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Suppose you were the illegitimate President of the richest country on the continent. You try slapping tarrifs on steel, but the WTO gets annoyed and punishes you! So you figure THAT won't work.
You have all these ranchers supporting you, in the arid West, where all the subsidized water goes. They are unhappy because cattle prices are low while feed prices are high. You could let some ranchers (agribusiness, for those who don't believe in fairy tales) go out of business, but they don't want free market Darwinism, not for themselves, thank you! You could cut farm subsidies to the crop farmers, so that feed costs drop, but then the crop farmers (agribusiness, for you who don't believe in fairy tales) would be ticked off. You could jawbone the meat packers and other middle men, but they whine all the time about their profit margins as it is. So you go see your GOP approved mad economist(GOP-ME).
Your GOP-ME offers a novel solution: Mad Cow Disease! Create the impression that your trading partner to the North (Canada, for the geographically impaired), which under NAFTA has done wonders in bringing tons of tasty, nutricious, healthy and CHEAP beef, pork, eggs, etc. to American grocery stores, has herds of disease-bearing cows which will infect US herds and bring Americans a slow, painful, unpreventable death from spongy brains! Slap a quarrantine on Canadian beef, paint yourself as a hero, defender of the poor, etc. etc. It isn't true; you had your minions doctor one cow (a synch, compared to all that anthrax turmoil, which got out of hand and actually got real people dead, some of whom would have voted Republican, no doubt, since the targetted Democrats didn't actually open their own mail) and the only creature dead this time is the cow, who would have been slaughtered for market anyway. Suddenly, supply of cows drops! Throw in the Atkins diet plan and demand for beef rises, and suddenly Sunday's roast is $8-$20 a pound, instead of $2-$5. What could be more beneficial to the campaign coffers?
But then the chickens come home to roost: Japan, well versed in political Kabuki centuries before you took it up, decides to embargo US beef, (thereby saving themselves and their own beef market without using WTO prohibited methods) due to the fear of Mad Cow tainted US beef. The Vegans, Vegetarians, and heart doctors all counter-attack on Atkins, while the public, having actually read of Britain's people dropping like flies, back away from the table. Since you have never actually insisted on any serious prevention/detection or protection of the food supply (because you know damned well there isn't any mad cow disease in the US or Canada, for that matter), you are caught in your own lies; and meanwhile some enterprising reporters (although they don't seem to work in the corporate media and you can't get them fired) start talking about American cattlemen sending sick animals to slaughter that can't even walk, they are so ill.
So after thoroughly disrupting the domestic economies of your citizens, ticking off your biggest trading partner to the North, losing the lucrative Japanese beef market indefinitely, and shredding just a bit more of the vaunted US credibility, you steal another election and go, hat in hand, over the border to mend fences.
What have you learned from this? GOP-ME!
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