When Donald Trump announced a $12 billion welfare program for farmers facing massive financial losses from his poorly conceived, erratically conducted trade war with China, it looked like a brazen political payoff to rural Trump voters to try to stop a Democratic Party takeover of Congress from creating a check on his corrupt, incompetent presidency. It failed miserably.
An enormous Blue Wave of urban and suburban voters is on track to flip 40 congressional seats for a Democratic House majority—the largest surge for Democrats since gaining 49 seats after the Watergate scandal drove Republican President Richard Nixon from office. Rural voters have remained Trump’s strongest constituency, but now they’re learning just how paltry those farm bailout checks really are. The question for 2020 is whether rural voters will continue to swallow the continuous stream of lies they’ve been fed by a fast-talking city slicker.
The puny payouts to endangered Wisconsin family farmers who lost tens of thousands of dollars in Trump’s trade war are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the wealthy who really cleaned up from those bailouts. But first, it’s clear who didn’t qualify for much help: struggling Wisconsin farmers. In the first round of payments, 11 of the state’s largest corporate farms received between $50,000 and $81,000. But, the average payment for all Wisconsin farmers was only $2,145, with 237 of them receiving less than $100 each. Those numbers are even worse when you realize how much money state farmers lost due to falling prices, rising tariffs and disappearing markets.
Pennies for Dairy Farmers
The Wisconsin Farmers Union, representing small- and medium-sized farms, said a 55-cow dairy farm would receive $725 from Trump’s bailout, while losing some $36,000 to $48,000 this year. On the high end, a 290-cow dairy farm would get $4,905, but could lose as much as $400,000 this year.
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The Environmental Working Group—a non-partisan research group that has tracked farm subsidies for two decades—said the largest 10% of corporate agribusinesses qualifying for bailouts received 68% of all the money as small change was tossed to struggling family farmers on the edge of extinction. If that sounds familiar, it’s the standard pattern for all Republican corporate welfare and tax cuts: Republicans direct most of the financial benefits from their policies to those at the very top who need it the least.
Trump didn’t even bother to consult obedient Congressional Republicans on his $12 billion farm bailout. Acting on his own, he diverted Depression Era-emergency funds created by Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt that were intended to reimburse farmers for weather-related disasters and catastrophic crop failures. Trump simply redefined disaster relief to include relief from his own disastrous presidency.
Another quirk of Trump’s farm bailouts was no one actually had to be a farmer to receive the funds! The Washington Post profiled a millionaire Manhattan, N.Y., architect who received a check for $3,300 in farm bailout funds as part-owner of his family’s farm in Ohio. He’s one of more than 1,100 urban investors across the country qualifying for farm bailout funds, including 85 living in Milwaukee.
Chinese Pork Payments
The most unbelievable abuse of Trump’s farm bailout reported so far was the awarding of $240,000 in pork payments to Smithfield Foods—the world’s largest pork processor boasting $15 billion in annual revenue. The company’s enormous profits weren’t even the worst part. Remember that the farm bailout was to counter the severe economic damage to U.S. farmers from Trump’s trade war with China. Since 2013, Smithfield Foods has been owned the WH Group, a Chinese conglomerate.
Bipartisan outrage in the U.S. Senate led by Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley ultimately forced Trump’s Agriculture Department to cancel the payment of nearly a quarter of a million U.S. tax dollars to a Chinese company as compensation for Trump’s trade war with China. But don’t get carried away crediting Sen. Grassley as one of the few Republicans to stand up to Trump’s most stupid moves. There was a good reason Grassley knew what was going on with farm bailouts. Grassley and Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, both millionaires, own farms and have applied for Trump’s bailout funds.
Trump isn’t the only current government official passing laws and promoting policies to fill his own pockets. That’s why Republicans call Washington, D.C., the “swamp.” Everywhere you look, swamp creatures—including Trump, his family, his cabinet members, as well as lawmakers from both parties—are frolicking and doing back flips in the muck.
The public explanation from Grassley and Tester is the same one Trump uses as a billionaire businessman for paying little or no taxes some years. They take advantage of every public subsidy and tax loophole to which they are legally entitled; there just happen to be a lot more of them when you’re the ones writing the laws. If the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath wanted to survive by farming, they should have run for public office.
