The criminals in high places are even putting their hex on corn. As ethanol gets a nice boost from Willie Nelson , (and ChiDyke gives us lovely corn haiku ), the cretins in the White House are clawing for the profits, of course.

Diane at cab drollery yesterday put up a great account of the cretin in chief's trip to South America and his cynical attempt to co-opt what Brazil has been doing in promoting use of sugar-based ethanol - substituting for it the use of corn, which is anticipated to be a source of massive deforestation of rain forest.

from Diane:

In a week of tumultuous revelations about White House involvement in the firings of eight US Attorneys for political reasons, the "true confessions" of Khalid Sheik Muhammad for all crimes committed against the United States and the world at large in the last thirty years, and the continuing bloody mess that is the Iraq War, not as much attention has been paid to the President's excellent adventures in Latin America. We do know from various sound bites that the intrepid executive had some pretty nice dining experiences and we learned that apparently Mr. Bush has a fondness for blueberries.

The press in Latin America, however, has had plenty to say about the tour. Angel Guerra Cabrera, in an op-ed piece in Mexico's La Jornada, has a pretty scathing analysis of the President's "promises" to a continent his administration has rather pointedly ignored the past six years. One section of the column presents a rather interesting take on what is surely going to be the centerpiece of the President's energy initiatives.

As was to be expected , the insincere promotion of ethanol production as way to generate jobs and remedy global warming has not been accompanied by a reduction in the massive taxes on Brazilian energy. If the project were to be put into practice on the scale that Bush proposes, it would mean a death certificate for the tropical forests of Brazil, the devastation of rural agriculture in Brazil as well as vast regions of Central America and the Caribbean, the deepening of monoculture and the liquidation of biodiversity on hundreds of thousands of hectares.

This would be a true hecatomb [mass animal sacrifice] , raising the price of food to the heavens, adding hundreds of millions to the legions of hungry, greatly increase the emission of polluting gases and bringing a dramatic increase in the use of agrochemicals highly detrimental to living things.

This strategy, destined to fatten a handful of transnational corporations, maintain the environmentally lethal and wasteful energy consumption in the United States and sabotage Latin American integration, is already being met with considerable social rejection. This can be deduced by the stance taken by the leader of the Movement of Landless Field Workers in Brazil, Joao Pedro Stédile. The most this [U.S.] strategy can achieve in Latin America is an intensification of the already energetic activity against imperial policy.

At this point, ethanol is a problematic source of energy for this nation and for the world. It isn't terribly energy efficient in its production, and, just as important, it requires taking millions of acres out of food production. It also requires taking land out of such important biosystems as the rain forest. Monoculture just isn't a very sound approach to anything, but that won't stop this president and his buddies at ADM.

Touting ethanol as the answer to all of our energy problems is an easy response to a complicated and difficult situation. The fact that the meme is useless in the real world won't stop this administration from trying to impose it on the Midwestern farmer and the Brazilian peasant. Should Mr. Bush succeed in this, we're in for some real trouble.

While there has been a responsible community promoting the use of alternative fuels, the takeover of the ethanol cause by agricultural monopolists has been a warning signal. Just because the basic concept is a good one doesn't mean that the war criminals can't corrupt it.