We Don't Need No Stinking French Fry Grease

peterj - What a great description of the biofuels scam: "burning food". I hadn't thought of in those terms before, but you're bang-on!

Ethanol would make sense if there was a shortage of oil.

Not even then. Petroleum is the major resource consumed to grow and process corn into ethanol and junk food. Industrial agriculture is an inefficient process to turn oil into food.

The exceptions are those farmers who grow soy, canola and sunflowers to produce biodiesel to fuel their farm operations. Much like their grandparents did with growing horse feed, it only takes a small percent of their land to grow the fuel the farm needs.

American Democracy is an excellent system, but unfortunately the vast majority of American voters aren't using it correctly.

Of course democracy isn't really a very good idea for getting efficient or good government, for that you need an enlightened despot. But with despotism you never can get only the enlightened kind, it always attracts the tyrannical kind. Democracy's chief virtue is that it gives the best chance of regularly chucking out the bad rulers without riots, lynchings, and mass bayoneting. To also get somewhat good government from it takes a lot more interest and effort than most electors are willing to put in.

Good points, I agree. Regarding democracy, the American system has reached the stage with the current administration where this prophesy now applies more than ever.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

the USA postal services used ethanol "polluted" fuel and did a audit and found that they not only used more fuel then when using straight gas, the gas component of ethanol tainted fuel was greater then straight gas, that's one hell of a efficiency drop.

how me ONE government system in recorded history that was good for the plebes
Switzerland, the world's oldest modern democracy. It works, not because it's a democracy, but rather because it's the Swiss.

"Corn ethanol is a scam to subsidize corn growers."

Even the corn growers believe that big lie. It largely only benefits ethanol makers like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland). Any benefit to corn growers is overwhelmed by the increased costs of production livestock feeders and consumers.

It increases cost to petroleum refiners and consumers.....even making exhaust systems swiftly biodegradable...

Perhaps only the muffler shops benefit....

It is a democracy and a republic. The two are not mutually exclusive. Neither are democracy and monarchy, e.g. that's what we have.

"Is the prices of everything else in free fall too?"

Short answer is yes, and on a broad range of crops. I have yet to discover all the reasons why. I do not know how productive the Russian, Kazakhstan, and Ukrainian crops were, nor the crop conditions in SA.

Western Canada did not have a very good crop, but apparently the US had a good wheat and bean crop. There are also economic fears as we have seen the stock markets dramatically drop to levels of two years ago and barrel oil price drops to levels not seen for a few years.

Using food producing crop land to produce ethanol is a crime against humanity.

There really is no benefit to mixing this piss with our gasoline.

Like sasquatch commented, it "benefits ethanol makers like ADM (Archer Daniels Midland). " In the USSA that's all they need to override common sense. It's what happens when a country lets lawyers and lobbyists run their government.

The Sgt. said: "There is no such thing as "food inflation"."

Agreed. What we are really seeing is the food prices finally rising to the same level as everything else, after having been ARTIFICIALLY SUPPRESSED by government since the 1960's.

Its called the Cheap Food Policy, and its primary goal is keeping the Low Information Voter unconcerned. As in fat, happy and stupid enough to keep voting DemocRat. Or Liberal, in our case.

However all the centralized command and control of the economy counts for nothing when you're printing a trillion dollars a quarter of Monopoly money and off-shoring your entire industrial infrastructure to the Third world. All the little scams and "policies" start to come unraveled in the face of a wall of debt like that. We will soon be fondly remembering $7.00 a pound bacon as the good old days when there was bacon at the store.

None of which means that the ethanol fuel law isn't contributing to the price of food, of course. It is. Just like a zillion other asinine centralized economic command and control policies regulations and laws are. A government takes half your income and then borrows 2:1 against the other half, pretty much everything they do is going to hurt.

Its just that using FOOD for fuel is so egregiously moronic that it stands out above all the rest like a giant torch of burning stupid. A veritable beacon of liberal fail, shining above the mountain of bullsh1t they've accumulated over the last 100 years.

Beef is still thru the roof. I cant afford to buy feeders to feed that cheap corn to. For the past 8 months feeder cattle and dairy beef cost mote per lb then finished cattle.