So, my brain is odd. What follows is stuff that you almost certainly are familiar with, but I am going to type this out for my benefit, as well as the audience if interested.

Time had this debate in 1980. For some reason, in my head I don't equate corn as 'grain' even though corn is a grass, a grain and a basic food staple. When I think of grain, I think of wheat, rye, barley, rice, but for some reason, not corn.

One of the really great things that Carter did was use grain to drag the Soviets to the SALT II table and agree to end new missile developments. This plan was so successful you end up with TIme talking about weaponizing food. I once heard a great talk from a guy who lost everything in the Reagan Farm program where the government auctioned off family farms left and right who said that Reagan shot them all in the back after Carter's Embargo cut them off at the knees and left them with tons of high-interest debt and suddenly no customers. But these guys were all wheat and 'grain" farmers, and I never in my head made that link to corn. Found a page that does not look like a 90's Geocities regect

Sugar subsidies, bty, are solely to fuck Cuba. They started in the late 50's as a way to hurt Cuban exports when the Castros took control of the country.

Now - I'm not saying this is moral. I'm not saying this is ideal. I'm not saying I wouldn't change it - I'd want to talk to a whole bunch of smart people before I even thought about it. But I've found that the more I dig into things, the more the stupid ways of our world make sense.

This is why I tell people that the world is not black and white, never was that way and can never be. Tom Freidman has a point that the increase in global trade has done more for world peace and an end to major wars than anything else, and I tend in very broad strokes to agree with him. China is not going to go to war with the US any time soon... not to say there will be pot shots here and there, but it is too profitable to stay in the WTO framework. Its one of these things that now we are stuck with and it gives the impression that no matter what we do we end up just punching the tar baby harder. Hopefully I won't be around if the whole thing goes off the rails or we get a set of incompetent egomaniacs in charge.