Lefties with Bush Derangement Syndrome like to blather about how he has blood on his hands.
Well, Bush, and every politician and greenie behind this idiotic ethanol nonsense may really have some blood on their hands.
Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’s April 12 ouster. Haitians are sick and tired of food prices that are 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies.
If you think that free markets are heartless and cruel, you are now seeing the opposite. It’s time to stop this brai-dead market meddling before people starve to death.
Update:
I have to agree with David Freddoso:
[W]hy has the price of food followed the price of oil, upward and rapidly so? A small portion of that is transportation and farming, but most of it is due to the the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which mandated that we use an incredible amount of the food we produce to create biofuels — for 4 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, gradually increasing to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012. This year, it means that 28 percent of our grain crop will be used for energy and not eaten.
And that’s not all. If we simply set all that grain on fire and watched it burn, such a major decrease in supply would already cause a significant price increase. But our policy of subsidizing food-to-fuel conversion further exacerbates the problem by creating a nexus between grain and oil prices.