Who? Never heard of him.
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Make no fucking mistake, this is absolutely a threat, and we should take it as such:
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who is considering an independent bid for president, said a far-left Democrat could alienate much of the country and help to re-elect President Trump. He pushed back against the common Democratic complaint that he would act as a spoiler if he entered the race.
“I really believe the spoiler in all of this is going to be a far-left Democratic candidate, if that’s who gets the nomination, who is walking the shoes of a socialist,” Schultz said in an interview on Friday. He said “lifelong Republicans who do not want to pull the lever for Donald Trump are not gonna pull the lever for someone” who promotes socialist policies.
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Impeachment would be nice but it is getting to what the hell is the point of the long drawn out mess if we can boot him out in less time.
I just saw Bernie in iowa city. Mind you Iowa city is the most liberal part of Iowa, but dang the crowd was revved up. The room was full with hundreds of people who couldn’t get in. He hit all his major talking points. I especially liked his points about corporate farming making family farming almost impossible. I think that’s a talking point that is more serious than people realize and could hit home with rural America. It’s a big reason most small towns in Iowa are like ghost towns these days. downtown business shuttered, schools and hospitals being closed and consolidated. And I think that the fact that family farms can’t keep afloat is a huge part of why that’s happening. All that money, just like in other sectors like health and education, is trickling UP real fast.
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Hate to break your bubble, but the myth behind the family farm really is just that: a myth.
Most can’t survive not because of corporate farming, but because family farming is not sustainable.
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See this thread:
https://twitter.com/sarahtaber_bww/status/1104488219259912197?s=21
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Weird. I grew up surrounded by families who ran farms. Most of who are forced to lease super expensive equipment, can’t plant their own seed and are forced to accept prices from a single corporate buyer. Seems like some corporate pressures to me. Sure farming is full of risks and we have had systems in the past to deal with that without having corporate monopolies sucking the life out of farmers. Here’s an article in the guardian about this exact subject matter: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa
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See the thread linked in the comment directly above yours. Sarah Taber works directly with farms both family run and corporate. The family farm has never actually been an agricultural success. It has been a successful mechanism for land grabs.
Co-ops, community farming (such as with Hutterites and some of the Native bands) all work better than family farming, especially on the sustainability front. The corporation has the efficiency advantage that family farms do not.
I grew up around family farms, too, and the successful ones were tied into a cooperative. People who tried to go it alone failed. That’s the reality of Ag, not the myth that keeps being sold.
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You seem to be taking issue with my usage of the word “family farm” and then using the term yourself. I never said they could only be called a family farm if they do it all alone without a coop. Are you disagreeing with Bernie and that guardian article that these corporations (I mean companies like Smithfield and Monsanto, not farm coops) are using monopolistic practices to squeeze money out of farms to the detriment of the individual farmer? I’m not sure where the “myth” is. Or are you just saying these farmers wouldn’t have this problem if they’d just join a coop?
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Rather than talk about that which I don’t know, I’ve reached out to a local farmer and Facebook friend from my hometown in Iowa who has a family farm and is from what I can tell left leaning politically. I’m actually curious how they are getting by financially (or not), whether they participate in a coop, or are being squeezed by these large corporations… I’ll get back to you.
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The problem with the family farm is not that it’s a family farm. It’s that the people who are running it don’t recognise that it’s a business, don’t know how to run s business or are too overwhelmed to run the business properly.
They can be successful, but not for the majority of people. Running a food production business isn’t the same as having a backyard garden. There are regulatory requirements that must be met, often from different levels of government. Most family farms are sticking to “how we’ve always done it”, because that’s what they know, and a lot of times are too overwhelmed to figure innovation out. Successful businesses migrate constantly to “best practices”. Go back to Sarah Taber’s thread an click through on the quoted tweet about Hutterite farmers. She talks about how they and BIPOC farmers are squeezed out and considered threats as well, because they are extremely successful, by not following the European farming practices that were never suited for this continent (yes, the Hutterites originated in Europe, but they’re communalists, and approach things differently). And no “make regulations less onerous” is not a solution, either, because these are things like labour and food-safety regulations, two areas where short cuts can literally kill people and sometimes (if you get really unlucky) wipe out a large part of the food supply, and then kill a whole lot of people.
Have you ever noticed that the family farm model held up as one to save is extremely white? That’s because the whole thing is shot through with racism and even white supremacism. Black people especially have been (and still are being!) redlined out of farming by the exact same people and families crying about the mean corporations. They are being targeted, harrassed and vandalised.
Now. I am not saying corporations aren’t a problem, but bailing out bad business people so they can keep badly running the business isn’t the solution, either. There are alternate ways of doing things. It’s not a binary.
Think about it this way. If the bulk of people aren’t suited to be entrepreneurs, and if we aren’t rescuing all those failed ventures (especially those ventures by POC), then what makes farmers so special?
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Wal Mart is more efficient and cheaper than most of those old downtown businesses they displaced but at what cost? I wouldn’t say to loosen regulations at all. In fact the opposite. These corporate farms seem to the ones abusing chemicals, monopolizing feed and seed and fertilizer, overcrowding animals and causing air and water pollution through animal waste etc… I feel like we’re talking past each other here. The cooperatives you talk about seem great. I don’t know if these local farmers in Iowa are doing that or not.
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The problem is (and to swing this back around to being somewhat on topic) when politicians go to the middle of the country and talk about saving family farms, everybody knows it’s not about those alternate groups and methods. As I said, those “pretty great” cooperatives and groups are being actively harrassed by the same people crying about the family farm being in crisis. “Saving the family farm” includes things like placing limits on how much land a Hutterite community is allowed to own, while placing no such limit on “traditional” farms. A lot of those traditional farms aren’t just being squeezed by the corporation (which I never said wasn’t part of the problem, but it’s not the whole thing) they are finding they can’t meet regulatory requirements, whether it’s because they don’t have enough staff, or they don’t understand them, or they think that it’s unnecessary.
To go back to your example of Wal-Mart… where’s the hue and cry for federal dollars to bail out Rashid’s hardware store or Robert and Luisa’s deli? What makes farmers so sacred?
There are some well-run family farms out there, but – spoiler alert – they aren’t the ones that need saving. Because they’re well-run, they are actually doing pretty good.
But whenever you hear that rhetoric, especially from a politician, understand the white supremacy it’s rooted in, even if they don’t. It was a myth sold to people in Europe to convince them to move out to America, and then to people on the East Coast to convince them to move out West, and take the land from the people who were already using it, and maintained as a largely white monolith through redlining (banks literally not lending to black farmers while throwing money at whites, businesses refusing to sell to black people even today) and outright harrassment, and vandalism. Dr. Taber used to believe it. I used to believe it. It’s hard to let go of the propaganda we’ve been steeped in our entire lives. Dogwhistles aren’t easy to spot (unless you’re the ones getting the dogs called on you) for a reason.
But make no mistake, it is a dogwhistle. It doesn’t matter if you don’t see yourself as a white supremacist if you’re trying to bail out a system that is white supremacist at its core. You can’t fight systemic racism by saving the racist system.
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On the subject of co-ops…
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