Hubler challenges GOP on ethanol

The sort of disingenuous fear-mongering on display below gets us nowhere as a nation, which I suspect , is the underlying purpose of the message. Perhaps you and your ilk (Congressman King prominent among you) were not paying attention in Iowa in the 80's when the packing plants opted to break the unions which provided good-paying jobs to Iowans who lived in and contributed greatly to the economies of towns like Perry, Marshalltown, Carroll, and Sioux City, in order to “cut production costs” so that we could all have bacon on our Whoppers whenever we want at no extra charge and the owners could get fat with profit. Maybe you missed it when that plan backfired as the replacement workers, still Iowans, could not survive on what they were being paid and left in search of a living wage. And you must have missed these same packing plant owners sending recruiters to Mexico, Africa, Bosnia and elsewhere to acquire a fresh stock of “willing” workers, leaving the towns to figure out how to deal with them once they arrived with their families to work for $7 an hour with no benefits.

Unfortunately political leaders from both parties have spent the past thirty or so years chickening out on the issue of undocumented workers, to the point where it is now so deeply metastasized into our dysfunctional economy that, like a virulent cancer, it will cause great pain to cure it – if there is a cure to be found.
In that vacuum it's so easy to peddle fear, as we see below, but so counter-productive to our true mission as a nation.

As a daily reader of this blog I am pleased to see consistently excellent articles, and am equally disappointed by some of the comments, as illustrated below by Brittanicus. Up until now I've refrained from joining the fray, but you can expect to hear more from me in the future. So we're clear up front, don't expect to bait me into a back and forth discussion unless you really have something to say and can say it with a civil, intelligent tone because
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with with an unarmed person.

This is Mister Rogers … welcome to my neighborhood.

The sort of disingenuous fear-mongering on display below gets us nowhere as a nation, which I suspect , is the underlying purpose of the message. Perhaps you and your ilk (Congressman King prominent among you) were not paying attention in Iowa in the 80's when the packing plants opted to break the unions which provided good-paying jobs to Iowans who lived in and contributed greatly to the economies of towns like Perry, Marshalltown, Carroll, and Sioux City, in order to “cut production costs” so that we could all have bacon on our Whoppers whenever we want at no extra charge and the owners could get fat with profit. Maybe you missed it when that plan backfired as the replacement workers, still Iowans, could not survive on what they were being paid and left in search of a living wage. And you must have missed these same packing plant owners sending recruiters to Mexico, Africa, Bosnia and elsewhere to acquire a fresh stock of “willing” workers, leaving the towns to figure out how to deal with them once they arrived with their families to work for $7 an hour with no benefits.

Unfortunately political leaders from both parties have spent the past thirty or so years chickening out on the issue of undocumented workers, to the point where it is now so deeply metastasized into our dysfunctional economy that, like a virulent cancer, it will cause great pain to cure it – if there is a cure to be found.
In that vacuum it's so easy to peddle fear, as we see below, but so counter-productive to our true mission as a nation.

As a daily reader of this blog I am pleased to see consistently excellent articles, and am equally disappointed by some of the comments, as illustrated below by Brittanicus. Up until now I've refrained from joining the fray, but you can expect to hear more from me in the future. So we're clear up front, don't expect to bait me into a back and forth discussion unless you really have something to say and can say it with a civil, intelligent tone because
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with with an unarmed person.

This is Mister Rogers … welcome to my neighborhood.