Not that we didn't already know that, but as the corruption of the Trump administration comes out more and more each day, this little tidbit is yet another example of how there simply is no bottom when it comes to the Trump presidency.
When somebody is picked for a cabinet position, they get vetted. Typically during this time, they lay low so as not to attract any undue attention during the confirmation process.
Sonny Purdue said hold my beer and watch this:
There's a company called Archer-Daniels-Midland. (ADM for short.) They owned a soy bean plant in Estil, South Carolina, a very small town. The plant employed 30 people.
In what can best be described as a pay to play deal, ADM sold the factory to Sonny Purdue for $250,000. The problem? The place was valued at over 5 million dollars.
So the factory gets shut down, Sonny gets a processing plant for 16 times LESS than its value. But that's not the end of the deal. From the article:
www.esquire.com
When somebody is picked for a cabinet position, they get vetted. Typically during this time, they lay low so as not to attract any undue attention during the confirmation process.
Sonny Purdue said hold my beer and watch this:
There's a company called Archer-Daniels-Midland. (ADM for short.) They owned a soy bean plant in Estil, South Carolina, a very small town. The plant employed 30 people.
In what can best be described as a pay to play deal, ADM sold the factory to Sonny Purdue for $250,000. The problem? The place was valued at over 5 million dollars.
So the factory gets shut down, Sonny gets a processing plant for 16 times LESS than its value. But that's not the end of the deal. From the article:
Yet Hankey had suspicions about ADM’s motives in Estill, and he turned out to be right. ADM shut down the processing business. Some 30 people lost their jobs in a town where more than a third of the population lives below the poverty line, according to an estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau.
“It had a huge impact on the town,” Hankey said.
The sale also affected the wider region. Because it processed so much soy, the plant was a regional buyer in the market. That was a lot of capacity for local growers, who could sell to Carolina Soya instead of shipping it to big traders like Cargill or ADM. When the Estill plant closed, local soy prices fell. That meant ADM, one of the biggest players in soy processing, could purchase beans at a lower cost. “They bought the market,” Hankey said.
And absolutely none of it showed up on Purdue's disclosures. It was all done in the open. I tell you, there is simply no bottom at all to the corruption.
Trump's Corruption Was So Garish That We Lost Sight of the Other Brigands
In which the Washington Post informs of us a very coincidental land deal for then-incoming Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.
