Tag Archives: herbster

Watch This Guy Try to Flatter His Way to Becoming Trump’s Ag Secretary

by ElizbethMendez9 Posted on December 20, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

President-elect Donald Trump has made some mind-bending Cabinet picks, tapping a Big Oil CEO to lead foreign policy, a former pro wrestling magnate as head of the Small Business Administration, and a raunchy burger tycoon from a company with a history of worker wage disputes as head of the Labor Department. But one Cabinet slot remains open: secretary of the US Department of Agriculture, a sprawling agency with more than a $150 billion budget that directs farm and hunger policy.

Last last week, I posted an update about the chaos surrounding Trump’s USDA transition. Since I filed that piece, some fascinating new information has emerged. Here’s a rundown of why another wild-card pick might be on the way:

• During his campaign, Trump assembled a 60-plus-person band of right-wing farm state pols, agribiz flacks, and donors to serve on what he called his Agricultural Advisory Committee. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is one its highest-profile members. On the national scene, he’s most famous for (1) unapologetically sharing fake news stories on his office’s Facebook page; (2) calling Hillary Clinton a “cunt” on on Twitter; and (3) trying to bill his state’s taxpayers for a trip to take a medical procedure called a “Jesus shot.”

In what Politico described as a “Hail Mary attempt” to assert himself as a candidate to take the USDA helm, Miller released a fulsome love letter to Trump Friday in the form of an op-ed piece. “The focus is now the golden lobby of Trump Tower, the new symbolic representation of power in America: an edifice built by sharp-edged business acumen and cold American cash rather than taxpayer dollars and political pork,” Miller opines.

At the start of the piece, Miller predicts that “not only will Donald Trump defy his critics, befuddle his opponents and become one of our greatest presidents, but he will fulfill his promise to Make America Great Again.” By the end, Miller is ready to go further: “In just over one month Donald Trump has already kept the pledge written on thousands of red caps across the America: He has already Made America Great Again.”

• Just a little over a week ago, Trump seemed close to choosing a centrist Democrat from a farm state as USDA chief—a surprisingly tame pick for this crew. It would also have been diabolically smart, because if Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) could have been persuaded to take the post, it would quite likely have meant increasing the GOP majority in the Senate by one seat, since a Republican would likely have won a special election to replace her. But then Politico reported last Monday that “Trump’s closest rural advisers are trying to torpedo efforts” to appoint Heitkamp, and the post has been in limbo ever since.

Since then, the San Antonio Express News‘ Lynn Brezosky has added some excellent perspective on what happened. She got a hold of an email from one of Trump’s ag advisers, high-powered DC attorney Gary Baise. (Baise confirmed the authenticity of the email, Brezosky reports.) Baise is a significant figure in Trump World—he’s the man who takes credit for putting together the Agricultural Advisory Committee on which the above-mentioned Miller sits. Baise represents Big Ag interests for the law firm and lobbying house Olsson Frank Weeda Terman Matz, and serves as policy expert for the Heartland Institute, an oil industry-funded think tank that denies man-made climate change.

In his email, which went out to the transition team as well as members of the ag advisory group, Baise declares:

Politico just put this story out regarding the delay in selecting a USDA Secretary. All of you need to know that I have been advised that a person on the Trump transition team believes “I” have been causing problems regarding the USDA Secretary selection. I have been told indirectly to “back off”!!!! Rest assured I will not. I am speaking and reflecting you, Mr. Trump and agriculture’s best interests not some politically correct solution. President–Elect Trump did not win by being politically correct!

The “politically correct solution” he’s referring to appears to be choosing Heitkamp. Baise goes on to call for a USDA chief who “supported Mr. Trump and did not oppose him or offer lukewarm support,” and who is “not a Tom Vilsack type” (a reference to the current USDA secretary).

• San Antonio Express News‘ Brezosky goes on to report that members of Trump’s advisory committee “say they had been promised a seat at the table on agricultural policy,” and Baise’s email represents their effort to promote themselves. Meanwhile, Politico reports that Charles Herbster, chairman of that committee, remains a contender to become Trump’s USDA pick. Citing a a “source close to the transition,” Politico reports that Herbster “managed to stay under the radar as he made his way to New York last week to meet with Trump transition officials,” though “he doesn’t appear to have spoken directly to the president-elect.” The news site adds:

Still, the fact Herbster was summoned to NYC suggests he remains very much in the mix. In many ways, Herbster would make sense: He’s a businessman from one of the country’s biggest farm states who was a key rural backer for the loyalty-loving Trump during the campaign. His dearth of government experience, which would likely be a detriment in any other administration, could fit into Trump’s swamp-draining pledge.

Herbster would be a fascinating drain-the-swamp pick. As I reported in August, he is a major funder of a super-PAC called Ag America, and he even sits on its steering committee. According to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants. He also runs a multilevel marketing operation—one of those companies like Avon, Amway, or Herbalife that sell their products to the public through a network of individual “distributors” who make money not just based on their own sales, but also from the sales of others they’ve managed to recruit. More here.

Meanwhile, as Christmas approaches, we all anxiously await word of whom our Great Leader will choose to oversee ag and hunger policy.

Originally posted here:

Watch This Guy Try to Flatter His Way to Becoming Trump’s Ag Secretary

Posted in FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Pines, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch This Guy Try to Flatter His Way to Becoming Trump’s Ag Secretary

While Most Republicans Stampede Away From Trump, One Group Remains Loyal

by ForrestRjh Posted on October 10, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Last Friday, GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign announced additions to his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee: Two Nebraska farmers joined a group of more than 60 Republican elected officials and agribusiness execs, chaired by Nebraska rancher and multilevel-marketing magnate Charles Herbster.

That same day, after Trump boasted of his taste for committing acts that amount to sexual assault, Republican politicians began to stampede away from their party standard bearer. By Monday afternoon, no fewer than 50 prominent Republicans had withdrawn their support from Trump in response to his toxic remarks, The New York Times reports.

But his ag-policy committee remains nearly completely intact. Of its 60-plus members, only two—South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaar and Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis—count among the recent renegades.

So: Two members joined Friday, and two have left since. For a man who divides his time between Manhattan and Palm Beach, Trump enjoys loyal support from certain quarters of the ag world. For more on Trump’s food and farm agenda, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Visit source:  

While Most Republicans Stampede Away From Trump, One Group Remains Loyal

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on While Most Republicans Stampede Away From Trump, One Group Remains Loyal

Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

by MartyMulkey Posted on August 31, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Like a jittery upstart on The Apprentice, Donald Trump is looking like an unlikely contender for the prize he’s groping for. To beat the long odds stacked against him in the presidential election, the mercurial reality TV star will have to conquer a chunk of real estate quite distinct from the vast gambling dens and condo castles he’s used to: Iowa.

While the US corn, soybean, and hog capital isn’t a big enough prize on its own to push the GOP nominee to victory, “there is no realistic path to the presidency for Trump without Iowa’s six electoral votes,” as the Washington Post recently reported. Ohio, too, has emerged as a necessary but insufficient piece of the electoral map for Trump.

So the lifelong urbanite is plunging those famous fingers of his into the muck of farm-state politics. Trump reportedly declined to mount a Harley and participate in the ride portion of Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s “Roast and Ride” event at the state fairgrounds in Des Moines last week, but he did deliver a red-meat speech pandering to some of the baser urges of the Corn Belt’s agribusiness interests.

Here are some highlights:

• He thundered against government regulation of farming practices—a highly contentious topic in a state where waterways and drinking water are routinely polluted by runoff from farms. “We are going to end the EPA intrusion into your family homes and into your family farms, for no reason—what they’re doing to you is a disgrace,” he declared, adding without citing evidence the unlikely claim that “many” Iowans have lost their farms to overzealous enforcement of environmental standards.

• To the crowd’s delight, Trump vowed to revoke the Obama administration’s Waters of the US Rule, which gives the Environmental Protection Agency greater authority to regulate water pollution. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, “wants to shut down family farms just like she wants to shut down the miners and the steelworkers… through radical regulation,” he warned.

• Yet Trump pledged support for an infamous federal government boondoggle: a 2007 law that mandates that a huge portion of the US corn crop be diverted into ethanol production. “President Obama lied to you about his support for the Renewable Fuel Standard, and you can trust Hillary Clinton even less,” he said. In reality, Obama has never wavered in his support for the corn-ethanol mandate, and Clinton, too, supports it—as does one of her main ag policy advisers, USDA chief Tom Vilsack, a former governor of Iowa.

• Trump promised to “end double taxation of family farms at death”—a reference to the estate tax. Repealing the so-called death tax is a perennial applause line for GOP politicians, and Trump’s proclamation drew an enthusiastic response. It’s hard to figure out why the issue still resonates with farm audiences—after years of rollbacks, the tax now applies only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher, and affects fewer than 1 percent of US family-owned farm operations, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

On two other issues, Trump declined to pander to the ag crowd during his Iowa speech. On immigration, the candidate has maneuvered himself into a tight corner. Anti-migrant rants fueled Trump’s blitz through the primaries, appealing to the nativist impulses of the GOP base. But Big Ag relies heavily on immigrants for labor, from the fruit and vegetable fields of California and Florida to Iowa’s industrial-scale hog slaughterhouses. Perhaps in deference to such business interests, Trump has on some recent occasions softened his stance on immigration. Underlining these tensions, several members of Trumps 64-person ag policy committee support a much softer stance on migration, the Washington Post recently reported. But in his Iowa speech, Trump for some reason reverted to old ways, fulminating against “criminal illegal immigrants” and vowing yet again to “build a great border wall.”

The other issue is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the controversial trade deal championed by President Barack Obama and prized by Big Ag because it pries open Asian markets for US-grown seeds, grain, and meat. Trump has been denouncing the TPP on nativist grounds since he launched his campaign. Perhaps because Iowa stands second only to California in agricultural exports, Trump held his tongue on the TPP during his speech, declining to mention trade at all.

Perhaps to smooth over those immigration and trade rough spots with the Big Ag community, the Trump campaign deployed the chairman of its Rural Advisory Committee, Charles Herbster, to address the Ohio Cattlemen’s Association’s annual roundup in Jackson, Ohio, last Saturday. Herbster, a Nebraska rancher and multilevel-marketing magnate, did not return calls asking for details of his presentation. According to Elizabeth Harsh, executive director of the OCA, Herbster “answered many questions from OCA members,” ranging from “trade and TPP to health care and immigration.” She added, “OCA’s members were very interested and engaged in the discussion,” but she declined to say more.

In a brief interview a month ago, Herbster acknowledged that he’d been getting calls from farmers concerned about Trump’s crusade against the TPP, and insisted that a President Trump would renegotiate trade deals in a way that keeps ag exports booming.

Link to article – 

Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

Posted in alo, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Watch Trump Desperately Pander to Farmers

Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

by marques458 Posted on August 1, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump churns out strong opinions like McDonald’s produces Big Macs. But save for the odd eruption—like declaring the supremacy of Trump Tower Grill’s “taco bowls” or blaming the California drought on environmentalists to the delight of the state’s agribusiness interests—he has been relatively quiet about food. At last month’s Republican National Convention, the real-estate developer/reality TV star took a step toward filling out his food and farm policy by tapping Nebraska agribusiness owner and cattleman Charles Herbster as the chairman of his Agricultural and Rural Advisory Committee.

Like Trump, Herbster is an unconventional business titan with political ambitions.

He and his wife own Conklin, a Kansas City-based company with an odd mix of product lines: from pesticide additives called adjuvents to fertilizers for farms and lawns to probiotics for livestock, pets, and even people to industrial roof coatings to motor oils for “everything from semis to farm equipment to race cars.” In addition, he owns a cattle-breeding company called Herbster Angus Farms as well as farmland in Nebraska and Colorado, for which he received a total of $196,757 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2014, according to the Environmental Working Group’s Farm Subsidy Database. (That’s not a particularly high number—many Nebraska farm operators got much more over that time frame.)

Before he took the reins of Trump’s ag-policy team, Herbster was best known for his aborted 2013 campaign for Nebraska’s governorship, as Politico’s Ian Kullgren recently noted. Soon after exiting the race, Herbster donated $860,000 to the campaign of another Republican gubernatorial candidate, Beau McCoy, a Nebraska state senator. Herbster ultimately donated a total of $2.7 million to McCoy’s campaign, “nearly his entire war chest,” The Omaha World-Herald reported. McCoy lost the race. Last year, Herbster hired McCoy to run marketing for Conklin’s building-supply business. Another one-time Nebraska officeholder, former Gov. Dave Heineman, joined Conklin’s board of directors last year.

Herbster’s largesse to politicians hasn’t been limited to McCoy’s failed bid. Politico notes he “has given $336,000 to Republican candidates and ag-related PACs since 2012.”

He is a major funder of Ag America, which describes itself as a “Federal Super PAC active in local, state, and federal elections.” Herbster sits on the Ag America steering committee, and according to the money-in-politics tracker Open Secrets, he donated $60,000 to it in 2015. Other recent contributors include Monsanto, DuPont, Archer Daniels Midland, and several other agribusiness giants.

In public documents, Ag America pushes a a fairly standard agribiz policy agenda: The next president must subject (unnamed) federal ag regulations to “rigorous cost-benefit analyses” and pursue free trade agreements “across the globe to open markets for America’s agricultural products.”

That last bit would seem to contradict Trump’s oft-stated antipathy to the the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pending trade deals that was hotly supported by the agribusiness lobby.

And that appears to be where Herbster comes in—reassuring farm interests that a Trump presidency wouldn’t mean reduced access to foreign markets.

On a recent afternoon, I caught up with Herbster by phone on a corn field on his Nebraska farm after calling a number I found on the website of Herbster Angus Farms. I was quite surprised when the man himself answered the phone. After volunteering that “I’ve been friends with Donald J. Trump for more than 10 years,” Herbster told me that he’s been getting calls from farmers “concerned about issues of trade.” Herbster said he reassures them that Trump “is not against trade in any way”—it’s “just that we wants trade to be fair,” and that means renegotiating trade deals. Herbster acknowledged that “trade for agriculture in the Midwest has probably been pretty good for the past few years,” but that it “hasn’t been good for small manufacturers in middle America and the coasts.” Trump, he suggested, would make trade great again for everyone.

He then mentioned reducing the inheritance tax (applied only to estates valued at $5.45 million or higher) as a “big issue,” and said that rolling back regulation would be “at the forefront” of a Trump’s first 100 days as president. “We regulate, regulate, regulate,” he complained. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, he added that “if it moves, the government’s response is to tax it; if it keeps moving, the response is to regulate it; and if it stops moving, the response is to try to control it and subsidize it.”

I asked him to specify what regulations he sought to dismantle. “We’re not gonna pinpoint and try to detail the minutiae of all of those, because the first thing we have to do is we have to win,” he said. “I believe we are gonna win, but I’ve always said, until you win, all of the great ideas in the world aren’t going to help you, because you have to win to implement ’em.”

Rather than sweat policy details, “my focus .. is to make sure we get rural America out to vote, that we raise as much money as possible,” he said, adding that “it’s gonna take a lot of money for this campaign, because we saw what happened with Romney versus Obama.”

Meanwhile, Herbster said, he’s working to assemble a group of people to serve with him on Trump’s ag-policy committee, which will be announced the first week of August. “Everyone’s gonna pretty well know the names on that list—we have some governors, we have some former governors … we’ve put together a really great list.”

I pressed him for more policy details, but he politely hustled me off the phone. “I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve got concrete being laid at the farm,” he said.

Taken from – 

Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food

Posted in Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Is the Mysterious High Roller Donald Trump Wants to Put In Charge of Our Food