The consequence of passivity

Winners today: Hollywood, Archer Daniels Midland, Poet/Brion Ethanol, LLC, global carbon scams, junk science. Losers: everyone else. Federal ethanol requirements which are already proving catastrophic were imposed on the US so as to be non-negotiable. Great job.

• Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- "U.S. officials rejected Texas Governor Rick Perry's request to ease the requirement for the use of corn- based ethanol in gasoline, saying he didn't prove that the rules were straining grain supplies enough to cause ``severe economic harm.''...

He wanted to reduce by half this year's requirement to produce 9 billion gallons of the biofuel.

• The decision ensures ethanol producers such as Poet LLC, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Archer Daniels Midland Co., in Decatur, Illinois, will continue to have demand for their fuel. It is a blow to refiners and livestock producers who have fought the increased mandates because of higher costs...

Perry said. ``Any government mandate that artificially props up a single industry to the detriment of millions of Americans is bad public policy.''...

• The decision isn't surprising, said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates in Houston, ``

• particularly in an election year,

• given the importance of corn-growing swing states, such as Iowa and Minnesota.''

``The market was widely expecting the request to be denied,'' he said."...

Diversion of food crops to carbon offsets results in world-wide famine, here starving Kenyans. photo from Time.com, 2/2/7/08.

• Pa. Gov. Ed Rendell changes mind about ethanol.

(Aldous Huxley, 1962): ""It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to

• love their servitude." -- Aldous Huxley (1962 speech at Berkeley)

(Servitude=passivity). sm

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