What Do Rural Voters Here Think of Sanders' and Warren's Positions? [View all]

[ancianita]

This is about more than Iowa, where Dems are campaigning.

It's not about public lands, but farm lands. But their demonstration of care bodes well for those with public land issues, too.

Not being a rural voter myself, I think these ideas seem to show our candidates listening and giving constructive thought to the needs of rural voters.

Which is a damn sight better than anything they've gotten from Trump.

What say you?

For years, an ever-shrinking number of companies has hoovered up more and more control over our food. Amazon and Walmart are slowly taking over the regional grocery industry; Heinz and Kraft are now one company. At the base of the food chain, farmers may face the most tightly consolidated set of oligopolies of all: a handful of seed and pesticide companies (like Bayer, which took over Monsanto) that sell them what they need to grow crops, and another few that buy their crops and livestock. Caught between a few input providers and a few buyers, the region’s farmers have been struggling for years.

Sanders’ rural package also includes a remedy that hearkens back to the New Deal era: a proposal to help farmers of big commodity crops like corn and soybeans coordinate planting decisions to avoid chronic overproduction. This policy is known as supply management. He would reestablish a national grain reserve, a lapsed New Deal institution that collected excess crops in bountiful years to keep prices from plunging, and release them in bad years to avoid shortages (a notion that, as Sanders points out, makes lots of sense in an era of climate chaos).

Harvard Law professor Warren penned an influential article calling for the establishment of a federal commission designed to “eliminate the hidden tricks and traps” that banks and other lenders use to ensnare consumers ... The idea caught on among the Congressional creators of the the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, and in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau debuted—and has been under assault by Wall Street-aligned Congressional Republicans and later the Trump administration ever since.

The new CAP paper calls for an Independent Farmer Protection Bureau, “modeled after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.” The IFPB would “investigate and stop abuses of market power; protect farmers’ contract rights …; combat anti-competitive practices in seed and other input markets”—and even have the power to “review and block mergers in markets that affect farmers.” And it would give debt-laden poultry and hog farmers, many of whom currently toil under contracts favorable to enormous meat companies who buy their animals, a federal watchdog to protect them from abuses.

“It looks like the Dems are really searching for a platform for rural America,” says Joe Maxwell, a Missouri hog farmer and executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, a farmer-led group that organizes against corporate control of agriculture. Maxwell is a savvy former politician in his own right—he’s a former state representative, senator, and lieutenant governor in his home state.

“We and others have been working hard to get these conversations into the public discourse for years,” Maxwell says. “And now they’re clearly taking on a life of their own.”

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2019/05/how-can-dems-win-back-rural-america-bernie-sanders-and-elizabeth-warren-agree-on-the-answer/

(photo from the USDA)