Here’s an interesting post on food subsidies from 2007.
When the House of Representatives debated the bill in July, PCRM along with many other health and public interest groups, supported the Fairness in Farm and Food Policy Amendment, which was offered by Reps. Ron Kind (D-WI) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). This amendment would have limited government subsidies of unhealthy foods, cut subsidies to millionaire farmers, and provided more money for nutrition and food assistance programs for Americans and impoverished children overseas.
Unfortunately, politics doomed the reform effort. At the eleventh hour, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) feared that freshman representatives who voted to cut subsidies might risk losing their seats in farm states in the 2008 elections, endangering the Democratic majority. The reform amendment was defeated 117 to 309.
Farm and food subsidies are becoming one of the most single important ways in which government can control the populace and feed its own growth and power. If you can keep people sick, fat, needy, hooked on pharmaceuticals, and desiring government programs to solve their problems brought on by government policy, the vicious circle will feed off of itself and grow the powers of the state to “solve” one massive “health crisis” after another.
Congressional friends of corporate interests have one foot in the subsidy trough, propping up their constituency that consists of agriculture and powerful (processed) food interests, and on the other hand they purport to want to save you through their nationalized health care, “war” on obesity, and jihad against any alternative forms of health solutions and maintenance. Government is in the business of making special interests wealthy, and in the process, it knowingly creates problems that can feed its own growth so it has the manpower to “resolve” the problems. Many years and many $$$$$ later, the problems are far more widespread and catastrophic. Yet every dupe in the media and medical establishment acts as if they have no idea how Americans came to be saddled with this exploding epidemic of obesity and diabetes.