Free Mike's Election Guide by Michael Moore

waiting room of the ER last week with my kid, or the six-month waitlist I’m on to see a dermatologist?” They will say that pharmaceutical companies won’t have the money to research and discover new life-saving drugs if they can’t charge $300 for a prescription. You say, “You mean the life-saving drug that was developed with my tax dollars at the University in Ann Arbor (only 17 percent of the research for our drugs is done by the drug companies)?”
    We would not allow the police to ask us for a credit card before they start looking for the crook who broke into our home, and we would not allow the fire department to demand a fire insurance card before they start putting out the fire. We should make it illegal for anyone to say to a sick person, “Will that be cash or charge?”
    3.Ban High Fructose Corn Syrup.
    One way to help us live a bit longer would be to ban the most evil substance known to man: high fructose corn syrup.
    Read the label of anything you’re eating and you’ll probably see the words “high fructose corn syrup” somewhere. It’s in everything and you can’t get away from it. Just because the word “corn” is in it, please don’t think for a second that you’re getting one of your five recommended vegetable servings of the day. High fructose corn syrup has as much to do with corn as I have to do with the Boston Marathon.
    High fructose corn syrup is a super sweet and very cheap “sugar” extracted from corn without any of that silly corn fiber, taste, or nutrients. Real sugar is not cheap. Back before the 1970s, that’s what food manufacturers used in their products. And they tried to use as little as possible because the more they used, the more it cut into their profit margin.
    Then along came Richard Nixon.
    In the early 1970s, Nixon, who was already under immense political pressure because of the Vietnam war, was beginning to see waning support from a traditionally strong Republican base: farmers and big agribusiness. They were upset because a series of short-term economic problems were putting a serious squeeze on their income.
    In the midst of this crisis Nixon brought in former Purdue University dean of agriculture Earl “Rusty” Butz to serve as America’s eighteenth Secretary of Agriculture. Butz, who had a penchant for telling tasteless jokes and bemoaning welfare spending, turned his attention to eliminating anything that got in the way of farmers planting “from fencerow to fencerow.” But what would they do with all this corn? Sell it and make it into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Because real sugar was expensive. HFCS, derived from cheap and widely available corn, was a bargain.
    As a result of Nixon’s and Butz’s corn policies, the average American has gone from consuming zero pounds of HFCS per year in the late 1960s, to 63 pounds per year in this decade.
    Thanks to $19 billion a year in subsidies to agribusiness giants making food products that harm Americans, we are a sicker—and poorer—nation as a result. Because of all these subsidies, every dollar of profit ADM makes on corn sweetener costs consumers and taxpayers $10.
    Thanks to all this cheap and easy high fructose corn syrup, soft drink and fast food companies have turned 8- or 12-ounce drinks into 16- or 20-ounce super-sized drinks or 32-ounce Big Gulps. While turning cheap corn into HFCS has resulted in cheap soda, cheap corn can also be used in making burgers and other fast-food or processed junk foods. Cheap, subsidized corn, in the form of HFCS, is the backbone of our ever growing national waistline.
    If you look at the charts, you can see when the obesity boom began in the U.S. It began with the introduction of high fructose corn syrup into our diet. If you are overweight you are in the majority—two-thirds of us are now overweight, and a third of us are actually obese.
    This weight gain has increased the risk of heart disease, turned millions into diabetics, and generally reduced the