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It's not often that a United States Senator becomes so enraged with a trade association that he'll march to the Senate floor and rail on the group for more than half an hour.

It's even less common that a senior statesman will completely unearth the dark underbelly of the DC spin industry during such a heated tirade.

But that's exactly what happened in May 2008 when Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) berated the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) for spending buckets of money to manufacture a national food versus fuel debate.

In his speech Grassley exposed that an Inside-the-Beltway public relations firm was receiving $50,000 a month from GMA to blame ethanol and farmers for higher grocery bills.

He even referenced GMA's internal planning documents that detailed a strategy of building "a global center-left coalition" to push likable environmental and hunger groups to the forefront of the debate and hiring "trusted third-party experts" to parrot anti-ethanol messages.

The firm that organized the assault on farmers promised in a plan that it would be "available to assist with the development and editing of third-party research and will work to leverage its release with earned media…[and] generate interest on the Hill and in the Administration."

What Grassley did not know was that the $50,000-a-month retainer was just the tip of the iceberg.

According to lobbying records GMA also spent $4.46 million in 2008 trolling its messages on Capitol Hill. That's a 185 percent increase in lobbying dollars from the previous year, and it does not even reflect the association's PAC, which doled out nearly $200,000 in campaign dollars last year.

But GMA's campaign had a major flaw.

While its lobbying and PR bills were piling up, ethanol and commodity prices were falling fast. And the multinational food manufacturers that makeup GMA'smembership had absolutely no intent of dropping food prices to reflect lower ingredient or transportation expenses.

This turn of events was not lost on Sen. Grassley, who demanded that GMA's members either lower food prices or apologize for the misinformation campaign.

A major grocery store chain, Safeway, recently echoed Grassley's demand for lower-priced products from big food companies. The chain's CEO Steve Burd said on a conference call with investors that food makers were being "disingenuous" with consumers by not dropping prices to reflect declining input costs.

Of course Grassley and Burd are unlikely to receive either an apology or relief for everyday Americans at the checkout line.

In 2007-before commodity prices peaked—the GMA released a study that flippantly stated, "The long period of low food price inflation rates prior to 2007 has passed." In other words, what goes up doesn't come down.

And America's family farmers-who are receiving 50 percent less for major food commodities than a year agobut are still being used as scapegoats to justify planned price hikes-will likely never know for sure where GMA got all of that cash to underwrite its smear campaign.

As a 501(c)6 organization, GMA can hide the identity of its funders. Sothe people who have long suspected a close tie between GMA and the ethanol haters at Big Oil are unlikely to find a smoking gun.

Then again, a simple oversight by GMA's web technician might provide some helpful ammunition. GMA's webpage outlining the association's energy policy is actually hosted byBiPAC, a big-business political action committee whose board includes executives from Exxon Mobil, Independent Petroleum Association of America, Diamond Oil and other well-heeled energy interests.