George Bush’s Legacy: The Roquefort Tax
Roquefort Cheese under Threat from US Import Duties
George Bush, cheese-hater. That’s how the outgoing 43rd President will be remembered by generations to come. According to the Times, One of George Bush’s final acts in office was to slap duties on all sorts of EU imports from chocolate to chewing gum but none was as punitive as the 300% increase in duties on Roquefort cheese. Is it because the Americans do it better? Nope. It’s because France has banned US hormone fed beef for the last twelve years and refuses to budge.
Britain had a similar problem when British herds were infected by BSE and our Gallic neighbours turned their noses up for a very long time. However, once the problems was sorted out, France imported our wares once more. A fair system. But Bush is playing such hardball that Philippe Folliot, a centrist MP for the area around the village of Roquefort, called for a super-tax against Coca-Cola.
I would love to see that. Men with tommy guns and spats smuggling Coca-Cola across the mountains from Spain. People drinking coke out of “Dandelion & Burdock” bottles. Street wars and big time gangsters funded by the Cola Prohibition. Smuggling of sorts has already occurred in some stores in the UK. You can find all manner of exotic labels on your can of coke as shop-owners try to source the cheapest coke from around the world.
The sheep farmers of France are not to be messed with, either. In 1999, Jose Bove drove a bulldozer into a MacDonalds restaurant in a protest against junk food. He is a sheep farmer and sympathises with the plight of the Roquefort villagers, whose ewes produce the milk for the legendary Roquefort cheese. Their local caves are use for the ripening process and may be a good place to stash cheap Coca-Cola before France takes the huff.
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Can a man’s legacy be drawn from an eight year period in time? What kind of a footprint has GWB left on the American people, or the world for that matter? Has he served his country well by protecting us from terrorism, or has a alienated America from the rest of the world. Has he acted as a Christian in his role as President of the United States, or has he misused the Bible as a means of procuring votes and evoking war? Was the rebuilding of Iraq set in motion years before the Twin Towers tragedy, or was this a rapid decision based on an emergent circumstance? I have tried to keep this debate as original as possible. That includes errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling. I have also tried to collect them in a somewhat chronological method in order to keep a level playing field. I have simply collected publicly posted comments of others from open sources.