You folks in New York state should know something about Bernie Sanders. You see him as a white knight, free of corporate donors, working only for the people.
We in New England have a different view. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Bernie doesn’t take money from Goldman Sachs or other Wall Street interests, but he is a slave nonetheless to a more sinister power. Bernie Sanders is the puppet of Big Syrup. Big Oil holds Texas in its oleaginous grip, but Big Syrup is every bit as powerful in Vermont and the rest of New England, where we are all in the grasp of the Maple Syrup Cartel’s sticky tentacles.
You don’t hear about Big Syrup because we are afraid to speak its name. Independent sugarers have been surreptitiously rolled up overnight by the gendarmes, made to disappear forever, their land snapped up cheaply by corporate syrupers. Meanwhile the Cartel’s illegal overtapping (often three or more taps in a single 10-inch trunk!) goes unpunished.
Mr. Sanders’s involvement is quickly revealed by reading all Congressional Records since he was elected to the House in 1990. Not once will you find Mr. Sanders opposing the Sap Depletion Allowance. Just as Big Oil gets a tax break as its oil deposits become depleted, Big Syrup gets a break because of the disappearing sap used to make maple syrup. Mr. Sanders is possibly not so much corrupt as ignorant. Though a Vermont resident, he was born in Brooklyn, and is possibly unaware that maple trees, given adequate water and sunlight, can replenish their sap on a regular basis.
He has also been silent on the proposed hostile take-over of Mrs. Butterworth by Aunt Jemima. Mrs. Butterworth syrup contains only 1 percent maple syrup, making it a low-cost substitute for the real thing, a boon to the low-income families that Mr. Sanders supposedly represents. Word on the Street is that Aunt Jemima, backed by the Syrup Cartel, plans to buy up Mrs. Butterworth in order to shut her down and force costly real maple syrup on poor communities. Hillary Clinton, hoping to solidify her African-American support, calls the proposed merger “typical corporate black-on-black violence,” though Mrs. Butterworth’s race remains in doubt, depending on how full the bottle is.
Maple syrup is essential to the economy of New England and much of the northeast. It flavors our pancakes, waffles, and oatmeal. It keeps Donald Trump’s hair in place. For those of us who are diabetic and are forbidden sugar, it is a welcome loophole for sweetening our coffee. He who controls maple syrup production controls the economy. English chemist Robert Boyle saw the maple syrup of Massachusetts as the new world’s greatest contribution to the global economy. Boyle is venerated in these parts. It was Boyle’s Law, after all, that exonerated the New England Patriots of all charges in Deflategate, and it also governs the changing viscosity of maple syrup as it transforms from liquid to a gel-like fluid during boiling. It is impossible to separate New England, and especially Vermont, from the syrup industry, and Big Syrup owns Bernie Sanders tap-spout-and-bucket, as the expression goes in thee parts. Make no mistake. The Cartel has funneled its sweet support directly into Senator Sanders’s tap hole.
How else can one explain Mr. Sanders’s refusal to speak out against the pipeline? Not the various oil pipelines, which are fairly innocuous, but the giant syrup pipe proposed to run from Baffin Island to Tierra del Fuego. It will provide syrup to all of the U.S. plus Latin America, where people have been eating empanadas sans syrup for generations. No more! The obvious danger is that animals of many species, as well as Mayan toddlers, will lick the seeping syrup from the porous joints of the pipeline, thus introducing dental caries and early-onset diabetes to all of these individuals.
If there is a bright side — at least for New Englanders — to Big Syrup, it is that the cartel has tricked New Yorkers into paying high prices for inferior Light Vermont Fancy, a wan, wimpy, liquid-like syrup that no one in New England would drink or eat, and has reserved the more substantial Dark Amber and Grade B syrups for those of us in the cognoscenti. We pay a fraction of the price that New Yorkers are swindled out of. This is what Ted Cruz was referring to when he spoke of “New York values.”
Bernie Sanders, socialist? I don’t think so. He is the capitalist tool of industrial sugaring.
Dick Teresi lives in western Massachusetts, and is the national chairman of ISH, Independent Sugarers for Hillary.