"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak.

Not to act is to act." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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CCAGW needs your help today to defeat the ill-conceived and outrageously expensive Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (FARRM), which despite the reform in its title, not only fails to modernize the federal governments Depression-era, command-and-control agricultural policies, but would also cost taxpayers nearly $1 trillion over the next 10 years! The House of Representatives may vote on this legislation as early as this week, so please, before you do anything else today, tell your U.S. Representative to oppose the FARRM Bill. Our nation is facing its fourth straight year of $1 trillion-plus budget deficits, and the national debt is nearing $16 trillion. At the same time, farm income is at an all-time high of $98 billion, or twice as much as it was in 2001, and commodity prices reached record levels from 2005-2010. Nonetheless, the House Agriculture Committee has crafted legislation that would cost 60 percent more than the 2008 Farm Bill. The FARRM Bill completely fails to modernize decades-old federal programs for commodities like dairy, sugar and peanuts. The sugar program alone costs Americans $1.9 billion annually in higher prices at the grocery counter and has wiped out at least 75,000 jobs in industries such as candy, cereal, and baked goods manufacturing. The price supports, marketing controls, and import quotas that keep the price of sugar in the U.S. at roughly double the price on the world market cost taxpayers $1.2 billion each year. The FARRM Bill continues to fund the Rural Utilities Service Broadband Access Program, which was intended to help bring Internet broadband service to underserved rural communities. However, RUS loans have a documented track record of profligacy, including a loan to a company providing broadband access to affluent suburban communities near Houston, Texas. The FARRM Bill also keeps intact the Market Access Program (MAP), one of the federal

governments most blatant examples of corporate welfare. MAP provides $200 million annually in overseas advertising support for successful private-sector companies, such as Butterball, Tyson Foods, Monsanto and Sunkist Growers. In 2011, MAP paid for a reality show in India called Lets Design to promote U.S. cotton. Speaking of cotton, the World Trade Organization has ruled that the U.S. cotton program violates international trade rules, and the U.S. agreed to pay $145 million to Brazilian cotton farmers to settle the case. Yet rather than reforming the cotton program, the FARRM Bill keeps taxpayers forking over that $145 million every year! And if all of this isnt bad enough, despite claims that federal agricultural programs provide a safety net for small- and medium-sized family farms, the overwhelming majority of beneficiaries of federal agricultural programs are large, wealthy agribusinesses, not family farmers. Jan, while the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed dozens of bills that would reduce spending, only to see them die in the Democratic-controlled Senate, the House version of the FARRM Bill will cost billions of dollars more than the Farm Bill passed by the Senate on June 20. I urge you today to tell your U.S. Representative to stand with taxpayers, rather than the special interests, by opposing the FARRM Bill! Sincerely,

Thomas A. Schatz President

we need to send a resounding message to House members that their constituents are watching this vote closely. Please forward this message to as many of your friends, neighbors, and colleagues as possible and ask them to express their outrage over the FARRM Bill.
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The Council for Citizens Against Government Waste (CCAGW) is the lobbying arm of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), the nation's largest taxpayer watchdog organization with more than 1 million members and supporters nationwide. CCAGW is a 501(c)(4) nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that lobbies for legislation to eliminate waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government. Contributions to CCAGW are not tax-deductible for federal income tax purposes. For more information about CCAGW, visit www.ccagw.org. To help CCAGW wage this battle to defeat the FARRM Bill, make a contribution today.