Yeah, About those Subsidies

It appears that a fertilizer plant in Iowa, created with millions of dollars from the state of Iowa and the USDA in order to create a competitor to Koch Industries (Yes, those Koch Suckers) is being sold to Koch Industries.

Seriously, if you want to create competition through subsidies, make sure that the enterprise responsible for producing the product is owned by the government.

I know that this sounds like socialism. That's because because it is socialism.

The alternative to this is to keep throwing the surviving half of the Koch brothers piles of money.

To quote Emilio Estevez in Repo Man, "Fuck That!."

In 2017, the chemical company OCI Global opened a fertilizer plant in Iowa after a deal that was notable from the beginning. Pitched as an opportunity to introduce competition into the highly consolidated fertilizer industry, the goal of this new plant was to decrease fertilizer costs for farmers and food costs for consumers. As such, the project was heavily subsidized by taxpayers through state and federal tax breaks, loans, and grants.

Just six years later, however, we’re seeing Koch Industries — the very competitor the Iowa plant was built to challenge — acquire the plant. If the deal goes through, taxpayers will have footed a $550 million bill to build the Iowa plant only for Koch Industries to reap the rewards.

Since there were no safeguards established to prevent larger companies from acquiring the Iowa plant, this outcome isn’t surprising. Like all the giant corporations dominating our food and farm system today, Koch Industries is always looking for the next opportunity to tighten its grip on the industry by buying out smaller competitors.

As the government funds major investments to boost competition in the fertilizer, meatpacking, and seed industries, Farm Action has been sounding the alarm: Without proper safeguards, the billions of dollars the government is investing will inevitably end up in the hands of the dominant corporations they are trying to challenge.

Well duh.  Of course they will.

In fact, I would argue that this was probably the goal all along.

Both the Iowa Republicans and the USDA have their tongues so far up the rectums of big Ag that they are probably tasting tonsils.