Two
newspaper headlines, juxtaposed against one another tell
a story about America, its empire, and its decline better than
a thousand essays.
They
were on the business page of the Sunday edition of a local
newspaper in upstate New York. It doesn�t matter much which paper it was, since most of
the dailies have been relegated to boosting local businesses
and spouting the jingoistic lines of national politicians.
In this, they have been doing a good job.
The
headlines were: �Sinking milk prices pulling even more
small farms under� and �Unions� power slips as industry
shifts.� The farm story was about the last dairy farm
to go on the auction block in Plainfield,
Vt., a small town that once had dozens
of dairy farms. The other was the story (once again) about
labor unions being engaged in �an epic struggle,� trying
to maintain their members� wages and benefits.
What
is most often missed in these kinds of stories is that
these are working people. These are the people who do
the work of a society and an economy and they are being
squeezed out.
In
the most nonchalant way, such stories (the farm story
was by the Associated Press) focus on the hardships
of small farmers, faced with increasing tax burdens, and
ever-rising feed and fuel prices, while the price for
their goods stagnates or drops. The underlying theme of
these popularly written stories is that the reader is
not to worry, since there are gigantic milk factories
milking thousands of cows that will pick up the slack
and the supermarket dairy cases will never fail to be
full of whatever you want to buy.
The
average reader probably is soothed by the idea
that industrial production of food is always going to
be there, but the fly in that ointment is that such hyper-production
with such finely tuned cattle and other livestock probably
cannot be maintained forever. No thought is given to the
negative effects on the animals and the minimum wage workers
who see that they are fed, watered, milked, and given
their medications in a timely way, so that they can keep
up the appearance of vibrant health in such an unnatural
setting.
Much
is said these days about biodiversity and its importance
in the life of the planet. That�s why there is so much
effort to protect ecosystems and the wildlife that lives
in those regional or micro systems. We need to preserve
and protect what is left, if the planet is to survive.
A nation�s agriculture can be seen as a giant bio-system,
as well and should be seen as an integral part of producing
a healthy populace. In that, the U.S.
is not doing so well. Diseases that we have not seen before
are cropping up in people of all ages and all stations.
These diseases include cancers, autoimmune maladies, obesity,
hypertension, autism and Asbergers syndrome, and endless
little-known health problems that were unfamiliar to most
of us in years past.
All
of these may have existed in generations past, but they
have become epidemic in our time and it is not just because
we have become better at detecting and identifying them.
They simply seem to be increasing in number and severity.
Our food is not the only factor, especially when one considers
how little we know about the effects of genetically modified
foods on the human body, but it is an important one.
If
biodiversity is important in the natural ecosystems of
our world, it should be easy to see that biodiversity
of agriculture is of vital importance, and that�s why
small farm agriculture should be valued as a gem and necessary
for the survival of the nation. It is hard to imagine
that those who control the political system and Corporate
America have even given a thought to saving agricultural
diversity, and there does not seem to be any effort to
protect small farm agriculture, which is said by the powers
that be to be inefficient. �Get big or get out� has been
the motto of powerful farm organizations and Corporate
America for generations, for both farming and for the
economy at large. And the politicians, who benefit from
big business�s big money, parrot that philosophy.
Because
the big profits are to be made in the industrial form
of agriculture, there has been little, if any, effort
to keep small farm agriculture as a hedge against collapse.
The monoculture of modern America,
where thousands of acres are planted to the same crops
year after year, is where the profits are, and those profits
go to the giant agribusinesses which control more and
more of our food system. Should a pest or disease appear
that attacks or wipes out those monoculture crops, there
will be nothing left to provide the food that Americans
are accustomed to eating. Small farm agriculture has a
tendency to prevent that kind of complete loss, no matter
what the crop-destroying event, just because of the diversity
of the small farms.
It
is unlikely that small farm numbers will again reach the
12 million or 15 million mark, just because it is too
difficult to control that many small farmers and even
more difficult to create and control a market that depends
on that many small farmers. So, industrial agriculture
will persist, as long as the handful of giant corporations
that control the food system is able to maintain its control.
The AP and the rest of the country�s news organizations
will continue to ignore the importance of small farms,
continuing to view them as an anachronism and an oddity
and do a little light hand wringing when they seem to
be in the process of extirpation in places like Vermont, Wisconsin, and New York.
As
for the other headline, �Unions� power slips as industry
shifts,� from McClatchy Newspapers, even though
that chain has been more accurate than most news outlets
in analyzing the plight of working men and women, they
persist in viewing workers simply as ciphers in the nation�s
unions. This is a view of the state of the economy that
is put forth by Right Wing think tanks (which is most
of them), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association
of Manufacturers, the Business Roundtable, the American
Farm Bureau Federations, and other powerful groups that
do the bidding of the powerful and the wealthy. The way
they have unfailingly portrayed the workers� place in
the economy is as members of the unions, which are always,
in turn, portrayed as �the too-powerful unions,� which
must be stopped before they destroy corporate power.
They
don�t put it in those terms exactly, but that is the clear
meaning and they have been very successful in convincing
working people who are not in unions that unions, themselves,
are the enemy. Seldom, if ever, is there an analysis of
the American workplace that shows the actions of Corporate
America over the past half-century having reduced the
living standard of the working class (and now, too, the
middle class), by falsely claiming that the unions must
be eliminated. The propaganda had to be promoted in that
manner, otherwise the attack by Corporate America would
be shown to be a naked attack on workers, in general,
and that would not have gone over too well. It might have
prompted working people to have a direct and very unpleasant
response.
But,
if workers could be convinced that unions and the organized
labor movement were the enemy, they would support Republicans,
some Democrats, and others on the right and would support
elimination of programs that might benefit their own families.
That very thing has happened. The clear evidence that
this tactic works is the recall election in Wisconsin,
where the governor, Scott Walker, has worked to eliminate
union contracts, benefits, and to reduce wages. He is
even attempting to eliminate collective bargaining, virtually
the only power workers have in a dog-eat-dog economy.
Polls in Wisconsin indicate that
the race to recall Walker is nearly even, with the incumbent showing
a slight edge. This means that a lot of working men and
women are convinced that unions are the problem and that
they will vote with Walker and the Koch brothers (billionaires
who fund Right Wing causes with their pocket change).
What
is being discussed in both cases is that these people,
farmers and workers, are the ones who produce for the
nation. They�re the people who do the work and, until
the past three decades, they made enough money to keep
the economy running. The �get big or get out� policy has
finished off small farmers across the country. The best
example is the structural discrimination against black
farmers that took decades for the federal government to
even acknowledge the injustice. Dispersal of the million-dollar-plus
settlement is ongoing, after all these years. Now, it
is the turn of all small farmers to face the problem
of intentional termination.
For
workers, it has been a struggle to find a well-paying
job, as Corporate America has shipped the work and machinery
to other countries, where the labor costs are low (a fraction
of U.S. pay) and environmental
laws are nonexistent or barely enforced. In a �globalized�
economy, there is no place for them. Neither farmers nor
workers can compete with others who are forced to work
for 20-50 cents an hour.
In
a country where government and corporations have made
it a practice to maximize profits, even as it costs the
American people their livelihoods, there is the relentless
seeking of profits and resources from a growing worldwide
empire.
The
question remains: What do we in America
do with those of us who are surplus people?
BlackCommentator.com
Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former
union organizer. His union work started when he became
a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early
1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in
New York State. In
addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers
as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure
from factory food producers and land developers. Click
here
to contact Mr. Funiciello.
