From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They called me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Congratulations Matt, Congratulations, NOL, congratulations, Mission Control code name Doc Holliday, and all our fellow conspiracy realists playing along at home. Tonight will be our most corny episode.
Literally, de boom, Jonathan Davis, as long as you don't rap.
I have heard Noel freestyle, and Nola is way better than Jonathan Davis.
You said it before, and I was like, you mean scat. I think the term we're looking for is scat. And then Ben pointed out that apparently there are some deep, deep interior cuts what one should never hear of corn where Jonathan Davis does in fact rap, He just stick to scatting and bagpipes.
Hmmm, who are we to judge?
You know, we are we We are exactly who we are to judge.
You know, guys, I was never really a big fan of that band Corn until I tried it with some butter and then changed my life.
I'll tell you that McDonald's dad with a buttered corn.
That sweet corn is what I will say this guys, and can move on from Corn band. I think their first couple of records are very unique. I don't think there were any other bands that sounded like that. I think there were a bunch of bands that copied them, and then they kind of had to sort of stay with the times and they became more kind of rap, rocky, limbisky.
But I think their first two records hold up as pretty interesting records and then a unique sound from a band that hadn't really been done before.
I will diell That's fine. That's a fine hill to die on. You could say something similar about Walt Whitman and Blank Verse with Pards of Grass.
You know what I mean.
Excellent excellent work, created a lot of inspired a lot of work that is not necessarily for me. I get you, I hear you, and the baselines on those early Corn albums absolutely nasty, utter poetry.
All the stuff that were saying about corn the band. You could technically say about corn the crop.
It's bold. It's a mold statement. I don't agree, but I love it, so it's yeah. We are diving into, as you said, Noel, we are diving into a conspirac A lot of folks have maybe wondered about occasionally in the grocery store or maybe your gas pump, but never really solved. Why does the United States have so much corn? Why did corn take over America? How did that happen? Here are the facts. It doesn't matter what sort of propaganda you read, it doesn't matter whom you're speaking with.
Everyone knows, by any measure, these United States are a corn superpower. As of just last year, ninety million acres of the entire country were committed to corn. Some folks in the industry and some folks outside of the industry. Economist in fact, call this stuff yellow gold. Not a super creative.
Name of yellow.
I mean, I know how you know in depth they went with workshopping on that, but uh, but they do call it gold because it is a generative business. It is a billion dollar business. You could actually, if we traveled back in time and talk to those alchemists who were trying to turn lead into gold. Then we could realistically tell them about corn. They wouldn't have known about corn, and they would have said, why don't I just become a farmer?
What do you think would have happened if in their pursuit of turning lead to gold they had accidentally turned it to corn. You think they would have been pleased or disappointed?
They would have been super hype. They would have been they would have gone so they would.
Have been like devil, What is this substance before.
Me, shout out angry alchemists. Yeah, it's like this industry, corn as an agricultural product, touches on all sorts of other parts of the day to day experience in the United States. I think it was we were looking into this off air in preparation for this episode. As of twenty twenty one, probably the most recent reliable numbers, the USDA US Department of Agriculture estimates the corn industry and this country alone is worth well over eighty six billion dollars.
Yes, and that is not just the raw product of corn, right. That is, as Ben said, the corn industry because there is so much that has been built out of that crop for reasons we're going to get into because you can't just make corn. You got to do stuff with it. And there's a reason for that, because we got so much of it.
Yeah.
Have you ever seen the corn Palace? That's huge, that's built entirely out of corn.
Yeah, there's there's other stuff you can do with the crop too, and it's actually kind of astounding what you can do.
Yeah, it's amazing, so versatile. Also, I want to give a wholesome shout out. We don't always get the opportunity to do this. I would like to give a wholesome shout out to that little American kid who was like what four five? Very corn kid, Yeah, very very young kid. The corn kid. Very young kid did a good fun. Yeah, it's fun. Let's play just a little.
Please, Yeah, because I don't think any of us are doing it right. He has his own kind of way about him.
I love.
All right, perfect we all.
Yeah, see now you get my reference with I tried it with butter.
And it can happen to you too. That's what I love. This kid is Promethean. He's like, I will bring I won't bring the idea of corn and butter to you. Uh so, why why did this happen? If you look at the experts across the world, not just in agriculture, but in the world of economics, you'll find very interesting comments. The chief economist that the USDA was asked about why corn was such a big deal, and this guy explained it simply. He said, we're really good at it. His
name's Seth Meyer, and he is right. He's not the famous Seth Meyer. He's the chief economist Seth Meyer circles. Sure, I hope so it does good work. He's unrelated to Saturday Night Live. The US has the land, the climate, we're in the cap bird seat as a country to grow corn. Most importantly, the US has a very well established infrastructure entirely meant to push corn out from the ground and to consumers across the world.
Yeah exactly. And by the time, you know, of course, early the early days of corn, I don't think we even had a US government. Wasn't corn one of those things that we basically like stole from the Native Americans? Yeah exactly. So there was certainly a time where corn was less governed. Let's say, we were all less governed before the US government was actually a thing. Corn was
already a very well established crop. According to writings in an Indigenous People's History of the United States by Roxane Dunbar Ortiz, to quote, Indigenous American agriculture was based on corn. Since there is no evidence of corn on any other continent prior to its post Columbus dispersal, its development is
a unique invention of the original American agricultures. For Ben, we were going to talk about monsanto and bioengineering and all of that stuff, But how does one invent a crop in these our early days of the history of this land. Yeah, good question.
Also, the way that you do it is you find a cereal, a grain of some sort, and you overtime over different harvest cycles select for the traits that you desire. So the original thing, the original grain that leads to corn, is not what you would find in a can today. It's way less cool. In its original form, corn as a story dates back ten thousand years ago to people in southern Mexico, and they've figured out a way to
reproduce for the traits that they were seeking. And I really appreciate that you bring up post Columbus dispersal here because there's a great there's a great, somewhat snarky, high level history of corn in the US, which is automatically history of corn in North America's history of corn in the world. In fourteen ninety three, Crystal bal Cologne, or Christopher Columbus as he's known here, returned to Europe with all kinds of trash to talk. He also had a
pocket full of corn seeds. He had seen native people growing and eating and using corn in his travels, and he knew this thing would be fire, you know what I mean. If he could convince the regimes of Europe at the time that they could invest in it, he knew he could change Western Europe. Unfortunately, he fumbled the ball pretty hard. He brought some corn seeds, not popcorn. He brought some corn seeds, but he did not know
how to grow it. He did not know how to propagate it, how to treat the soil and the harvest correctly.
He just got in the ground, right, Well, yeah, that's it, you just put it in the ground.
Well, that's why, that's why Europe is still very much wheat based. When you talk about grains. To those folks, that's why they like musley and stuff.
Like that.
Am I saying that right? Museally?
I think so?
Yeah? Was it musically like a dry cereal that makes you poop?
Yeah, but it's that corn.
Yeah, it's like human dog food. It's like grape nuts, but like worse.
All human food is human dog food.
Fair enough, fair chocolate. It's like processed kind of kibble looking stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
So the Europeans they're not with it. They hear about the gold and silver, and of course they love the slavery, but they don't get on board with the corn, and an interesting division occurs in those two societies. Across the Atlantic Ocean, corn thrives. It is today an integral part of the economy and culture of all people living in the United States. Full stop, folks. It does not matter if you think you don't eat corn, you kind of do. Well.
Yeah, if you eat anything that's processed, basically, you're probably eating corn. If you open your mouth while you're outside, you're probably taking in a little bit of corn residue, just a little bit via ethanol in some way, especially if you're near cars.
Which leads us to the other question, how did this get so big? Is there a conspiracy a foot? It's a good question. It might seem strange, might seem a little weird at first. The thing is, like you were saying, Matt, corn is ubiquitous in this country. Yeah, all right. You might go to a barbecue place, you might get a side of corn on the cob. You might go to the movies, you might eat popcorn. You might get other products that are visibly corn and based. But some version
of corn is a sweetener. High fructose corn syrup is in so many things, potato, chips, sodas, sauces, salad, dressing, baked good, cereal. It feeds poultry, It feeds cattle, it feeds fish. It would actually take longer to figure out what food products don't have corn somewhere in their process. Michael Polland, author of a fantastic book called The Omnivores Dilemma, he said this way in an interview with NPR in two thousand and three. He said, our entire diet has
been colonized by this one plant. But our question tonight, how how did that happen? Is there some stuff they don't want you to know behind the meteoric rise of corn? Yes, yeah, I mean spoiler, But we're gonna take an a break. Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, the answer is absolutely yes. There is a lot of stuff they don't want you
to know, and we want you to know it. To take a line from another aspect of agribusiness, the idea of the corn conspiracy, while universally acknowledged, has become sort of a way for it chicken and egg situation. Ah, we did.
It so the economists that we referenced earlier wasn't just blowing smoke. Corn has a lot of the traits that might make what would be considered an agricultural superhero, a sort of champion of the agricultural Olympics. It is incredibly versatile, it can grow in a number of different climates. It's resilient, very hearty term that I love. And it also benefits from a great deal of advancements that we've seen in technology, not to mention financial technology or innovation. Let's just say
some financial trickery at play here. And it might surprise you, but a little less than ten percent of the absolutely astronomical amounts of corn that are grown in this country
every year are actually eaten by humans. There's so many other uses for it, as you mentioned, ben ethanol, for fuel, feed for livestock, you know, to the point where I was gonna mention this earlier, the term corn fed kind of becomes like a thing where we're talking about, you know, corn fed beef, you know, or even like it's almost, I think, kind of like a term of derision for like people from certain parts of the country, like you know,
corn fed, good old boy or whatever. Like, the stuff is just so ubiquitous that it really has kind of created this place in the culture of this country. Cows, for example, pigs, even some fish are fed this ground up food that is largely consisting of corn, and they eat several times the amount of corn that are consumed by folks like you or I every single year.
Well, it seems kind of crazy, it's a little wild.
Yeah, it's a lot to take in, right, because we just named several industries that would seem ostensibly unrelated. Oh, what's your favorite salmon doing eating corn?
Right?
I like the idea of corn fed to your right. Now, it's on the level of a real meat and potatoes person, right, So we know that this thing is huge. We just learned that humans eat a very small percentage of the pie here, and that's because Not all corn is created equally. There are many many different varieties. Technically speaking, maze street named corn is a cultagen. Cultagen means that you need
to have human intervention for the thing to propagate. It's kind of like how some species of dogs don't reproduce well on their own, you know, and it's really sad, right, like, what is it bulldogs? Dog's gonna have trouble reproducing on their own. Maze corn, it's got the human touch on it. It needs to have active human intervention in different key
stages of the growth to harvest process. And usually while there are many many men and many many types of corn, usually when we're talking about corn from the United States, we're talking about three rough varieties. The little Olden boy is sweet corn. That's what you eat when you know you're eating corn. It's the stuff in the cats, it's the stuff on the cop It is at best one percent of the total amount of corn grown in America, very very.
Small, but that's what you think of when you think corn. Like, that's what you see in your brain, right, that corn.
That's what that kid's eating with it, you know. It's it's a yellow cob. It's got like a nice little pat of equally yellow butter thanks to food colory.
So maybe it's got little little things that are poked into either end that are also themselves shaped like corn, creating a meta situation that would boggle the minds of any you know, visitors from another planet.
We like, we heard you like corn dog, so we put some corn outside of your corn, and.
One off those little things had then sticks within them that were also tinier pieces of corn. I could just go on forever like that, And that, my friends, is relativity.
Yeah.
Well, and then there's another slightly larger percentage of corn that you may also think about. It comes in bags that you can toss in the microwave. It comes in little tin things that you could toss on the stove, and you can. It's also used in other things, not just for popcorn. But it's basically popcorn, right, m.
Hmm, Yeah, yeah, it was a it's called flintcorn. Back in the nineteen sixties, Jiffy Pop comes out, and Jiffy Pop has exactly what you're referring to, Matt, the idea that you could take a little a pie ten essentially with aluminum foil over the top, and then you could rotate. There's an art to it. You could rotate it over a stove at like medium to high heat, and you could make popcorn just like in your favorite movie theater.
Then the microwave comes out, and so, of course in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties and even now, more and more people are buying my microwavable popcorn. Shout out to shout out to our previous episodes about dangerous chemicals in food. Lining in microwave popcorn is double plus on good.
Yeah, not great for you. Keep in mind of that date range there in the nineteen sixties and forward. Keep that in mind as we move into the next section we're going to talk about, because there's a reason that type of corn became more and more popular as a thing to sell.
And still Okay, so we had sweet corn, that's the special golden boy. We have flint corn, which is now freely available, but it is also still a very small percentage of total corn. The bulk of the corn game, the stuff you see by the interstate when you're driving through Iowa, that is overwhelmingly going to be what's called field corn or dent corn. It is in most of the animals that you eat if you buy meat in America,
it's fed to them. It's a huge part of the livestock process because it is so affordable, it is so cost effective. And then also it's what makes high fructose corn syrup.
Yeah, it's shot directly into your veins via your mouth, via the Coca Cola company.
Well, when you put it like that, it sounds kind of scary.
You guys. I just found out one of my best friends growing up who was in theater with me, was Ali corn no Is. I literally found out today and I just saw it on LinkedIn because I had a weird dream with them in it. This person won't name anybody, but this person is one of the top legal people, like literally the top I think legal person at Coca Cola. Oh good wow.
Can you get us some free samples of that weird European soda?
No, but I think it's time to investigate further this whole corn syrup thing.
Yeah. Well, I think we can solve it pretty easily. It's a function of economy of scale, right, It's much more expensive to have an alternate version of this because the US makes corn stupid cheap for everybody. The US is very very much a bad example of a drug dealer when it comes to the world of corn. So I will expand this analogy. I promise it will work
before we do that. Here's why the US makes corn amazing through the use of things called subsidies, corporate welfare, farm subsidies, or agricultural subsidies, if we want to put a little bow tie on it. They are payments and other forms of support extended by Uncle Sam to farmers and agribusiness, and corn is by far the biggest recipient of those concessions. When we say payments and other kinds of support, what I mean here is things like very
advantageous loans, things like insurance. You know, like if you're a farmer, very stressful occupation, you've got to try and build a house every year, and you got to hope that the house doesn't get blown down, and it can happen. There are variables beyond your control.
But ben corporate welfare, that sounds like the kind of thing that certain individuals in business don't care for. Welfare is bad. People should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Why should we be getting welfare help from the government.
Well, exactly, because ultimately, a subsidy is a tax on everybody, right that then goes to certain individuals or certain corporations, which is why there was there were no farm subsidies of any kind up until all of a sudden there were in the nineteen thirties.
I love it. I love it. Subsidy is a tax, That's.
That's all it is.
Well, yeah, it's just a reallocating of funds. Yeah, you know, and then we're paying ends going somewhere. But I guess is the term corporate welfare is that sort of a loaded term that people who are like against this practice might use to sort of draw the similarities, like how it's sort of like a double standard where so many people are against welfare for individuals, but yet welfare for corporations is okay.
It can be weaponized for sure, right all language?
Can you know any technology? Can I love the I love the point of farm subsidies previous to preceding the Great Depression not really a thing. You would get some sweetheart deals if you're a big time rancher or farmer, you know what I mean, And you would say, oh, I agree with blobbody blaws claws or there your bigger aims, So why don't you cut me a deal on these taxes, you know, or all least tariffs.
Especially in times of war. Right if you think about World War One prior to nineteen thirty, like, there were reasons to produce a whole bunch of food. You make as much food as we possibly can. There's an article here called the Origin of American farm Subsidies from the
Foundation of Economic Education. And there's just a tiny little story in here that the author, Burton Folsom points out, and it's from the Secretary of Agriculture in and around the mid eighteen nineties, a guy named Jay Sterling Morton. And when he was approached by specifically in this story, by beat sugar producers, they came to Washington. They were like, hey, we need some help. We need some kind of government loan or you know, some kind of money from the government,
which at the time would have been taxes. The response from the Secretary of Agriculture at the time said, quote, those who raise corn should not be taxed to encourage those who desire to raise beats. The power to tax was never vested in a government for the purpose of building up one class. At the expense of other classes, which is fascinating that he used corn producers in the example.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because, as we will see, those are two industries that continue beefing today. And I'm choosing the word beefing on purpose anyway, shout out Celeste Headley's shout up Big Sugar. In nineteen thirty, the US did a census and they found that about one out of every four people in the country around that time, that was
about thirty million people. One out of four of those people lived on farms and ranches, and they estimated that there were about six point five million different farms and ranches. That is no longer the case. The number has drastically, dramatically decreased. Most people, not just in the US but in the world overall live in what we would call urban metropolitan areas conurbations. Big big cities just keep growing and then they become one big city themselves, right, and
this trend will continue. There are fewer and fewer people living on a mom and pop farm. But even while those mom and pop farms disappeared, farm subsidies from Uncle Sam remained, and they overwhelmingly assist not actual people. Now, huge corporations very powerful entities. Those mom and pop farmers still get brought up every single election year in political rhetoric. But if you are hearing this now in twenty twenty three, actually if you're hearing this anytime past twenty twenty three,
you need to understand those mom and pop farmers. They are at best and endangered species. Corporations are wearing sheep clothing, and they are pretending to be something you can relate to so they can take more of your money and put more corn in your stuff.
Well, it's sort of like the you know, a lot of the craft breweries quote unquote that have basically just been bought up by Bush Mills or Anniser Bush Rather and like these large, you know, mega corporations that now are kind of masquerading as like these small little operations that they once were, but now they're not. They've bought them up and everything that goes along with it. I guess some of them continue doing business in a smaller way, but they are still, you know, a wing of a
large corporate entity. And I apologize to guys if I was being weird earlier when I was talking about like the corporate wel for thing. I guess in my mind to your point, Ben, I guess I just think of farming now in the modern day as being largely these big corporations to what you were just saying. But Matt, you said, not not the case.
Well, I'm only shaking my head. I had I had an opportunity to drive from like the coast just north of Georgia down through a bunch of farmland back to Atlanta not long ago. And if you make that drive, if you take like state roads and not a major interstate, you will see that it is almost all farmland, all farmland, and it's it is small farmers. It was like, you know, a couple of acres you can you can see the clear DeLine. You know. It's not like they don't have
a ton of huge equipment. They've got the equipment necessary to farm that small amount of land.
Well, John Deer is screwing them over, by.
The way, exactly. Farmers are getting hit left and right with the amount of money they have to put in just to get one crop out for one year, right, And one of the only ways they can successfully do that is if they get paid extra or a little bit more by the government through these subsidies to plant something like corn, one of the fly crops that they will pay for. There's other ones like you can get
some money for peanuts and a couple other sauce. Yeah, but it's mostly those primary ones that we've talked about, right, Corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, those are the big five. But it is still small farmers. They're just they have to play the game or else they can't make enough money to survive.
And these folks are at any given year they are getting pushed by large corporations. The octopuses we're talking about want to buy their land often for a song, right, because they're private corporations so they don't have to practice imminent domain, so they.
Well and even you can still work the land, it's still your farm, sure, but we own it and you got a you know, a certain percentage or whatever goes to us. We've seen it. We've we've talked about that before because it's just so it's it's pretty infuriating. There's at some point, only to give you another quote from the nineteen twenties, right before this era, we hit here where we're talking about subsidies and as they arise because
of a perceived need and actually an actual need. I think we're about to hit the Great Depression, right.
Yeah, yeah, we've been going toward that yet. But what you're saying is the to put it in a pithy line, these corporations are saying, surf the bottom line with US peasant, you know, right the wave hashtag no pun left behind. The original intent of the US farm subsidies was to provide economic stability to farmers to a largely agrarian population during the Great Depression, and importantly to ensure a steady domestic food supply. However, they really not necessarily the US
government Hoover kind of shut the bag. But overall, I think it was the corporate interest of the US who created the Great Depression. And if that sounds like a hot take, please write in, because we are correct. The issue here was that the issue here was that it didn't work. It was a dollar short, a day late. You know, there were farmers who were purposely destroying their crops or their livestock or products thereof so that they could ensure higher prices because they needed those prices to
be hired to survive. So at the same time people are slaughtering hogs, people are pouring milk into creeks out Middle America. There are folks in large urban centers Chicago, New York, you know, name it, any of the good ones. Those people are starving. They can't get the milk, they can't get the food. This idea made sense over time. The US agrees to farm subsidies due to a sort of nationwide PTSD, a traumatic event. It's absolutely mission critical
that these things exist. It might be surprising to hear us say this, but think about it. One bad gear. Honestly, one evil month can spell doom for a single farm, and one bad year for multiple farms can spell doom for an entire piece of agriculture. In the grand calculation of events, in the slippery slope of the greater good, farm subsidies are a money saving effort. You keep those folks in business, You help them survive for one bad year.
You are saving money in terms of what you will need to spend later if the food is not there. So that's it's kind of like you get a pizza every week. One week the pizza doesn't come through, you still pay for the pizza because you're going to be hungry later.
I've got to do this, guys, we got to jump really quickly to the nineteen twenties before, right before Hoover and all of this that you're talking about, Ben, because there's a guy in office named Calvin Coolidge. He was in there from twenty three to nineteen twenty nine, and there was a bill that was pretty similar to what became the Farms the original farm subsidies bills that Hoover and then Roosevelt passed as the Great Depression was hitting.
And it feels a lot like that Titanic moment that we've talked about before, some great disaster that occurs so that the change can come through, right, so that the populace is willing for some change. Because in the nineteen twenties, when Coolidge was president, there was this bill, it's called the McNairy Hougen Bill hau ge n and it was a bill that Congress passed and it had to do
with price fixing on crops, right. But the conspiratorial part of it was that there was going to be a system of human beings in Washington, d C. Essentially bureaucrats who would decide the prices of things, right, So then the farmers, each individual farmer would be beholden to whatever the bureaucrats in Washington were going to say. And when that bill, which was again passed by Congress, got to Coolidge's desk, he vetoed the thing and he said, no,
the American people don't actually want this. Basically, this is business coming in trying to dictate how farmers are going to act and what they're going to have to do.
I want to give you just a super short quote here, Coolidge said, quote, I do not believe that, upon serious consideration, the farmers of America would tolerate the precedent of a body of men chosen solely by one industry, who, acting in the name of government, shall arrange for contracts which determine prices, secure the buying and selling of commodities, the levying of taxes on that industry, and to pay for
losses on foreign dumping of any surplus. There is no reason why other industries copper, coal, lumber, textiles, and others, in every occasional difficulty, should not receive the same treatment by the government. Such action would establish bureaucracy on such a scale as to dominate not only the economic life, but the moral, social, and political future of our people. He went a little hard on the paint there at the end.
But I agree though, like that's like you got two big ooh moments there, because as anyone knows, like the one of the issues with that predecessor bill is that it was framed as a price dictated non negotiable. Who was not phrased as a minimum price. You can build a floor. America loves it when you build a floor, hates it when you build a ceiling, but will do it if you know, depending out of their back room finances work out. But the second thing was the idea
of foreign dumping. Could you describe foreign dumping for US? Oh?
Yeah, Well, basically, if you've got way too much much of a product, you try and sell it abroad four pennies on the dollar, you don't you get rid of it. Basically, if possible, which is a thing that occurs when there are surpluses, it's still something that happens.
So if there is, for instance, if there is a way just make it an argument here for fun disease. If there is a way to grow wheat and say a good part of India and it is much cheaper to produce it there, and there's no tariff. There's no international mukety muck. If you can sell that wheat to people who live in Western Europe, where it is very expensive to make wheat, would that be foreign dumping?
I don't think so. That sounds like good business to me.
Oh good, oh god, someone called Calvin all right, he figured it out? Okay, yeah, he was I think the original rhythm guitarist for Korn. Also an American president for a minute. But yeah, his nickname was Monkey.
Well, honestly, I haven't thought about that guy until I've read that article, Like I don't. When's the last time you thought about Calvin Coolidge?
Pretty often, I think he's got one of the best names, best presidential names. It sticks with me. I'm not joking, and I think of whenever I hear the name Calvin. I think of Calvin Coolidge before I even think of that little kid pissing on the swastika.
The precedents, the precedents of the presidents leading up to the American Depression, the first one at least, are of intense interest to me, and they should be of intense interest.
To you in the immediate future.
Folks, Matt, you're talking about something that more people need to understand our farm subsidies. Stuff can sound a little bureaucratic and dry. Here's the real thing. Let's peak behind the curtain. Why do countries really like farm industry supplements and subsidies? Why do they really want this stuff to happen? It goes down to her boy, Henry Kissinger's real politic reasoning. And it's much older than Kissinger. In the United States and in the it.
Was still living last we checked, right.
Yeah, yeah, he just dropped by Chessinger Watch John Kerry. Yeah yeah, Now I get alerts.
So there's a widget. There's a dashboard widget on men's phone connected up to Kissinger's pacemaker.
So the US and in the no comment, the US and the European Union to a large degree. Yeah, you could say they're practicing corporate welfare. There's a big old, sloppy financial kiss on the quarterly bottom line, right, or
annual at least. But the brutal open secret about this is that at all times, since since the day you emerged your entire life, anyone in charge of any nation you have ever heard of is continually low key planning for war, open conflict, and if international trade breaks down, a lot of countries are immediately going into disaster mode. So that means even in times of ostensible peace, if you are a leader, you make sure your country, to the absolute highest degree possible will not be reliant on
potential enemy forces for basic things food, shelter, water. And the tricky part about this human history teaches you one constant truth. Every single nation is a potential enemy. There
are no friends. And you know, you might have you might have a good couple decades getting your avocado right, you might have, you might have a good one hundred years with uh great rice supplies, and maybe you've had your differences with another country, but that doesn't stop the flow of rice when the bridges break down, can you feed the people who follow you? That is why these subsidies exist. So, yes, the US is good at growing corn. It will not stop. It should not stop. This is
a cycle of money and path dependence. And the problem is that truth creates a feedback loop and that loop is very, very dangerous, not just to the US but to the world.
Yeah, especially when you can't eat the corn right, you can't eat most of it?
You like, I mean, you could have you guys ever eaten non sweet corn like regular cornporn just like the field corn.
What about blue corn, the kind they make like the good tortillas with and stuff, and like, I mean, there's probably various types of corn that I've eaten that have been made into other products, but probably wouldn't be that great right on the cob. Is that what we're getting at.
Like heirloom corn?
Yeah? Yeah, maybe so. Yeah.
I think what we're saying here is the majority of corn that you will not eat. It's not super delicious. I My heart goes out to the corn kid. He's gonna learn about this, He's gonna have to learn about it on the on the streets.
Yeah, I've ben right just before we get to that feedback loop, because this is one of the most important things we're going to talk about this episode. I just want to go back to that USDA survey from the nineteen thirties that found one in four Americans lived on a farm, worked on a farm. Farming was a part
of their life, right. Think about that as a voting block in the nineteen thirties, if you're a politician, you need to get the farmers on your side, especially if you're anywhere near the center of the United states like Texas, you know, whatever, the let's just go through the states, the biggest society states. Well, yeah, it's Iowa, Texas, Illinois, Nebraska, Minnesota, and just shout out to Paul Michigan, control deck in a little Kansas in there too, and a bunch of
other states. But you need those folks to vote for you, especially if it's in the nineteen thirties all the way up to the nineteen twenty threes. It's not the farmers that went to Washington, DC with that bill because they wanted to have safety in knowing that they grew their crop the government could help them out if things didn't go well. Right at the top of this episode, we talked about all the factors that a farmer has to deal with. That means they're going to have a great
year or a terrible year. Right, you want to have some kind of some kind of thing to fall back on. I know, I'm still going to get money and the government will help me even if stuff goes sideways. But it's not them. It's not the farmers, the individual farmers going to Washington to put these things in place, to have bureaucrats and make these things. It's industry that comes together and says, hey, guys, we have a common goal here.
We just want to make sure y'all are gonna be okay, right, everything's gonna be fine, and then bring in in your mind, bringing all the stuff that Ben just outlined there with like the reason why a government, why a country needs to do these things. When you put them together, you get this icky thing that on the surface, politicians will say it's for the farmer right, but that's they're a.
Chess piece, you know there. It's an optical thing. I mean, it's an optical illusion, is what it is. I mean, they're they're basically like parading these you know, salt of the earth individuals who have been making their you know, families, lived multi generations perhaps on this land, and they're using them as a way to kind of like wave this flag of like the am dream and see see you got to help these people. But it's really just a subterfuge, right.
Well, at the heart of it, there's the greater good argument as ever. The feedback loop is this. You know, right now, the US government subsidizes the production of corn alone to the tune of billions of dollars a year. More than two billion world more than three. Probably. The result is a perpetuation of growing goals. If you've ever worked for a corporation, you might have found yourself in that weird Larry David Kafka esque moment where they say, hey, yeah,
you did a great job this year. You met these insane goals we gave you. But we have these things called shareholders, which means that as a reward for meeting our crazy goals, you have to meet even crazier goals the next year. That's kind of what's happening with the US and with the corn industry. The farming industry realized that the more corn they grow, the more money they will generate for themselves. And again I'm not talking about people.
We're not talking about people here. We're talking about institutions, and they are thus incentivized to grow more and more corn. Next step of the feedback loop. The more corn that's out there, you've increased the supply. Right, We've increased the supply, so we lower the demand. I mean we lower the price, meaning that if there is a possible application for an ever cheaper commodity in any industry, you will go with that because that lowers the overall price of your weird grift.
So if you are if you are selling gasoline and you realize there is a heavy financial incentive for you to you know, not try to make corn gas, which is kind of a dumb it's not a feasible idea. But if you if you get enough money to put ten percent ethanol in your gasoline, then of course you'll do it. Then it's like the oh, what's that game theory. It's like the prisoner problem in game theory. If you don't do it and everyone else is doing it, then you are taking a hit, a ten percent hit that
will be magnified and compounded throughout your supply chain. The more corn there is, the lower the price, the more you want to use it. That is why the United States, despite all the other stuff it says, that's why they will always seek a way to substitute corn products into any industry. I know, we've got to go to an app break poll, but like everybody think about it, to huge oil producers in the world, Norway, Saudi Arabia, they're not about to go full into corn. Why the would they.
They would have to buy that corn from somewhere else. They can't grow it. Uncle Sam has a cheat code. It would be foolish not to exploit that cheat code. I don't know. I mean, maybe I sound crazy, but I think that feedback loop, that convenience can lead to an addiction.
What do you guys think, uh dependence, Yeah, certainlyence hath dependence greed.
I said agreed, but I basically just said agreed, and I think both of us say hold holds true.
Well, but let's take a quick break and let's come back and let's talk numbers, like real numbers, not just on corn, on farm subsidies in general in this country. Because it's uh nuts, No, it's corn it's corny.
No, it's corn nuts.
It's corn nuts, guys.
And we have returned, Matt, I'm gonna give you an alley oop for the dunk here. Can an industry be dependent upon subsidies? Absolutely? In twenty nineteen, so still pretty reliable numbers. As we record a few years later, in twenty nineteen, the US subsidized two point two billion dollars of your money. By the way, if you're listening to this in the United States, it doesn't matter whether you
are a citizen of the United States. Every time you had to pay sales tax every time, you know, every time old Uncle Sam came looking for his big a little bit of that went to corn.
I'm sorry you just said that in such a matter of fact way.
I love it. It's weird. Like if you imagine when you imagine paying tax, you know, think of think of it as okay. So we're okay with paying taxes at a gas station, right, you get your gas, you have a you have a tax paid for every gallon of gas here in the US still use gallons. So imagine
it a little bit differently. What if there was a guy in the garish Uncle Sam costume, you know, top hat stripes and stars or whatever, and as you're pumping gas, old boy walks up to you and he's like, hey, can I get a little bit of that for like I'm doing a corn thing?
Mm hmm. Yeah, it's odd. It's odd. Look, it's also odd considering that just you know, it's another one of these kind of antiquated bits of infrastructure that like we should have figured out a way around, but we've spent all this time figuring out how to kind of build tax payers out of their you know, money for these subsidies.
That were sort of, like you said, been dependent or addicted to some degree on it, even though really there are so many better ways of using that that could be maybe for R and D, for more efficient fuel sources, or for like, you know, more efficient electric vehicles and things like that. It just it just seems like it's feeding into a system that is totally past its prime. But yet somehow there's so many stakeholders that need it to be the system.
Well it's crazy. Okay. Imagine if houses cost the same as our grandparents paid for houses right now?
Oh cool, that'd be great, it would you guys have grandparents.
I don't not anymore, but yes we did, yes at one point.
Or how about just our parents the price that our parents paid for homes, if they were able to buy a home, if that stayed the same, Think about all of the money generated over time for the huge amount of people that grew their incomes basically that went this way because of the real estate business and accruing, you know, the amount of money that they did for those homes
that they didn't pay for. Now, imagine if coorn costs the exact same as it did in the nineteen thirties, right at the time that these things were put in place. Imagine if it costs the same how would any farm make any money. It's got to go up, it has to, right.
It has to expand that's just the nature of business and capitalism. Those Ye. The same thing is that we see with publicly traded companies they have to show year over year growth or else they've failed. And sometimes to even show that year over year growth, it requires a lot of creative accounting and you know, perhaps things that
aren't entirely above board. Not you know, naming names or any any accusations, but I think we all understand that there's some trickery at play and these kinds of things. It's not possible. Infinite growth forever is cancer.
You're being really anti Coolidge right now, and I just thought, you know, I don't appreciate it.
It's not very uncooliage of.
You, dude, It's very it's a very good point. Let's go to Joseph Glauber. Joseph Glauber is a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. They've got some horses and corn cobs in the game, but they do some good research.
Uh.
This guy was also once upon a time, the chief economist of the USDA, just like her boy Seth Meyer, who regrettably has not yet made it onto SNL. But Seth, if you're hearing this, I think you'd be a bang up host man's jokes.
Yeah, they're all agriculture based, but I mean, you know, it's a niche kind of operation.
Maybe it's time, you know what I mean, I like it. So anyway, this guy, Joseph Glauber, he says, quote, a lot of these subsidies get embedded into the cost of farmland, and they essentially bid up the price of farmland marginally over time, So the benefits accrue largely to those who own land. To your point, Matt, if you got in the game early, you're always going to have a compounding advantage.
And that is the history of the United States. So yeah, as of last year, twenty twenty two, as we record this, the CBO Congressional Budget Office, some of my favorite nerds in the game. They looked at the insurance program that the US government gives to large agribusiness and the remaining mom and pop farmers, and they said, spending on this program, this one facet of the subsidies alone is going to increase from twenty twenty one to nearly forty billion through
twenty twenty five. It's a big, big business. And yet we have to understand that the folks in charge of this country, private and public or state representatives alike, they are playing the long game. They know that the US needs to have a domestic supply of things. But corn is no longer just a domestic supply of food. It's never been just that. So why why are they providing all this support. Is it because they're saying, hey, we're good, we care about our voters, we want corn to remain
as it is a very helpful thing. Or is corn only? Is corn only in the conversation because it has such a financial grift around it? Is it because of the
political corruption? We got to say, there are a lot of lobbying interests, and those interests have an existential concern with the subsidy checks, like they're very powerful agricultural interests that are entirely positioned toward corn and past a certain point to your idea earlier, Matt, past a certain point, the actual corn doesn't matter as much as the money
supply in the corn. The futures you know, the betting, the speculation, the guaranteed income at the end of the year, no matter what happens to the soil.
Well, yeah, oh yeah, there's so many vested interests and I've been I just I want to blow it out one more time, just to include those the five crops that are subsidized most heavily by.
The US rice, wheat, soy.
Cotton, corn, corn. Those are them, and then just the other the honorable mentions. I've got to list those two. These are these are fun peanuts, yeah, sogram, you said. And mohair.
Mohair like the suits.
Yeah, it's the stuff that comes off of specific goats that's like really luxurious.
And I always thought it was mole hair for the longest time, like in that it's in the lyric in that Benny and the Jets got electric boots a mohair suit, you know, I read it in a magazine. I thought it was mole hair for the longest time. I'm like, oh, the mole hair must be the finest and the softest of hairs to be made into the finest of suits that a man like Elton John would wear.
Yes, I want to give you two. I want to give you two quick stats before we keep going, because I see exactly where we're headed here. Ben. This is from an article titled how farm subsidies affect the US Economy. It was written for The Balance by Kimberly Amadeo in twenty twenty. Just a couple of quick quotes from this. In twenty twenty, the combined agriculture and food industry made up five percent of the US economy. That's a pretty
big chunk. It's not crazy. It's like, not one of the only things we do, but five percent of the entire US economy. It employed nineteen point seven million full time and part time workers, which is about ten point three percent of all US employment. Think about that, over ten percent of all US employment is tied in with these businesses, most of them making you know, these staple crops. And in that time, corn is the nation's biggest crop.
More than fifteen point one billion bushels of corn were grown just in the year twenty twenty one, which is the second highest amount on record. That's twenty twenty one, when you know, coming out of the pan, which is so crazy to think about. So that's all of farming, right, big numbers, A lot of statistics kind of boring. But here's where it gets nuts. There's another article titled total subsidies in the United States from nineteen ninety five to
twenty twenty one. It was created by the Environmental Working Group. You can look this up. There were over four million, three hundred and eighty thousand recipients of subsidies for you know, farmland, right, that's a ton like those are individuals right in the top five. I just want to I just want to give you a couple of these. I'll give you the top two and they're rice based. Oh, can you do the top three? I'll do the top three. Yeah, let's let's keep it in rule of threes. First one is
Riceland Foods Incorporated. They're based in Arkansas. They received over five hundred and fifty four million dollars in subsidies subsidies from ninety five to twenty twenty one. Farm Services Agency in They're based in Washington, d C. At least they received over three hundred and forty six million dollars in subsidies. And Producer's Rice Mill received over three hundred and fourteen million dollars in that time period, which is just to show you those are only the top three of millions
of farm subsidies recipients. And these are massive businesses. Think about that amount of money going in to a company, right.
Oh, I was going to say, uh, literacy, healthcare, food security. Oh but yeah, yeah, it is kind of food security though like this, you're you're right man. This is an absolutely astounding amount of cash right in a very capitalism driven world.
And this cash turns into potential political influence.
One hundred percent it does, right, yeah, it is. Let's get to that part. You know. Look what we're saying to be clear. Right now, there's a thing coming out called the Farm Bill. Like our palse Lest mentioned, you, as a resident of the US, you don't get to vote on the farm Bill. It's a thing that comes up every five years. Your elected representatives can weigh in
on it. And as our palse Lest Headley creator A Big Sugar, said, you owe it to yourself and the people who come after you and the people who live around the world with you. You owe it to yourself to push your elected representatives to make some changes on the farm Bill. Now, we're not saying that all the politicians voting to continue the egregious mistakes of the Farm Bill are somehow illuminati, but they're not like crazed tolls or anything. But what it does mean is they have
acknowledged an ironclad truth about governance in this country. It is very popular to create a subsidy for the powerful. It is from that point very easy to continue growing that subsidy. Mission creep is a real thing in every industry, but at the same time it becomes increasingly difficult and dangerous to rule that benefit. Back to your example, Matt, what if of those top three subsidies you just named, what if there were a lone politician saying pull those
subsidies entirely, I think they would not get reelected. And I am very confident in that thought.
Well, the heartland is always such a big political talking point in general, you know, I mean, for good or bad. I mean, it's just the idea of like protecting the good men and women of America that you know, built this country into what it is today, you know, I mean, And it's like, maybe they don't have as much political capital as like the big cities, but they represent something, you know, and because of the nature of I guess elect elections, you know that they do matter and those
you know. That's why. Why do you think Iowa is such an important political stop, Like it sort of kicks off the whole season, right.
Yeah, that's a big thing American politicians. US politicians in particular, typically play toward a romanticized version of the US that does not actually exist. It's a rose colored glasses thing. As a colorblind person, I find that hilarious. I know we're going long. There are a couple of things want to hit real quick points of interest in your journey. We invite you to take the journey on your own, folks, and contact us about it one eighty three to three
STDWYTK Conspiracydiheartradio dot com. You can find us on your favorite weegea board. We mentioned earlier. The sugar or sucrose industry is beefed up with the corn or fructose industry.
Back in twenty eleven, trade associations representing growers of sugarcane and sugar beets or sucrose went to court arguing that a lobbying group for a high fructose corn syrup, the Corn Refiners Association, was behind a conspiracy to deceive the public because they wanted to change the name of high fructose corn syrup to corn sugar on all your ingredient labels. Technically accurate, technically accurate.
But you gotta process the living hell out of that corn in order to make high fructose corn sertum. That's one of the things. Listen to the episode we did one where we talk about high fructose corn syrup in particular. It's like, it's an awful thing that you got to break that corn way down. Yeah, using nasty stuff you don't want to put in your body.
Right, Yes, that is true. It takes some poison to make the antidote, does it not. Uh. The The thing is, these forces are further incentivized to normalize the presence of corn at the heart of American consumption. It does not stop at your local soda can. It does not stop at your local gas station or at your local case of do a plate, Oh god, case is probably a high frot dose corn syrup lost.
You don't need a plate for a case. That's sort of the beauty of a making a case built in plate.
Man, Thank you, thank you for saying that that does matter.
So you need a play, however, for a chimmy chanka, because that's a real saucy affair, and things can get really messy, real quickly.
And speaking of things get messy, there is some trouble on the horizon. As we in tonight's episode, the United States currently sports about thirteen percent of its corn products abroad in some form. Simply put, going back to the drug dealer analogy we said we'd explain earlier, this is a dealer who consumes most of their own supply. This is like your buddy in college who smoked so much weed that they started selling a little bit of weed so they could get a discount on all the weed
they smoke. Other players want in on the game, and this gives us an opportunity to talk about one of the funniest related conspiracies. Kid, you not, there are real life corn spies right now, cor In, not just some folks talking Jonathan Davis. In twenty sixteen, a guy named Mao Halung got popcorned for a five year conspiracy.
To still picture these guys as like just blending in with the stalks, you know, like dressed in some sort of corn accoutrement. I don't know, I guess scarecrow, yeah, maybe so, or literally just dressed. They gotta be really skinny to apply, just literally, you know, dressed as like a piece of corn, a corn on the cob. That's a popular costume for holiday times.
Right, well yeah, yeah, oh for sure. Uh but this guy was this guy was literally trying to steal corn seeds, right like going out like Johnny Apple seeding reverse Johnny Apple seeding corn.
Much less interesting, but much more nefarious than my whole concept.
Well or from his his perspective, he was being very much Johnny Apple seed. Ah, he was spreading, he was propagating. Why do you get to own this improvement? Why why is it for your country's benefit rather than my own? You know what I mean? It's a good because bump bump bum. Oh that's farmers. So this guy is employed by a Chinese corn seed company and US companies du Pont, Pioneer and Monsanto. They own the patent to a lot
of hybrid what are called non terminating seeds. This is a very big deal because for a while there were these hybrid seeds put out that would grow very well in all sorts of conditions, but they would not reproduce on their own. They would not You would have to buy new seeds even though they are a cultagen. Even if you try to farm them, you would not make a new crop unless you bought another batch of seeds.
So being able to make something that can just boom boom boom you through multiple harvest seasons, that's a big deal. The FBI popped this guy Fbipoptom in twenty sixteen. He's sentenced to three years in prison, and then he also has to give up two separate farms he owns, one in Iowa, one in Illinois because they were purchased as a cover for his weird corn spy activities. That's how deep it gets. The US government and its corporate masters
are in a corn cold war right now. Brazil, Argentina, Canada. They're making inroads. Just four days ago, Brazil made a pretty big legal move and will probably take too long to explain, to increase their stake in the global corn game. They want to be the next US for corn, and they want to do the same things that the US has done with this power. We mentioned ethanol, we didn't even get to it. I guess we should say before we end the corn itself is not the problem. Corn
is a solid crop. It's awesome. It grows phenomenally well in the US. It played a huge role in the current American experiment. The farmers themselves were never the problem. People were farming this way before the United States ever existed. People who actively create stuff in these kind of situations, they are almost never going.
To be the problem.
But the people who take advantage of those people, they have some different aims. You know. Logically, the US has to take corn to the highest most extreme degree of usability right of utilization, but given that feedback loop of profit, the US may encounter diminishing returns. And as corny as it sounds, thank you, thank you, tip your server. The corn game is rife with conspiracy. No one wants to stop it. It is in no one's best interest right now to be the voice of opposition to this.
I don't know, well, everybody knows it's a problem. And right before we started talking like doing this episode, we were talking about the New York Times and other major outlets reporting in two thousand and four, two thousand and five, two thousand and two about how horrible it is that all of us have to pay all these taxes in order to support all of these subsidies. Because it's just this growing, ballooning thing that's gotten out of control in
two thousand and five, and nothing's changed. It's all the same. Nobody's gonna stop it. The farm bill's coming up. What are we gonna do? Hey, this seems wrong, too bad? Click? I mean sorry, I don't mean to be a downer, but.
Absolutely you're absolutely correct, and I still get I gotta tell you guys this evening, I am in love with the idea that every time I pay taxes on anything, this old white guy in stars and stripes comes up and ask me for extra money and tells me something very weird that he's going to do with it, you know, like, oh that you know that ninety nine cent pack of gum or whatever that's actually that's actually a dollar o nine.
And all of a sudden, this guy comes up and is like, I need ten cents for plutonium.
Yeah, we need more cluster munitions for Ukraine.
Then what am I gonna do?
Tell him?
No, it's a dime anyway. This is the stories it stands now. We hope you enjoyed this episode. We cannot wait to hear from you, especially if you are affiliated to any degree with any of the industries we mentioned. In tonight's show, we hope that you reach out and let us know what you think. Is there a way from the path dependence upon corn? Is there a way to reimagine this industry to the advantage of current and later generations. Tell us you.
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