SUGAR SLAVES

"Sugarcane farmers...are becoming national and world heroes because everybody has his eye on the ethanol."
-Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

I haven't written about Ethanol for a while. So far its been established that Ethanol is less efficient at producing energy than gasoline, isn't reducing fuel prices, takes more resources to produce, actually pollutes more overall, and is causing food shortages around the world because of subsidies and the push for production, its driving food prices up (which in turn causes more inflation), and the farms which are growing corn for ethanol are now suffering from the bad economy and want even more subsidies.

We've even found out that even the left realizes that ethanol is a joke, that it doesn't do what they claimed it would, courtesy the Rush Limbaugh show:

It makes a ton of headlines but it's completely useless for everyone. I mean, frankly this thing is so inefficient it costs more energy to make it than it produces in the long run.

That's Alexandra Leo from the Huffington Post on CNBC. They know its junk, they know it doesn't work. Have you seen an ethanol car ad recently? Last year they were all over the place. In fact "green" advertising sort of died out because they found it people didn't like it as much as they'd hoped.

Well there's a darker problem with ethanol production and its slavery:

Just the other day, in the darkest reaches of the Amazon jungle in Brazil, more than 1,000 slaves were freed. They were forced to work 18 hour days under crippling conditions, cutting down sugar cane with machetes in order to produce the “environmentally friendly” fuel.

The raid, which police claim was the biggest to-date took place in the northern state of Para. Apparently, behind this exploitative ring lie the biggest ethanol producers in Brazil, Para Pastoril e Agricola SA.

The company would, apparently ship in poor workers, and like the coal mines of the past work the people and charge them for everything until they didn't actually make any money - they ended up in debt to the company store and couldn't leave. Why? Because its a lot cheaper to produce sugar cane for ethanol with slaves than workers. Brazil is the world's biggest ethanol producer, using sugar rather than corn. Its always been cheaper than many other producers and now we know at least one reason why.

Ethanol is bad, bad for the world, bad for America, bad for people, and even bad for the environment. So why is it being so heavily subsidized? Well, many of the Democratic congressmen who were elected in 2006 are from farming states, and those farming states have powerful lobbies which pressure the legislators from one end and pay for campaigns on the other, squeezing weaker congressmen into obeying their wishes. Government money is like a drug, once you get on it, you want more and damn the consequences. Ethanol has given us a new class of junkies and congress doesn't have the willpower or even desire to cut that off.