Dirty Politics, Dirty Water
Today, water can no longer freely flow south from Lake Okeechobee, and the Everglades Agricultural Area, owned mostly by subsidized sugar companies, sits right where the River of Grass used to begin.
The water in Lake O has been contaminated with all kinds of nutrients from agricultural fertilizers, like nitrogen and phosphorus, so much that the water in the lake is considered far too polluted to be sent directly on to the Everglades like it used to.
Pay to Play Corruption
Consider this: From 2017 to 2022, Big Sugar has poured more than $40 million into the coffers of state politicians (doesn’t include local or federal contributions). And that number is just what we can prove using data from the Florida’s Division of Elections website.
Astroturf & Propaganda
Two federally-subsidized sugar corporations – US Sugar and Florida Crystals – fund an entire cottage industry that makes a fortune keeping things broken.
They spend tens of millions of dollars each year protecting the death grip they hold over the public’s water. They dole it out as political contributions to politicians and lavish monthly retainers on hundreds of lobbyists and consultants.
Federal Sugar Subsidies
Sugar Welfare®™ is growing a nutritionally useless crop using underpriced labor, getting rules and laws written that gives you indirect ownership of the public’s water, having the taxpayers pay to clean up the filth that pours off your land, all while evading actual market competition by receiving legal dispensation to overcharge for a product that’s harming us all and preventing clean freshwater from reaching the Everglades.
Yes, it’s a mouthful. It’s also the truth.
Regulatory Capture
Most folks think it’s the tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions Big Sugar doles out every year that ensures they call all the shots. It helps, for sure. But there is a lot more to sugar’s game.
One of their tactics to keep pollution and harmful practices unregulated to any practical extent is to “capture” the regulators.
