[Marxism] Cuban sanctions linked to obesity in americans

[Pat Costello]

Greg McDonald:

If corn syrup was replaced by cuban sugar in soft drinks there would
still be an obesity problem. Sugar is just as bad as corn syrup with
regard to empty calories. The letter is typical of americans who want
to blame everyone except themselves for their physical problems. If
americans were not so ignorantly addictive to empty calories, parked
their cars and walked or biked more, there would be no obesity
problem. Americans would do well to give up anything white for
consumption, sugar, baked goods, etc. I get away with an occasional
bagel and sugar in my coffee because I bike 150 miles a week. When it
comes to their bodies (and much else), americans are about the most
ignorant tribe on the planet.


Me:

According to your logic the rising obesity rate in the U.S. is due to growing
ignorance on the part of an entire population. That does not seem like a very marxist 
analysis!

http://www.postgradmed.com/issues/2003/12_03/bray2.gif

The obesity rate in the U.S. has been tied to government policy. Americans started to
gain weight back in the 70's when Nixon's secretary of agriculture changed the price structure
of corn:

http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=52

"So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm policy?
Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to
discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's—to
the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant
political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet
Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the farm belt.
Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat, milk,
bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the
streets to protest food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high
cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon
ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary
o drive down the price of food.

Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields "fence row to fence row" and set
about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He
shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated
a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments
to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of
lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to
simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the
price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food hasn't been a political
problem for the government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in
the perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to stay
solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower
prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of their raw
materials. That's why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly
supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain.
 (It doesn't hurt that those lightly populated farm states exert a disproportionate influence in
Washington, since it takes far fewer votes to elect a senator in Kansas than in California. That
means agribusiness can presumably "buy" a senator from one of these underpopulated states for
a fraction of what a big-state senator costs.)

But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes at a high price: first there's
the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the
economic misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing
world; and finally there's the obesity epidemic at home—which most researchers date to the
mid-70's, just when we switched to a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction of grain. Since
that time, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per
person every day; each of us is, heroically, managing to pack away about 200 of those extra
calories per day. Presumably the other 300—most of them in the form of surplus corn—get
dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.

Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building block of the "fast-food nation."
Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from
the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today.
Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and
still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly
processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients,
you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it
contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together."




But getting back to the point about the effect of Cuban sanctions on Americans,
it could also be argued that right wing Cubans are responsible for everything from
the Kennedy assassination to Bush's election (and thereby indirectly responsible
for the war in Iraq.) Right wing Cubans were even involved in Watergate.
Bad pennies!