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Tag: corporate agriculture
Why Rural Doesn’t Have To Equal Red

Why Rural Doesn’t Have To Equal Red

To say that President Joe Biden lost the rural vote is to sugarcoat the dire situation Democrats face out beyond the suburbs. Why? Well, scoff too many lazy politicos and pundits, rural America is indelibly red, filled with white rubes and racists, so Dems should write them off and concentrate resources where the big numbers are.

Aha! Might it be a problem for a political party to dismiss an entire diverse constituency of millions as a block of static numbers in some consulting firm's big-data computers — rather than, say, as human beings to be courted and won over? The national Democratic Party is a myopic, data-driven operation, as was inadvertently admitted two days after the presidential election by Rep. Cheri Bustos, head of the party's congressional campaign arm. According to The New York Times, "'Something went wrong,' Ms. Bustos said, blaming incorrect modeling of the electorate in polling."

Hello ... how about an incorrect understanding of, concern for, and outreach to rural families and communities? They are being crushed by Big Agriculture monopolies, joblessness, artificially low crop prices, farm foreclosures, Wall Street land speculators, corporate exploitation, opioids, public service cutbacks, climate change (floods, droughts, fires, storms), lack of broadband service, out-migration of youth, COVID-19, suicides, and a host of other Biblical-level plagues. Sure, Republican officials are uncaring and push policies that cause and sustain the pain of all the above. But where the hell are Democrats?

Pointing at GOP uglies is not a helping hand, and — let's be blunt — much of the rural electorate now writes off Democrats as aloof Washington-based elites who look down on them and simply don't give a damn about "out there." Even the party's good, responsive candidates and organizers in rural areas are finding it a hard row to hoe to convince farmers, workers, local business people, and other natural allies in the hinterlands that Dems are on their side. After all ... the party of the New Deal has not really been there for them in years.

In 2009, for example, it looked for one brief moment like then-President Barack Obama might stand up and finally bust the beef and pork trusts that openly rip off family farmers and ranchers. Thousands of abused producers testified at field hearings; a real ag reformer was appointed to go after the corporate profiteers; excitement spread across farm country ... and then nothing . Meat monopolists such as Tyson, Smithfield, and JBS shrieked at the White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress, so all of that grassroots testimony was shelved; the reformer resigned in disgust and protest; and the monopolists are now bigger than ever.

Note that rural America is not just about farmers, and it certainly is not monochromatic, for at least 1 in 5 rural voters are people of color — including African American, Latin American, Native American, Asian American, and others. According to Matt Hildreth of RuralOrganizing.org, a third of all new immigrants find work in enclaves far outside our major cities, as we learned last spring when untold numbers of immigrant workers at those same Big Three meat monopolists died after working in COVID-19-infected slaughterhouses. While then-President Donald Trump was the one who sanctioned this, the Democratic establishment did little more than file an objection and avert its eyes.

If Dems don't stand firm for rural people, why would rural people stand for them? As we saw last November, they won't. In fact, the Biden campaign hardly showed up last year. While the party has a rural program on paper, it has little on the ground — it's estimated that People's Action, just one of the great independent progressive groups that work with rural voters, ran a bigger and much more effective rural outreach effort than Biden did. And when the Dems do deign to go to the countryside, they basically assail the GOP but shy from even speaking the name of the real elephant stomping on the rural economy and culture: unbridled corporate power.

If Democrats ever hope to win rural/small-town America (or even to "lose better" — i.e., by smaller margins), that journey begins by literally moving a permanent party presence to the countryside, listening to the diversity of people there, standing with them, and delivering on their needs. We don't have to create a special vehicle to reach them, for a powerful office already exists with enormous authority and resources to help them restore vitality and prosperity: the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Corporate Profiteers Are Killing America’s Family Farms

Corporate Profiteers Are Killing America’s Family Farms

A massive depression has been building for years across our vast rural expanse, but don’t feel alone if you didn’t know, for most of our media and political establishments have failed to notice, much less inform the general public. In America’s power centers, farming is almost entirely ignored as something arcane and “out there” — and out of mind. In 1960, John F. Kennedy lightly summed up this attitude: “I don’t want to hear about agriculture from anyone but you,” the urbane president reputedly told Orville Freeman when appointing him Secretary of Agriculture. “Come to think of it, I don’t want to hear about it from you, either.”

But hear about it we must, and do something we must. Today’s crisis promises not only to devastate our country’s rural economy and culture but also to enter our kitchens and bite us on the butt. Today’s catastrophe is far more desperate than outsiders know — and is caused by another perfect storm of corporate monopolization, financial manipulation, and rigged ag policies. How severe is the storm? Start with one eye-popping indicator: The 2018 median farm income for U.S. farm households was minus $1,553! (“Net farm income” is the money left over after a farm family subtracts the cost of producing their crops from the amount they get paid for them.) You can’t pay for groceries, rent, medical bills, kids’ clothing, a trip to Disneyland, etc. on negative income. And $1,553 in debt is the “median,” meaning that half of America’s farm families went even deeper into the hole.

Such hardship is not a one-time blip. For six straight years, more than half of America’s ag producers have lost money on their crops and herds, and this year promises more of the same. Thus, to keep the farm afloat and make ends meet, farmers commonly work a part-time side job and have a spouse who commutes to a full-time city job. With typical dark humor, they refer to these off-farm jobs as the cost of supporting their “farming habit.” Indeed, today’s ag economy is so bleak that about 70 percent of the total income of U.S. farm families comes from their “secondary jobs.”

Are these farmers inept, outmoded, lazy? Au contraire, as we say in Texas: They’re industrious, efficient, productive, innovative … and broke. Indeed, the most worrisome thing for our society is that the operations being eliminated are the mid-sized family farms — the essential backbone of both an economically healthy food system and vibrant rural communities.

But if they’re good farmers, why are they going broke? Because corporate middlemen, commodity speculators, and government policy have intentionally perverted the structure of the U.S. ag economy to leave producers with practically no say over the price of their cotton, wheat, milk, and chickens. Pious right-wing ideology aside, farmers don’t become financial “winners” just by working hard and smart, outfoxing the pests, lucking out on the weather and producing an abundant, top-quality harvest. When they take their crops to market, even blue-ribbon producers face a take-it-or-leave-it price set by profiteering players they never see.

For the past several years, prices have crashed. Dairy farmers, for example, are in the fourth consecutive year of incomes below their production costs: In 2018, they got $1.35 for a gallon of milk that cost them $1.90 to produce. This financial bomb has been exploding throughout dairy country. From 2007 to today, the number of American dairy farms dwindled from 70,000 to only 40,000, and most of them are imperiled. For example, last year in Wisconsin, where milk and cheese have long been economic and cultural mainstays, dairy farms shut down at the rate of nearly two a day.

And it’s not just our nation’s dairy farmers that are hurting. Small farmers and ranchers across the country are facing demise of their livelihoods. Fortunately, there are groups across the country fighting for family farms. The National Farmers Union — serving family farmers and ranchers — recently released its detailed recommendations for much-needed farm policy reforms. Farm Aid has a hotline for farmers in crisis: 800-FARM-AID. And People’s Action has started a rural strategy to help family farmers.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

IMAGE: Photo of a New England farm by Joel Dinda via Flickr.