MANHATTAN’S WELFARE KINGS: HOW BILLIONAIRES TURNED FARMS INTO PERSONAL TAX HAVENS AND PETTY CASH MACHINES, ALLOWING THEM TO GIVE LESS, WHILE TAKING MORE
By Yasha Levine, at The eXiled
This article was first published in the New York Press.
Excerpts:
Wall Street bankers and retired hedge fund billionaires have been talking about fiscal responsibility and deficit reduction, preparing the masses for austerity measures and cuts in social services—which we are told are regrettable, of course, but necessary nonetheless. Well, here is the perfect welfare program for the bailout queens to show off their fiscally conservative chops: Let’s see them cut federal farm subsidies, which funnel billions of dollars to the richest Americans, including notables like Ted Turner, David Letterman, Scottie Pippen, Paris Hilton’s grandpa, Charles Schwab, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and just about every single one of Sam Walton’s degenerate heirs.
Most people know next to nothing about this $20 billion-a-year welfare for the rich program, probably because the billionaires want it that way. Why get the masses worked up? Best to let them think the $200 billion they spent from 1995 through 2006 went to friendly farmers with cute farmhouses, rather than to Chevron or Kenneth Lay. Better to let urban entrepreneurs call themselves backyard farmers and toil away for the locavore movement, than to realize that their rich neighbors are reaping actual “farm” subsidies.
Now, farm subsidies weren’t always this criminal and, until fairly recently, had been doing what New Deal programs were designed to do: help the little guy. But the freemarket “reforms” of the Reagan-Clinton Era warped the welfare, redirecting farm subsidies from the have-nots to the have-mores, bankrupting all but the biggest farmers and depositing farm subsides into the bank accounts of the rich.
There’s no need to go to Iowa to see this welfare-for-the-rich in action. You can see it on the Upper East Side, where billionaire elites collect huge welfare checks from the government just for being rich, while a few blocks away, in one of the poorest, most ghettoized districts in the United States, the city’s black population is being purged from food stamp rolls for smoking some dope. Because, as Mayor Rudy Giuliani once wisely said, “As soon as they stop being dependent on the government, they’re moving in a much healthier direction.”
Norman B. Champ Jr: Wall Street Welfare Prince
But brutal freemarket ideas don’t apply to members of Manhattan’s genteel farmer class, even billionaires like Norman B. Champ III, who received nearly a half-million dollars in welfare payments for poor farmers, despite the fact that he lives in a multimillion dollar co-op at 828 Park Avenue. From 1995 to 2006, he raked in a total of $405,807 in dairy, corn and soy subsidies via his stake in the Champ family’s dairy farm in Missouri, his home state. Handout-for-handout, even Reagan’s mythic Cadillac-driving Chicago welfare queen and her $150,000 welfare scam got nothing on Champ, who could buy a Lamborghini and still have money left over to reupholster his private jet.
[….]
He might not be what most of us expect a welfare queen to look like, but that’s only because we have been duped by the whole poverty thing, convinced that the crumbs we throw the needy are a huge burden on our budget. So we look for any way to cut them off. For those who want to observe a real subsidy queen in his natural habitat, there’s no better place than Park Avenue. I am not trying to be ironic here. The people are literally welfare queens: They live where queens live and take money from the poor like queens do.
Map to the Subsidy Stars
Billionaires Leonard Lauder, Mark Rockefeller and his dad, David Rockefeller, are just a few of the more famous names exploiting their salt-of-the-earth legal status. Over the past decade, however, millions of dollars in corn, dairy, peanuts, cotton, soy and livestock subsidy payments from the federal government have gone to countless rich rank-and-file Manhattanites few people have ever heard of: It’s all right there in the farm subsidy database maintained by the Environmental Working Group. William Lesse Castleberry, a tax attorney who oversees leveraged buyouts, received $133,680 in cotton subsidies through an Arkansas farm. Mary W. Heller, a photographer with a studio on East 74th Street, got $143,783 via a farm in Kansas for growing wheat and sorghum. William Philip Walsh, who recently purchased a $2.9 million luxury condo with interior design done by Armani, was paid $212,463 to not farm his land. Phyllis A. Joyner, a 77-year old peanut farmer with a swanky Greenwich Village apartment and over $7 million worth of beautiful land in rural Virginia, received $239,624 for her peanut crops.
They’re not your typical crusty overalls wearing farmers. But then, the small family farmers we picture in our heads, who live on their land with their family and rise with the rooster to milk the cows, aren’t around much these days (except maybe in Brooklyn backyard imaginations). And if they are, they probably aren’t receiving any assistance from the federal government anyway, says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group. “American taxpayers have been writing farm subsidy checks to wealthy absentee land owners, state prison systems, universities, public corporations, and very large, well-heeled farm business operations without the government so much as asking the beneficiaries if they need our money,” explained Cook in 2007, when his organization published a database of farm subsidy recipients from USDA records.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Farm subsidies first began as part of the New Deal and were designed to help small, family farms struggling through the Great Depression. These days, this well-intentioned program exists only in name. Successive deregulation and various other freemarket “reforms” have turned farm subsidies into just another welfare-for-the-rich program, bypassing the very farmers it was designed to help and depositing billions in taxpayer money straight into the bank accounts of corporations and wealthy Americans.
Here’s what the New Deal program looks like today, after Reaganism had a couple of go’s at it: From 1995 to 2006, the federal government spent about $200 billion on agricultural subsidies, 75 percent of which ended up in the bank accounts of the richest top 10 percent of farmers. It’s welfare in reverse, taking from the many and giving it to the wealthy. And the richer you are, the more assistance you deserve.
[…]
Mark F. Rockefeller, a fourth-generation industrialist, probably had taxes on his mind when he purchased roughly 5,000 acres of farmland in Swan Valley, Idaho, and started receiving subsidy checks at his capitalist lair in the Rockefeller Plaza. Starting in 2001, the federal government has been giving him $54,500 a year to not farm his land. That’s right: The government gives your money to a member of the ultimate capitalist clan, which has a combined worth of more than $200 billion, to just laze around, not work and let his fields weed over. It’s what they call a “conservation payment” program, in which the government pays farmers to convert their land into something natural, like wetlands or whatever other eco-friendly habitat might be appropriate for the environment.
It worked out well for Rockefeller. By some strange coincidence, his farmland happened to be right next to an upscale fly-fishing resort he opened up with his wife in 1999. The place, called South Fork Lodge, plays host to groups of rich, middle aged men who pay $1,000 a day to fish in elegance and beauty with a personal fly-fishing guide. According to its website, “South Fork Lodge rests on a dramatic bend of eastern Idaho’s world famous South Fork of the Snake River in scenic Swan Valley. As you prepare to spend your day on one of the most scenic and majestic fly-fishing rivers in America, you will marvel at the breathtaking views from your room or the Lodge patio.”
[….]
A tax free slice of Rockefeller heaven
[…]
Yasha Levine is a mobile home inhabitin’ editor of The eXiled. He is currently stationed in Victorville, CA. You can reach him at levine [at] exiledonline.com. Further reading: How Limousine Liberals, Oligarch Farmers and even Sean Hannity Are Hijacking Our Water Supply.
