How Corn Took Over America

The US is a corn superpower. Over the past few decades, corn has infiltrated all sorts of things, from soda pop and snacks to your own gas tank. But how did it get this way? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel dive deep into the strange world of agribusiness conspiracies in what just may be their corniest episode yet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
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

(00:48):
conspiracy realists playing along at home. Tonight will be our
most corny episode.

Speaker 4 (00:57):
Literally, de boom, Jonathan Davis, as long as you don't rap.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
I have heard Noel freestyle, and Nola is way better
than Jonathan Davis.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
Hmmm, who are we to judge?

Speaker 4 (01:32):
You know, we are we We are exactly who we
are to judge.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
I'll tell you that McDonald's dad with a buttered corn.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
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.

(02:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
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.

Speaker 4 (02:42):
All the stuff that were saying about corn the band.
You could technically say about corn the crop.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
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?

(03:16):
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

(03:41):
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.

Speaker 4 (03:57):
Name of yellow.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
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

(04:22):
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?

Speaker 4 (04:32):
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?

Speaker 3 (04:40):
They would have been super hype. They would have been
they would have gone so they would.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
Have been like devil, What is this substance before.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
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

(05:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
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

(05:48):
much of it.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:49):
Have you ever seen the corn Palace? That's huge, that's
built entirely out of corn.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
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.

(06:19):
The corn kid. Very young kid did a good fun. Yeah,
it's fun. Let's play just a little.

Speaker 4 (06:27):
Please, Yeah, because I don't think any of us are
doing it right. He has his own kind of way
about him.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
I love.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
All right, perfect we all.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yeah, see now you get my reference with I tried
it with butter.

Speaker 3 (06:41):
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,

(07:03):
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

(07:26):
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

(07:46):
established infrastructure entirely meant to push corn out from the
ground and to consumers across the world.

Speaker 4 (07:55):
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

(08:16):
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

(08:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:58):
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,

(09:19):
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

(09:42):
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

(10:04):
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

(10:24):
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.

(10:45):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
He just got in the ground, right, Well, yeah, that's it,
you just put it in the ground.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
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.

Speaker 4 (11:14):
Like that.

Speaker 3 (11:14):
Am I saying that right? Museally?

Speaker 2 (11:17):
I think so?

Speaker 4 (11:18):
Yeah? Was it musically like a dry cereal that makes
you poop?

Speaker 3 (11:23):
Yeah, but it's that corn.

Speaker 4 (11:25):
Yeah, it's like human dog food. It's like grape nuts,
but like worse.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
All human food is human dog food.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
Fair enough, fair chocolate. It's like processed kind of kibble
looking stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
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

(12:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:34):
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

(12:55):
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

(13:15):
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

(13:37):
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.

(14:03):
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,

(14:28):
we did.

Speaker 4 (14:28):
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,

(14:50):
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

(15:11):
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,

(15:31):
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

(15:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
Well, it seems kind of crazy, it's a little wild.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
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?

Speaker 4 (16:32):
Right?

Speaker 3 (16:34):
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.

(16:57):
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

(17:19):
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

(17:41):
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

(18:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Small, but that's what you think of when you think corn. Like,
that's what you see in your brain, right, that corn.

Speaker 3 (18:24):
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.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
We like, we heard you like corn dog, so we
put some corn outside of your corn, and.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:19):
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.

(19:41):
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

(20:02):
to shout out to our previous episodes about dangerous chemicals
in food. Lining in microwave popcorn is double plus on good.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:30):
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,

(20:50):
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

(21:14):
cost effective. And then also it's what makes high fructose
corn syrup.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yeah, it's shot directly into your veins via your mouth,
via the Coca Cola company.

Speaker 4 (21:26):
Well, when you put it like that, it sounds kind
of scary.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
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,

(21:52):
like literally the top I think legal person at Coca Cola.
Oh good wow.

Speaker 4 (21:58):
Can you get us some free samples of that weird
European soda?

Speaker 2 (22:02):
No, but I think it's time to investigate further this
whole corn syrup thing.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
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

(22:30):
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,

(22:54):
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

(23:17):
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.

(23:39):
There are variables beyond your control.

Speaker 4 (23:42):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
I love it. I love it. Subsidy is a tax, That's.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
That's all it is.

Speaker 4 (24:25):
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

(24:48):
corporations is okay.

Speaker 2 (24:50):
It can be weaponized for sure, right all language?

Speaker 3 (24:54):
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,

(25:14):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:26):
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,

(25:48):
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,

(26:09):
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

(26:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:43):
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

(27:08):
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,

(27:32):
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

(27:55):
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

(28:17):
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,

(28:37):
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.

Speaker 4 (28:46):
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

(29:06):
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,

(29:29):
you said, not not the case.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
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,

(29:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (30:08):
Well, John Deer is screwing them over, by.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
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

(30:33):
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

(30:54):
they can't make enough money to survive.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
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

(31:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
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

(32:13):
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

(32:38):
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.

(32:59):
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

(33:20):
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

(33:43):
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,

(34:03):
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.

(34:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
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

(35:07):
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

(35:28):
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

(35:50):
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

(36:13):
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

(36:35):
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,

(36:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
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

(37:38):
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?

Speaker 2 (37:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
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

(38:37):
people who live in Western Europe, where it is very
expensive to make wheat, would that be foreign dumping?

Speaker 2 (38:46):
I don't think so. That sounds like good business to me.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:07):
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?

Speaker 4 (39:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
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.

Speaker 4 (39:46):
To you in the immediate future.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
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?

(40:11):
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.

Speaker 4 (40:21):
Was still living last we checked, right.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Yeah, yeah, he just dropped by Chessinger Watch John Kerry.
Yeah yeah, Now I get alerts.

Speaker 4 (40:30):
So there's a widget. There's a dashboard widget on men's
phone connected up to Kissinger's pacemaker.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
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

(41:03):
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

(41:26):
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

(41:52):
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

(42:16):
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

(42:39):
to the world.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Yeah, especially when you can't eat the corn right, you
can't eat most of it?

Speaker 3 (42:44):
You like, I mean, you could have you guys ever
eaten non sweet corn like regular cornporn just like the
field corn.

Speaker 4 (42:56):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:09):
Like heirloom corn?

Speaker 4 (43:10):
Yeah? Yeah, maybe so. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
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

(43:50):
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

(44:11):
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

(44:33):
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.

(44:54):
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,

(45:16):
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.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
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

(46:02):
got to help these people. But it's really just a subterfuge, right.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
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

(46:27):
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

(46:48):
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

(47:10):
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

(47:31):
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.

(47:54):
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

(48:16):
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

(48:39):
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

(49:00):
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

(49:21):
I think that feedback loop, that convenience can lead to
an addiction.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
What do you guys think, uh dependence, Yeah, certainlyence hath
dependence greed.

Speaker 4 (49:33):
I said agreed, but I basically just said agreed, and
I think both of us say hold holds true.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:54):
No, it's corn nuts.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
It's corn nuts, guys.

Speaker 3 (50:04):
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

(50:30):
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.

Speaker 4 (50:53):
I'm sorry you just said that in such a matter
of fact way.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
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

(51:18):
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?

Speaker 4 (51:35):
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

(51:56):
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

(52:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (52:31):
Well it's crazy. Okay. Imagine if houses cost the same
as our grandparents paid for houses right now?

Speaker 3 (52:38):
Oh cool, that'd be great, it would you guys have grandparents.

Speaker 4 (52:43):
I don't not anymore, but yes we did, yes at
one point.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
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

(53:11):
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

(53:31):
make any money. It's got to go up, it has to, right.

Speaker 4 (53:37):
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

(54:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
You're being really anti Coolidge right now, and I just thought,
you know, I don't appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (54:17):
It's not very uncooliage of.

Speaker 3 (54:20):
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.

Speaker 4 (54:39):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (54:39):
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.

Speaker 4 (54:53):
Yeah, they're all agriculture based, but I mean, you know,
it's a niche kind of operation.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
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

(55:19):
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

(55:42):
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

(56:03):
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

(56:24):
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,

(56:46):
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

(57:08):
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,

(57:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
The US rice, wheat, soy.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
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.

Speaker 4 (58:13):
Mohair like the suits.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
Yeah, it's the stuff that comes off of specific goats
that's like really luxurious.

Speaker 4 (58:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
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.

(59:05):
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

(59:26):
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.

(59:46):
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

(01:00:08):
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,

(01:00:31):
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

(01:00:54):
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

(01:01:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:01:34):
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

(01:01:55):
driven world.

Speaker 2 (01:01:57):
And this cash turns into potential political influence.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
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

(01:02:23):
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

(01:02:46):
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

(01:03:09):
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,

(01:03:32):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:03:49):
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

(01:04:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
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

(01:04:50):
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.

(01:05:15):
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

(01:05:39):
fructose corn syrup to corn sugar on all your ingredient labels.
Technically accurate, technically accurate.

Speaker 2 (01:05:48):
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

(01:06:08):
don't want to put in your body.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
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

(01:06:30):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:06:41):
You don't need a plate for a case. That's sort
of the beauty of a making a case built in plate.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
Man, Thank you, thank you for saying that that does matter.

Speaker 4 (01:06:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:06:58):
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

(01:07:22):
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

(01:07:44):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:07:59):
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

(01:08:19):
a popular costume for holiday times.

Speaker 2 (01:08:22):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:08:36):
Much less interesting, but much more nefarious than my whole concept.

Speaker 3 (01:08:39):
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

(01:09:00):
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

(01:09:22):
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

(01:09:44):
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

(01:10:05):
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.

(01:10:30):
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

(01:10:53):
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.

(01:11:14):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:11:24):
To be the problem.

Speaker 3 (01:11:27):
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,

(01:11:49):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:12:08):
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

(01:12:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:12:49):
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,

(01:13:11):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:13:25):
Yeah, we need more cluster munitions for Ukraine.

Speaker 3 (01:13:30):
Then what am I gonna do?

Speaker 4 (01:13:31):
Tell him?

Speaker 3 (01:13:31):
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

(01:13:54):
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.

Speaker 4 (01:14:07):
Can tell us, and we hope you will by reaching
out to us at either of our Internet handles of choice.
Conspiracy Stuff on the social media now we're forming on
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Speaker 2 (01:14:22):
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Speaker 3 (01:14:40):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
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