Senator Ron Johnson votes with the Kochs (and the rest of us too!)

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson was the only Midwestern (OK, is not the Midwest, is it?) senator to vote against ethanol subsidies this week.  He actually did it twice (first the Coburn then the Feinstein version).

Good news for taxpayers, right?  Why should they have to support major agribusiness.  Perhaps RoJo was just doing the bidding of the Koch brother.  As Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center reports:

Even the powerful Koch brothers, who have bankrolled many GOP candidates and whose firms benefit from the subsidies, endorsed repeal.

For Wisconsin Democrats, the Kochs have come to embody everything that they believe is wrong in the world.  In this case, that's too bad since the ethanol subsidy is a bad deal both for taxpayers and for the global poor.  As Gleckman points out:

The subsidy itself is one of the least defensible in the tax code and it benefits a handful of corn farmers and producers in just a few states.

And in 2009 Gleckman reported this subsidy has contributed to increase in food prices of possibly as much as 15%. Seems like a perfect target for a party that professes to care about the hungry people of the world.  And yet it was our GOP senator (and supposed dupe of the nefarious Kochs) who voted to end the subsidy while our senior senator, Democrat Herb Kohl, voted to keep sending taxpayer money to Archer Daniels Midland and keep corn prices higher than they would otherwise be for the food consumers of the world (that is, everybody).

So to my Democratic/progressive friends in Wisconsin, I say don't get all strung out on Koch.  Sometimes the interests of American taxpayers, hungry people the world over, and billionaire GOP donors align.  And when they do, we shouldn't let partisan considerations prevent us from acting on them.

Senate Democrats Vote to Extend TARP

Via Senatus

The Senate defeated an amendment offered by John Thune (R-SD) that was designed to end any further use of TARP funds for bailouts.

I thought that one of the consequences of the Brown victory in MA and the apparent end to health care reform would be an uptick in outrage over bailouts and efforts by the Democrats to demonstrate they were sufficiently on the side of "Main Street rather than Wall Street". We've seen something in this vein from the President, but apparently Congressional Democrats didn't get the memo. Perhaps they are waiting for a more opportune time to adopt the mantle of populist outrage, maybe some time a little closer to November.

The vote was 53 to 45. Thirteen Democrats joined the Republicans in supporting the amendment, including Wisconsin's Russ Feingold. Herb Kohl joined fifty Democrats and two independents and voted against the amendment.