Free the Cheese from the Big Cheese
Under the Clintons, the Democratic Party took up dwarf throwing: seeing how far they can toss the little guy for votes. No one's been protecting the little guy since. Consider the small dairy farmer.
Hilaire Belloc doxed before it was tox.
It was 1912. Belloc laid it out in The Servile State: Henry VIII raped the Catholic Church, its monasteries, and probably a few recalcitrant parishes in-between, then gave the land to his cronies, creating a powerfully rich landed aristocracy the world hadn’t seen since Adam owned Eden. Belloc named a few of the cronies: “The Howards, the Cavendishes, the Cecils, the Russels . . .”.
You like Pride and Prejudice and dreamy Mr. Darcy? He doesn’t exist without that land grap. We don’t know who modeled Mr. Darcy for Ms. Austen, but the most likely candidates reflect family generational wealth that directly or indirectly came from that stripping of the Catholic patrimony that had accumulated over the course of 600 years since Alfred the Great carved out an Anglo-Saxon safe space against Viking bullying at the Battle of Edington in 878.
F’ing Mr. Darcy. His ancestors screwed everyone with the help of Henry VIII, and then he got to screw Keira Knightley.
And now his ancestors are screwing everyone. Probably even Keira Knightley, but I have no proof. Been lookin’ (and lookin’ and lookin’) for the videos, but no luck.
If you want to create a gelatinous pile of shit and feed it to everyone at a huge profit, it’s pretty easy to do. Not as easy as shooting the bull while taking a naked steam with Henry VIII, but aesthetically more palatable: you play a lot of poker and golf, set up a pipeline of hookers and cocaine in DC, form a bogus nonprofit with a sanctimonious name to funnel all the money, then open that hose’s spigot and spray shit all over the nation and tell everyone it has electrolytes.
That’s what Big Dairy’s Cavendishes have been doing for 30 years now as they relentlessly crush small dairy farmers, forcing them into stocking shelves at Walmart instead of husbanding cattle because over-production incentives from the federal government have crushed profit margins. It’s so bad, we now have at least 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stashed at underground storage facilities spread across our nation’s limestone innards.
In all fairness, federal direct purchases of cheese from small dairy farmers had already resulted in over 500 million pounds of cave-stored cheese by the 1980s. The direct purchases were ill-advised, but they were at least intended to do the right thing and help the small dairy farmer. Perhaps it’s not the government’s fault that it has Hansen’s disease and contaminates everything it touches, even when it’s trying to do the right thing.
But when the government gets really big, it can’t even intend to do the right thing, any more than Lizzo can stick a double-flip dismount from the uneven bars. It’s impossible, so big government quits even trying. It just rakes in the cocaine, hookers, and cash, then concocts schemes to let the Gudges of big business rape in more profits than a Hold ‘Em champ playing poker with mentally addled adults who’ve just received their monthly SSI stipend.
That’s pretty much where the federal government landed when the Democratic Party, under the Clinton machine, embraced dwarf-throwing: caring about the little guy only to see how far they could throw him for votes.
Among those dwarves were small dairy farmers. The direct purchase subsidies were eliminated and, instead, a Byzantine form of subsidy known as “profit-margin insurance” was put in place, along with a “checkoff” fee scheme that forced small producers to contribute to their own destruction, while an Ungoliant web of regulations squeezed small dairy farmers like a stranded sailor with one lemon trying to stave off scurvy.
Between 2004 and 2014, the number of dairy farms halved. From 2014 to 2024, it halved again. It’s estimated that a dairy farm now needs 2,000 head of cattle just to break even.
You’d think Big Dairy would be happy now, sitting on a heap of small dairy farmer skulls and grinning and shit.
But no. It wants more.
Its Dairy Management Incorporated promotes (”Got Milk?”) its Gudge members’ products like a smokin’ hot tiger mom using her diamond-level Hilton Honors Membership to get her son admitted to all eight Ivy League schools and Stanford.
The average American now consumes 1.8 pounds of commodity milk every day. The figure has been rising continuously, even though Americans’ milk consumption has been falling continuously for 50 years. How? First, there’s that relentless propaganda with the public combined with industry efforts to put dairy into everything from Starbucks to stuffed pizza crust. There’s also a Dr. Moreau-esque laboratory effort that recombines, ultra-filters, and refines dairy until it’s less recognizable than your dinner the morning after. These labs are now putting dairy into bread, crackers, granola bars, potato chips, corn chips, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, even certain beers.
If it’s processed, you’ve Got Milk.
And still, we can’t consume all the milk that Big Dairy is producing. And it keeps coming and coming . . . 1.4 billion pounds and molding.
It’s so bizarre, conspiracy theories are popping up, trying to account for the insanity. “Free the Cheese” movements are on Facebook and nutty folks are trying to infiltrate those limestone caves where all the excess cheese sits, maybe fearing some “Release the Kraken” moment when the cheese will be melted and poured over our country in a dairy-molten apocalypse.
I’m pretty sure the Free the Cheese conspiracy theorists are nutty, but can you blame them? A billion pounds of cheese and counting? Bankrupt dairy farms throughout the nation? Criminalization of unpasteurized milk? Forcing small dairy farmers to pay fees to further their own destruction to benefit their big dairy farm oppressors?
And the only way to make sense of it all is to understand the economics of a complex product like profit-margin insurance and the dark history of big business and big government since Henry VIII got a johnson for Anne Boleyn.
We can’t expect the little guy to make sense of it.
And that, I suspect, suits the federal government just fine.