[env-trinity] Redding.com Editorial: Subsidy disclosure quietly disappears from the farm bill

[Tom Stokely]

http://www.redding.com/news/2014/feb/01/editorial-subsidy-disclosure-quietly-disappears/ 

Editorial: Subsidy disclosure quietly disappears from the farm bill
Staff Reports
Saturday, February 1, 2014
The long-delayed farm bill that the U.S. House of Representatives passed last week remains, even in the final compromise, a source of controversy.
Cuts from food stamps, though far smaller than reductions the House Republicans passed last year, are drawing howls from liberals over the fate of the neediest Americans, even as conservatives complain of runaway spending and still-high deficits. An overhaul of the system of ag subsidies and crop insurance doesn’t go nearly far enough to satisfy reformers. (Rep. Doug LaMalfa said he’d have preferred deeper cuts but voted for the bill as a workable compromise.)
But there was one provision of the bill that, on its face, was uncontroversial. It initially passed the House — the infamously contentious House — by unanimous consent. And yet, in the final version that emerged from House-Senate negotiations, this little section was gone.
Why would a measure with unanimous House support vanish from the law? Well, go figure. It could prove embarrassing to leading politicians.
Farm subsidies have long been matters of public record, leading to a greater public understanding of the program and embarrassment for the media moguls, rock stars and, yes, politicians who pull income from programs theoretically aimed at supporting the family farmer. That’s changing. The new system eliminates direct payments and replaces them with insurance to cover crop losses — but in a way that obscures individual checks.
Want to know how much federal money Ted Turner pulled in on his sprawling ranches, or congressman LaMalfa on the Sacramento Valley rice farm? Such figures have been easy to look up. No longer.
But the House last summer voted for a measure that would require disclosure of payments made to members of Congress and the president’s Cabinet, as well as their families. Fuller disclosure akin to the current system would far better serve the public, but as a fallback citizens should at least know which politicians are enjoying the largesse of programs they themselves shape in Washington.
And they would have — until the bill was “fixed.” As the group Taxpayers for Common Sense discovered this week when analyzing the final bill, a thousand-pager released two days before its House vote, the disclosure requirements for politicians had disappeared. Did all those stories about subsidized farmer-politicians calling for food-stamp recipients to stop abusing the system start to sting?
LaMalfa blamed the Senate for removing the provision and said he was disappointed. From afar, though, it’s hard not to simply see a drill where politicians publicly vote for disclosure and a fully informed public, only to let those potentially troublesome measures disappear in closed-door conference committees.
The farm bill’s a big mixed bag. It includes measures important to the North State: federal “payments in lieu of tax” that help rural counties with large swaths of federal land provide vital local services (but which budget cuts had threatened); permanent authorization of “stewardship contracting,” which lets communities take a vital new role in managing the federal forests around them, successfully pioneered by the Weaverville Community Forest.
Yet the rollback of detailed disclosure of farm-program spending means the taxpayers will once again be left in the dark about how their own money is being spent. And the two-step in which Congress supports full disclosure of politicians’ federal subsidies until, suddenly and mysteriously, it doesn’t — that’s precisely the kind of double dealing that leaves the public so cynically convinced that politicians’ first loyalty is to themselves.
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