate welfare. But with a stroke of his pen, President Obama could send the bill back to Congress and refuse to sign it until Congress properly funds the food stamp program, making a larger populist argument about the need for stronger safety nets in the new gilded age.

The main problem with the farm bill is in the politically-targeted class warfare surrounding how $9 billion in food stamps was cut. Congressman Alan Grayson’s latest email explains his opposition to the current bill because of how it changes the way people automatically qualify for food stamp benefits. Under the former structure, people already benefiting from the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program (LIHEAP) would be more likely to qualify for food stamp benefits as well, since those families are able to take a $644 full standard utility allowance (FSUA) income deduction. In their new farm bill, the House GOP cut food stamps by changing the FSUA qualifications so LIHEAP recipients would have a harder time qualifying for food stamp assistance.

As Congressman Grayson pointed out, poor Republican families in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee would still be able to receive food stamps, but poor Democrat-leaning families in colder states like Illinois, Maine and Massachusetts would have to go through more hoops to qualify for food stamps. Leaving aside the false argument that a nation as rich as ours doesn’t have the money to make sure poor people have access to food, specifically targeting the qualification criteria of food stamp applicants based on whether or not they receive heating assistance is overwhelmingly cruel, not to mention politically-motivated.

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The House’s Farm Bill Is a Perfect Disgrace

The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013

The House has finally passed a farm bill, and we’ll start our discussion by listing the legislation’s good points. It won’t take long.

The bill ends the wasteful direct-payment programs that showered $5 billion per year on commodity producers without regard to need. It abolishes permanent agriculture laws dating back to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, thus eliminating the twice-a-decade threat of chaotic price increases that farm lobbyists used to extract new subsidies. And, for the first time in many years, representatives passed agriculture-support programs separately from food stamps, ending the old log-rolling arrangement between urban and rural delegations that insulated both programs from scrutiny on the merits.

Other than that, the bill’s a perfect disgrace. Each of the above-mentioned pluses is more than offset by a corresponding defect. Yes, direct payments would end, but they’d be replaced with a 10-year, $9?billion increase in crop insurance programs that would protect farms against not only natural disasters but also inconvenient market movements – at a time when U.S. agriculture is enjoying record profits. The irrational New Deal-Fair Deal-era default rules would end, but this new law would never sunset, locking in not only the crop insurance bloat but also costly, unnecessary sugar and milk programs.

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How Hemp Legalization Would Benefit My Family and Country

Doug Fine | National Cannabis Coalition | AlterNet | July 1, 2013

How can a decision be both astonishing and a no-brainer? On June 20, the U.S. House of Representatives passed (as the rest of the world long ago did) an industrial cannabis (hemp) cultivation provision in the massive five-year Farm Bill. The vote was 225-200. Of course, the whole Farm Bill was subsequently voted down, but that was just the usual nation’s political process falling apart – it had nothing to do with humanity’s longest utilized plant.

So I find myself, fresh back from months of international industrial cannabis research, calling a minor hemp study approval clause a landmark step for the nation, the planet and my family (not to mention a huge leap toward the end of the 40-year Drug War).

Because that’s what it was. Most of the early coverage of the hemp provision, put forth by Colorado Representative Jared Polis and two other congressmen, notes correctly that the Republican controlled House took the brunt of the Drug Enforcement Administration lobbying that had killed a similar provision on the Senate a week earlier, and, rightly, ignored its babbling, anti-American idiocy.

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