That’s gonna leave a mark!

Former Florida Congressman Francis Rooney (at right) slapped Big Sugar with a rhetorical 2×4 last week, calling out the industry — and the Trump Administration — for pushing policies that reward their political cronies while trashing the environment.

Initially, on his Facebook page, Rooney wondered why President Trump was urging Coca-Cola to use cane sugar instead of corn syrup in soda; it was, he wrote, “a gift to the Florida sugar industry — an oligarchy of billionaires who receive twice the world price because the US taxpayer subsidizes them.”

Then, Rooney told Gulf Coast NBC that “There is no reason for American taxpayers to subsidize the billionaires in Palm Beach, who are destructive to the environment just because they have political clout.”

Bingo.

Rooney is a Republican; and more and more people on both sides of the aisle now understand that Big Sugar is a pox on our health, our economy and our political landscape.

• Sugar contributes to obesity, diabetes and other maladies.
• Sugar policy forces consumers to pay higher prices than consumers in other parts of the world, enriching those Palm Beach billionaires.
• Florida taxpayers coughed up $1.2 billion to build the stormwater treatment areas (STAs) south of Lake Okeechobee, which could be used to help mitigate discharges to the St. Lucie River and Caloosahatchee rivers. Instead they’re used almost exclusively to clean water coming off the sugarcane fields. In other words, you paid for it — they get to use it.
• And all this contributes to Big Sugar’s “political clout,” which the industry cements by giving millions to politicians, who then labor to protect sugar’s sweet deal.

But former Congressman Rooney gets it. Now if we can only get a few more still in Congress to do something about it.