Agent Orange Corn.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Column

What are these phantasmagoric money machines that they call "private-equity firms"? They're much in the news these days because a fellow who was a private-equity magnate is running for President. Mitt Romney piled up a quarter-billion-dollar personal fortune through his Wall Street equity outfit, Bain Capital, and he now claims that, because of his success in that business, he knows how to "fix" our economy.

Private equity whizzes are all about the fix. They operate by borrowing big piles of cash at high interest rates from rich speculators to buy out XYZ Corporation. Then, to meet the interest payments owed to the speculators (and to siphon off a financial killing for themselves), the fixers do two things. First, they plunder XYZ's assets, selling off profitable chunks of the corporation. And second, they fire as many workers as possible, and demand deep wage cuts and benefit givebacks from the employees they keep.

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It's a raw redistribution-of-wealth scheme. The process downsizes America's middle class, while creating no real economic value. Nothing equitable about it.

But the fix also includes a set of very special partners, few of whom are even aware that they're in on the deal: taxpayers. The private-equity business model relies on tax loopholes punched into federal law by the financiers' lobbyists and the lawmakers who do their bidding. The equity funds are able to load up on such heavy debt to finance their corporate takeovers only because all of the interest they must pay to speculators for that borrowed money is tax-deductible. Nice work if you can get it.

Thanks to the blessings of nature and good farmers, you and I can enjoy such scrumptious delights as fresh corn-on-the-cob, popcorn, tortillas, and many other variations of this truly great grain. And now, thanks to Dow Chemical and federal regulators, we can look forward to "Agent Orange Corn."

The chemical giant is in line to gain approval for putting a genetically altered seed on the market that will produce corn plants that won't die when doused with high levels of 2,4-D. This potent pesticide was an ingredient in Dow's notorious Agent Orange defoliant, which did horrific damage to soldiers and civilians in the...