NCGA Satires the Food and Fuel Smear Campaign

Recipe for a Food and Fuel Smear Campaign

By Rick Tolman
Chief Executive Officer
National Corn Growers Association

Hey kids! Looking for a quick and easy way to deceive the public about the price of food while trying to limit exposure on the core issue of transportation costs? Want to confuse consumers and spread outlandish lies? You can do this and more in just five easy steps. Here’s how:

1. Make sure the oil and energy industry fills your board of directors. This is an essential first step if you are going to be successful in your smear campaign. After all, their pockets are deep enough to fund junk science, resurrect has-been spokespersons and infuse every facet of the American media landscape with propaganda.

2. Write a press release decrying the use of ethanol and calling for rollback of the renewable fuels standard that provides a domestic solution for America’s energy woes; puts money back into the economy through job creation; and is environmentally friendly by reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Be sure you conveniently ignore the fact that ethanol is eating into your outrageous profits. And don’t forget to skip over the fact that without ethanol blended fuel saves consumers could be paying 15 percent more for their fuel.

3. Make sure you get on national television so all your friends can see you. Be sure and distort the facts on how nearly $120-barrel oil has woven its way throughout every facet our economy and is contributing to the collapse of airlines,squeezing over-the-road truckers who are dealing with more than a 50 percent increase in their fuel and wreaking havoc on other industries that rely on transportation.

4. Distract the American public from the $128 billion profits of the oil industry you serve so well with smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors is one of the most important steps in a smear campaign. This step might be bit tricky, though, especially as the price of that barrel of oil breaks records almost daily. In fact, the public might even remember that in 1999 a barrel of oil cost $10, the price of lunch today. To distract Americans, make sure you find a spokesperson willing to spout off that biofuels are a crime against humanity. To mix things up even more, make sure you confuse the issue of rising American food prices with global hunger; even the two are not related.  Be sure to obscure the fact that of the world’s 47 poorest nations, 38 are net oil importers and consume much of their national income to pay for it.

Plus, kids, the smoke and mirrors step is fun! There are all sorts of variations on this step. For example, make unfounded attacks on agriculture and the environment. That way the public might not notice the environmental, financial and social costs in a world driven by the search for more oil.

5. Repeat steps 1 through 4. By this time, the media will be in full gear chasing down your exciting lies. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll miss reports from true experts that haven’t tried the Food and Fuel Smear Campaign Recipe--reports such the Congressional Research Service’s “Oil Industry Profit Review 2007” and  its report “Food Price Inflation: Causes and Impacts”;  or Texas A&M’s “The Effects of Ethanol on Texas Food and Feed”; or the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development’s “Impact of Ethanol on U.S. and Regional Gas Prices and on the Profitability of the U.S. Oil Refining Industry”; or John Urbanchuk’s “The Impact of Gasoline Prices in Missouri”; or Argonne National Lab’s “Analysis of the Efficiency of the U.S. Ethanol Industry 2007.”

Cooking up trouble takes time and effort, kids, and there is one caution: Where there’s smoke there’s fire. You might get burned. After all, the American public isn’t stupid.