The department of grotesque payoffs

VDH:

The US Department of Agriculture no longer serves as a lifeline to millions of struggling homestead farmers. In stead, it is a vast, self-perpetuating postmodern bureaucracy with an amorphous budget of some $130 billion -- a sum far greater than the nation's net farm income this year. In fact, the more the Agriculture Department has pontificated about family farmers, the more they've vanished -- comprising now only about 1 percent of the American population.