Thanks, Donald, For The Farmer Welfare—City Slickers Pocket Trump’s Farm Bailout

via Zerohedge:

About 9,000 “city slickers” living in luxurious neighborhoods of the nation’s largest cities received a farm bailout from the Trump administration to minimize the impact of the trade war with China, an updated Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of Department of Agriculture data shows.

The EWG analysis of USDA data revealed that “many recipients live not in farm country but in the nation’s 50 largest cities or in other decidedly nonrural locations.”

Urban recipients of the bailout include members of farm families, landowners, and investors. These people provide land, capital, or equipment for farms and make high-level decessions for operations.

EWG said bailout recipients include 70 people in San Francisco, 65 residents in New York City, 63 residents in Los Angeles, 61 residents in Washington, D.C., and 19 Miami.

In Washington D.C., lobbyist Van R. Boyette for the sugar company Florida Crystals, and its owners, the Fanjul brothers of West Palm Beach, Fla. all collected bailouts this year. Here’s a photo of the lobbyist’s USDA address:

Another non-farm address of a bailout recipient is at a Minneapolis skyscraper, is the location of R.D. Brummond and Sons LLC., which the Trump administration handled over nearly $100,000 this spring. The second is a mansion in a wealthy lakeside community in Blaine, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb, the address of Karnik Leifker LLC., which received about $100,000.

EWG has previously reported that nearly 20,000 city slickers in the nation’s 50 largest cities received farm subsidies in 2017, including hundreds who have received payments for three decades.

One farm bailout went to the address of a mansion located on a golf course of Craig Athen, of Omaha, Neb., who received $115,000 in government money this year.

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Richard M. Morgan, of Columbus, Ohio, another bailout recipient this year, had $50,000 in farm bailout money go to an address of a mansion located on a golf course.

The environmental advocacy group said 3,500 bailout recipients had collected more than $125,000 in farm bailouts through April.

In a previous report, EWG found that farm bailouts are flowing the wealthiest farmers.

They suggested that the next bailout rounds would only increase the problem of how bailouts are not protecting mom-and-pop farmers, but rather showering wealthy farmers with money.

Deline Farms Partnership, a soybean farm in Charleston, Mo., was the largest bailout recipient this year receiving nearly $1,000,000.

EWG said the report is based on $8.4 billion of farm bailouts through April. The USDA data was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

And earlier this month, President Trump hinted at a third farm bailout.

EWG said farm bailouts were intended to provide a level of assistance proportionate to a farm’s size and success, which have effectively crippled mom-and-pop to medium-sized farmers, by allowing more significant operations to receive the most bailout money.

This is more evidence that government interventionism in markets and socialist bailouts via the Trump administration aren’t working as farm incomes collapse, could trigger a farm bust in 2020.

 

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