rural farm

prolly belated

merri ok

rural hosp close b/c gop state govt rejected obamacare aca

SEE TARIFF SOYBEAN ARGENTINA 40B$

DOGE CUT BLM

SEE 2 AM RED BLUE STATES

SEE RED STATES 2

SEE PESTICIDES CANCER

SEE THOM

see rust belt midwest

see family farm ( protect the farm Lucas BS)

see polariz

see east palestine bomb train (war on white ppl)

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aha trump cato libtard GOP say dereg will revive rural blue collar economy but // EJ, poor white ppl hurt; poor white and POC endangered in covid, corps given immunity, and public health officials not allowed to report rates

see working class heroes

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an 10 26

New report reveals Trump is too broke to pay farm bribes

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AN 10 26 TC

Dr. Mehmet Oz lashed out at a reporter after she challenged President Donald Trump's effort to shore up rural health care with a new $50 billion fund, despite the much larger Medicaid cuts included in the same law

The heated exchange came during an interview with Molly Martinez of Gray Media's Washington News Bureau. Martinez claimed the White House was providing a solution to a financial problem its own legislation caused.

Martinez pointed to projections showing that Trump's signature domestic policy law would reduce federal Medicaid spending in rural areas by $137 billion over ten years, while the administration has also advanced a $50 billion initiative to improve medical services in rural regions.

Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, erupted at the numbers, raising his voice.

In a video she posted on X, Oz told Martinez, "You're repeating talking points that are not only wrong, but they're deliberately duplicitous.”

Martinez then asked him to explain what he believed was wrong.

Oz dismissed the $137 billion figure as an inaccurate depiction of what goes directly to rural institutions, arguing that Medicaid funding generally passes through the states to large hospital systems in cities and doesn't reach smaller, rural providers.

He argued that the administration's new rural health program delivered an unprecedented increase in resources for those communities.

However, Martinez didn’t back down and pressed the comparison again, accusing the administration of returning only a small fraction of what its law would take away.

"That is incorrect and dishonest and a deliberately duplicitous question," Oz responded.

Independent research backs the funding comparison based on the underlying figures. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the law which Trump signed on July 4, 2025, will result in a reduction of federal Medicaid spending across the country by $911 billion over a ten-year period, including the $137 billion for rural areas.

The Rural Health Transformation Program, which has a $50 billion budget, will provide states with funding over a five-year period from 2026 to 2030. However, according to KFF, this total represents about 37 percent of the estimated rural Medicaid reductions, even though the programs have different aims and time frames.

The grants also can't replace the lost Medicaid revenue, since federal rules limit direct payments to providers to 15 percent of a state's award and prevent using those funds to supplement existing Medicaid payments.

To support her figures, Martinez referred to the Congressional Budget Office and the Center for American Progress. She also mentioned the impact on rural patients who must travel long distances to reach hospitals.

After Martinez told Oz that she has spoken to people who find healthcare unaffordable and asked what he has to say to them, the former TV show host responded: "We're pouring money into places where the money should be spent."

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oct surp bribery 10b?$

an 10 26

GOP insiders stunned as 'bamboozled' rural Americans blame the rich

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MAD ABOUT DIESEL

AN 10 26

Furious farmers sue after Trump kills popular economic lifeline

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AN 3 26 FARM

'Lost all hope': Trump policies are crushing food industry in Republican heartland

Trump-loving farmers threaten 'to quit' as president’s war spikes fertilizer prices

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b3 medicare cuts will hurt/close rural hosp and make healthcare more dificult and expensive FOR EVERYONE

Pesticide use and cancer risk rise together across America’s heartland - Investigate Midwest

A direct correlation can be difficult to determine, as cancer development times can range from months to decades. Overlaying cancer rates onto a map, however, highlights the nation’s top crop and vegetable growing regions, where pesticide use is highest.

The Midwestern states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri — leading corn-growing states — had the highest rates, while rates were also high in California and Florida, high fruit-growing states.

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AN 12 25

After President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration aggressively downsized a wide range of federal government agencies with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its then-leader, Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk. Democrats warned that the cuts — which targeted everyone from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the National Weather Service (NWS) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRA) — would have painful results in the red states that voted for Trump in big numbers in 2024, but Trump claimed that he was only targeting "waste, fraud and abuse."

In an article published by **Politico on December 15, Montana-based journalist Cassidy Randall details some of the negative effects that Trump Administration/DOGE cuts are having in her state — which Trump carried by roughly 20 percent in 2024.

According to Randall, "DOGE cuts to public lands agencies" are "hitting rural, conservative communities — one of this administration's strongest voting bases — the hardest." And the result, according to Politico, is a "revolt" that threatens to "wake a sleeping political giant" in a deep-red state.

"Starting in February," Randall reports, "an estimated 5200 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 640 million acres of federal public lands in the U.S. That number doesn't include the many who took the (Trump) Administration's buyout or early retirement offers also meant to cut staff. Further, Trump's 2026 budget proposes more budget cuts and a reduction of nearly 18,500 more public lands employees."

Terry Zink, a 57-year-old hunter who lives in Montana, voted for Trump in 2024 but is now criticizing the effects that Trump Administration/DOGE cuts are having on rural public lands.

Zink told Politico, "You won't meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn't vote for this…. We have to listen to our wildlife biologists. We have to be strong advocates for those people."

Zink said of rural areas, "You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, and water restoration, and healthy forests."

*Read Cassidy Randall's full article for Politico at this link.

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AN 12 26

ANOTHER BIG BAILOUT? 12 25

Trump plots $12 billion farmer bailout following 'fallout' from 'far-reaching tariffs'

Calls to mental health hotlines rise as farmers buckle under stress

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AN AH 10 25

In the United States' last three presidential elections, Donald Trump had a clear advantage in rural areas. But Trump's steep new tariffs are creating a great deal of hardship for many of the farmers who voted for him, and farmers are hoping that a bailout will enable them to make ends meet.

The New York Times' Michael Grunwald, in an op-ed published on October 21, points to the difficulties farmers are facing as an example of a pattern with Trump — who, according to Grunwald, creates a crisis, then proposes a solution at taxpayers' expense.

"Once again, President Trump says he's preparing an emergency bailout for struggling farmers," Grunwald explains. "And once again, it's because of an emergency he created. China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans to protest Mr. Trump's tariffs on imports. In response, Mr. Trump plans to send billions of dollars of tariff revenue to U.S. soybean farmers who no longer have buyers for their crops. At the same time, Argentina has taken advantage of Mr. Trump's tariffs to sell more of its own soybeans to China — yet Mr. Trump is planning to bail out Argentina, too."

Grunwald continues, "This may seem nonsensical, especially since Mr. Trump already shoveled at least $28 billion to farmers hurt by his first trade war in 2018. But it actually makes perfect sense. It's what happens when Mr. Trump's zero-sum philosophy of trade — which is that there are always winners and losers, and he should get to choose the winners — collides with Washington's sycophantic approach to agriculture, which ensures that farmers always win and taxpayers always lose. In the end, Mr. Trump's allies, including President Javier Milei of Argentina and the politically influential agricultural community, will get paid — and you will pay. I didn't say it was good. I just said it makes sense."

Trump's view of economics, Grunwald notes, is outlined in his 1987 book "The Art of the Deal."

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"The most important thing to know about the former real estate developer and casino operator in the White House is that he doesn't believe in mutually beneficial transactions," the Times journalist observes. "The central theme of his book, 'The Art of the Deal,' is that every deal has a winner and a sucker. On trade, Mr. Trump sees America as a perennial sucker, and he vows to make it win so much that you'll get tired of winning."

Trump's protectionist approach to trade, according to Grunwald, is "lousy policy for America" but "works nicely for Mr. Trump, because it gives him enormous power to reward or punish specific companies or industries."

"We do not live in a zero-sum world," Grunwald argues. "The nice thing about free markets and free trade is that voluntary transactions between individuals or nations really can make both sides better off. Or we can keep paying farmers to farm soybeans, pay them more to convert some of those soybeans into wildly inefficient fuels, pay them even more when they can't sell their soybeans because we're in a trade war with their customers — and then pay extra to bail out one of the countries replacing them in the marketplace. That only makes sense in Mr. Trump's Washington."

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grassly

GOP senator from deep-red state admits farmers are 'very upset' by Trump’s policies

Ailia Zehra 9 25

china buys soy from brazil?

'It’s a five-alarm fire': Trump policies leave farmers in dire straits

an 9 25

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AN 9 25

Rebecca Kasen has seen and heard things in recent years in and around Michigan’s capital city that she never would have expected.

“It’s a very weird time in our lives,” said Kasen, executive director of the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing.

Last November, a group of people were captured on surveillance video early one morning mocking a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the front window of the center, with one of them vandalizing its free pantry. That same fall, Women’s Center staff reported being harassed.

A couple of blocks down East Michigan Avenue, Strange Matter Coffee, which supports progressive causes in the community, has been confronted by “First Amendment auditors” outside its storefront. Some toted guns or cameras, sometimes chanting slogans supporting President Donald Trump, generally unnerving customers and staff, Kasen said.

In many cases, extremist activities and conduct throughout the U.S. over the past few years have been driven by the deepening chasm of political partisanship and disinformation-driven rebellion against responses to the covid-19 pandemic. More recently, backlash against immigration and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has heightened tensions.

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Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 1,371 hate and extremist groups nationwide sowing unrest through a wide range of tactics, sometimes violent. Over the last several years, the group writes, the political right has increasingly shifted toward “an authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions.”

Researchers at American University’s Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, or PERIL, say that in online spaces, “hate is intersectional.” (For example, Pasha Dashtgard, PERIL’s director of research, explains, platforms dedicated to male supremacy are often also decidedly antisemitic.) Seemingly innocuous discussions erupt into vitriol: The release of “A Minecraft Movie” prompted tirades against an alleged trend toward casting Black women and nonbinary people.

The continued escalations drove staffers at PERIL and the Southern Poverty Law Center to approach the problem from a different angle: Treat extremism as a public health problem. Community Advisory, Resource, and Education Centers are now operating in Lansing, Michigan, and Athens, Georgia, offering training, support, referrals, and resources to communities affected by hate, discrimination, and supremacist ideologies and to people susceptible to radicalization, with a focus on young people.

The team defines extremism as the belief that one’s group is in direct and bitter conflict with another of a different identity — ideology, race, gender identity or expression — fomenting an us-versus-them mentality mired in the conviction that resolution can come only through separation, domination, or extermination.

Researchers who study extremism say that, as the federal government terminates grants for violence prevention, state governments and local communities are recognizing they’re on their own. (CARE receives no federal funding.)

Aaron Flanagan, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s deputy director of prevention and partnerships, said his organization and PERIL came together about five years ago to examine a shared research question: What would it take to create a nationally scalable model to prevent youth radicalization, one that’s rooted in communities and provides solutions residents trust?

They looked to a decades-old German counter-extremism model called mobile advisory centers. The objective is to equip “all levels of civil society with the skills and knowledge to recognize extremism” and to engage in conversations about addressing it, Dashtgard said.

“We’re not about, ‘How do you respond to a group of Patriot Front people marching through your town?’” Pete Kurtz-Glovas, who until June served as PERIL’s deputy director of regional partnerships, explained during a training in January. “Rather, ‘How do you respond when your son or a member of your congregation expresses some of these extremist ideas?’”

Michigan has long been considered fertile ground for extremism. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, convicted of the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, were associated with a militia group in the state. Some of the men charged in 2020 in the plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had ties to a militia group calling itself the Wolverine Watchmen.

The state’s capital city and adjacent East Lansing, where Michigan State University is, are relatively progressive but have seen conflict.

Will Verchereau has a vivid recollection from the early days of the pandemic: a pickup truck speeding down the street in their Lansing neighborhood, a Confederate flag flying from it, music blasting, later joining a rolling protest that clogged streets around the Capitol to protest Whitmer’s covid lockdown directives.

Incrementally, the community has responded to these expressions of extremism. After the confrontations at Strange Matter Coffee, Verchereau, a board member of the Salus Center, which advocates for and supports the LGBTQ+ community, said people banded together to talk about “how to be safe in those moments; how to de-escalate when and where possible.”

The CARE initiative reinforces such efforts. The centers offer tool kits catered to specific audiences. Among them are a parent and caregiver guide to online radicalization, a community guide to youth radicalization, and “Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-Based Bigotry.”

Flanagan said the team views this public health model as separate from but complementary to law enforcement interventions. The goal is to have law enforcement as minimally engaged as possible — to detect nascent warning signs and address them before police get involved.

The resources help identify conditions that can make people more susceptible to manipulation by extremists, such as unaddressed behavioral health issues and vulnerabilities, including having experienced trauma or the loss of a loved one.

Lansing resident Erin Buitendorp witnessed protesters, some of them armed, flood the state Capitol building during the pandemic over lockdown and masking orders. She’s a proponent of the public health approach. It’s “providing people with agency and a strategy to move forward,” she said. It’s a way to channel energy “and feel like you can actually create change with community.”

Lansing and Athens were chosen for a number of reasons, including their proximity to universities that could serve as partners — and to rural communities.

In the small town of Howell, 40 miles southeast of Lansing, protesters waived Nazi flags outside a production of the play “The Diary of Anne Frank” at an American Legion post.

In nearby DeWitt, the local school district proposed a mini lesson on pronouns for a first grade class that involved reading the picture book “They She He Me: Free to Be!” Threats against school staff followed and officials canceled the lesson. Since then, the CARE team has helped provide support to teachers there in holding conversations on contentious topics in classrooms and in dealing with skeptical parents.

“It’s really important that rural communities not be left behind,” Flanagan said. “They persistently are in America, and then they’re often simultaneously demonized for some of the most extreme, or extremist, political problems and challenges.”

The CARE team hopes to expand its program nationwide. Similar public health initiatives have been launched elsewhere, including Boston Children’s Hospital’s Trauma and Community Resilience Center and the DEEP program, run by New York City’s Citizens Crime Commission.

And in June a new tool, the Reach Out Resource Hub, went live, offering guidance to help prevent violent extremism.

Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University and a leading expert on extremism, sees a daunting task ahead, with extremism’s having become more mainstream over the past 25 years. “It’s just devastating,” he said. “It’s really startling.”

Simi said that while there was previously talk of shifts in the Overton window, the range of ideas considered politically acceptable to mainstream society, “I would say now it has been completely shattered.” Violent extremists now feel “unshackled, supported by a new administration that has their back.”

“We are in a more dangerous time now than any other in my lifetime,” Simi said.

The Rev. Pippin Whitaker ministers the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Athens in Georgia, which last year received a package of ammunition in the mail with no note included. She embraces framing extremism, and people’s lack of awareness of it, as a public health issue.

“If you have a germ out there,” Whitaker said, “and people aren’t aware that if you wash your hands you can protect yourself, and that it’s an actual problem, you won’t enact basic protective behavior.”

NOW READ:Across America there are stirrings of a giant backlash against Trump

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AN 8 25

'Their hospital might close': Dems look to Iowa State Fair as ground zero for majority rule

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an 8 25

Many rural Coloradans, especially in agricultural communities, feel looked down on by their urban counterparts. One cattle rancher I spoke to put it plainly. “It’s an attitude … we are the idiots … we are the dumb farmers … we don’t really matter.”

The sentiment is also portrayed in popular culture such as the hit TV show “Yellowstone.”

“It’s the one constant in life. You build something worth having, someone’s gonna try to take it,” says patriarch John Dutton. He was facing repeated threats by developers from “the city” to annex his land for a luxury hotel and resort development.

As a policy scholar, I’ve talked to and interviewed many dozens of people in rural areas in Colorado. I’ve also read hundreds of newspaper articles and watched hundreds of hours of legislative testimony that capture the sentiment of rural people being left behind, left out and snubbed by their urban counterparts.

Recently, I studied the divide between rural and urban Coloradans by looking at their responses to four statewide policies. A designated day to forgo eating meat, two political appointees and the ongoing wolf reintroduction.

These policies, while specific to Colorado, are symptoms of something larger. Namely, an ever-urbanizing, globalized world that rural, agricultural citizens feel is leaving them behind.

‘MeatOut’ or misstep?

My expertise doesn’t just come from my research – I’ve lived it.

I grew up in a rural community in Elbert County, Colorado, about an hour- and-a-half southeast of Denver.

In early 2021, Gov. Jared Polis declared via proclamation that March 20 would be a “MeatOut Day.” For health and environmental reasons, Colorado residents were encouraged to forgo meat for a single day.

Supported by the Farm Animal Rights Movement, MeatOuts have been promoted across the U.S. since the 1980s. Typically, gubernatorial proclamations, of which hundreds are passed each year and are completely ceremonial and devoid of any long-term formal policy implications, go largely unnoticed. And in Denver, Colorado’s metropolitan center, this one did too.

Not so in rural Colorado.

My neighbors in Elbert County promptly responded with outrage, flying banners and flags declaring their support for agriculture and a carnivorous diet.

One rancher from Nathrop painted a stack of hay bales to say, “Eat Beef Everyday.”

Communities all over the state, and even in neighboring states, responded with “MeatIns,” where they gathered to eat meat and celebrate agriculture and the rural way of life. They also coupled these events with fundraisers, for various causes, for which hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised across the state. While Polis backed off the MeatOut after 2021, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has, just this year, supported a similar “Eat Less Meat” campaign, prompting similar rural outrage.

Did I mention there are nearly 36,000 cattle in Elbert County? This is relatively typical of a rural Colorado county, particularly on the Plains.

In Colorado, 2.7 million cattle are raised annually, with a value of US$4.5 billion. The industry is consistently the top agricultural commodity and the second-largest contributor to Colorado’s GDP, at about $7.7 billion per year.

In early March 2021, Polis declared March 22 “Colorado Livestock Proud Day,” in response to the backlash.

Other policies

This came on the heels of several policies supported by Polis prior to the MeatOut controversy that critics considered anti-agriculture.

In 2020, he appointed Ellen Kessler, a vegan and animal rights activist, to the State Veterinary Board. Kessler criticized 4-H programs, designed to educate youth on agriculture and conservation, on her social media, insisting they “don’t teach children that animal lives matter.” Kessler resigned in March 2022, just days before she was cited for 13 counts of animal cruelty. More recently, in May 2025, Polis appointed Nicole Rosmarino to head the State Land Board. Rosmarino has ties to groups that oppose traditional agricultural practices, historically a key component of Colorado State Land Board operations.

Then came wolf reintroduction, passed by urban voters by just under 57,000 votes in the 2020 general election and supported by the governor. Those in support advocated for a return to natural biodiversity; wolves were hunted to extinction in the 1940s.

Rural residents voted decidedly against the initiative. Despite much legislative and grassroots action to oppose it, wolves were reintroduced in December 2023 in various areas along the Western Slope, in close proximity to many ranches. Several cattle have since been killed by wolves. Ever since, rural interests have been working to overturn wolf reintroduction on the 2026 ballot.

An American mess

Rural residents in Colorado have told me they feel excluded. This is not new or exclusive to Colorado, but a story as old as America itself.

University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine J. Cramer wrote about this rural exclusion in Wisconsin, calling it “rural resentment.” Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called it “stolen pride.” In their book, Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, and Paul Waldman, a longtime journalist, characterize it as “white rural rage.”

It’s a dynamic that descends from slavery. Isabel Wilkerson, in her book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” demonstrates that while Black Americans have historically been relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of an American caste system, poor white people are strategically positioned just above them but below white Americans of higher socioeconomic status. As Wilkerson explains, this is a durable system sustained by norms, laws and cultural expectations that feel “natural.” But they are entirely constructed and designed by the American upper class to intentionally exploit resentment of working-class white people.

The result is what sociologist Michael M. Bell calls a “spatial patriarchy” that characterizes rural America as dumb, incapable, racist, poor and degraded as “white trash.”

This spatial patriarchy is as old as industrialization and urbanization. One of the first policy iterations was rural school consolidation during the turn of the 20th century, designed to modernize schools and make them more efficient. Urban policymakers were influenced by eugenics and the assumption that rural schools “were populated by cognitively deficient children whose parents had not been smart enough or fortunate enough to leave the decaying countryside,” according to sociologist Alex DeYoung.

So, states around the country consolidated schools, the lifeblood of rural communities. Where a school closed, the town often died, as in small towns, schools are not just socioeconomic hubs but centers of cultural and social cohesion.

Environmental impact

The same concept – that urban policymakers know better than rural Americans – is manifest in the modern environmental movement. Like with the MeatOut, rural communities also distrust environmental policies that, in their view, intentionally target a rural way of life. Rural communities take the position that they’ve been made to bear the brunt of the transformations of the global economy for generations, including those that deal with energy and the environment.

For example, environmentalists frequently call for lowering meat consumption and enacting livestock taxes to lower global greenhouse gas emissions.

But, there’s a huge, untapped potential for environmental policies that use language consistent with rural attitudes and values, such as ideas about conservation and land stewardship. Political scientists Richard H. Foster and Mark K. McBeth explain, “Rural residents perceive, probably correctly, that environmental ‘outsiders’ are perfectly willing to sacrifice local economic well-being and traditional ways of life on the altar of global environmental concerns.” They instead suggest “emphasizing saving resources for future generations” so that rural communities may continue to thrive.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations attribute between 18% to 24% of greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture, while the International Panel on Climate Change places the estimate closer to 10%. However, agricultural producers point out that, while they may be responsible for that 10%, just 100 companies, such as BP and ExxonMobil, have produced 70% of all emissions. Agricultural producers say policies such as livestock taxes would disproportionately impact small-scale farmers and intensify rural inequality.

Rural communities have the distinct feeling that urban America doesn’t care whether they fail or flourish. Nearly 70% of rural voters supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election. He won 93% of rural counties. Rural Americans feel left behind, and for them, Trump might be their last hope.

Kayla Gabehart, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, *Michigan Technological University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 8 25

John Boyd Jr., founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association warns farmers are going to lose their land under the policies of President Donald Trump, even the one’s who voted for him.

“We're hearing from farmers all around the country that bankruptcies are on the rise and farmers are asking, ‘how am I going to be able to stay in my home or keep my home if they file bankruptcy.’ Farm suicides are up and the president's tariffs have put this country in complete turmoil,” Boyd told CNN anchor John Berman.

Boyd described a “state of emergency” for America's farmers because of the historically low sales prices of corn, wheat and soybeans thanks to tariffs troubles.

“The president is negotiating on this because he knows [farm produce] is the only thing that America produces, and he's gambling with American farmers' lives,” said Boyd. “

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Boyd also slammed the president “herding up migrant workers … riding through their fields and chasing [them] … like livestock.”

“These persons have been doing this type of work for a very, very long time on these farms, harvesting tobacco and other commodities around the country with no problem,” Boyd said. “These weren't criminals or all the things the president says they are. These are hardworking people that are doing the work that many of us in our own country don't want.”

The combination of labor shortages leaving food rotting in the fields and plummeting produce prices were not just hitting Black farmers, Boyd said.

“White farmers in those red states … who overwhelmingly voted for this president are going to be on the auction block come this fall because they won't be able to sell and keep their farm at at [current] grain prices,” Boyd said. “… You will not be able to make it with the highest input cost per acre that we face in my whole 40 years of farming. This is the worst period I’ve seen since I’ve been farming since 1983.”

Berman asked if Trump’s proposed tariffs on foreign goods would help farmers, but Boyd replied the tariffs didn’t help the last time Trump tried it.

“When he imposed those tariffs on China [in his first administration] they started buying soybeans from Brazil and the market never did come back to us,” Boyd said. “The first time the president came into office, John, I was selling soybeans for $16.80 a bushel. It plummeted all the way down to $8 a bushel, and the market never came back.”

Watch the video below, or by clicking here.

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an 2 25

'There are limits': Billions at stake as farmers hit on all sides by Trump policies

TRUMP MUSK DOGE FUCKS FARMERS 2 BILLION/YR 2 25

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palestine OH neglected

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an 7 25

Over the weekend, Vox posted an interview with Vox journalist Christian Paz, who’d reported previously that the Democrats were ripe for a grassroots takeover like the alleged one that overtook the GOP. The headline claimed to explain “the Democrats’ Tea Party moment.”

But unlike the headline, in the interview Paz was more circumspect about the actual existence of a Tea Party-style movement inside the party. The best that can be said, he said, is that “the base has never really been as angry as it is right now. What we’re seeing is a combination of anti-Trump anger, wanting a change in direction, wanting a change in leadership, and also some folks who are like, maybe we should become more progressive as a party” (his stress).

What are they angry about?

To hear Paz tell it, Democratic voters are angry with party leaders for failing to concentrate on “a working-class vision for Americans. They should be more focused on kitchen table affordability issues” (his italics).

But if you listen to Democratic leaders, like Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakeem Jeffries in the House, that’s all they talk about. They speak endlessly about the need for the parties to come together and solve economic problems that all Americans share, and to rise above the bickering and the partisanship, and find common ground.

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But despite that, the Democratic base is still angry.

Why?

Brad Lander suggested it’s because the real division in the party isn’t, as Paz suggested, between “the establishment” and progressives, but between “fighters and folders.” New York City’s comptroller said that’s what voters saw in candidate Zohran Mamdani when they gave him victory over Andrew Cuomo in that city’s Democratic mayoral primary.

“People want someone to go to bat for working people, paint a real vision of a city people can afford, fight for it and get on the field,” Lander told CNN last month. “And that’s what I think Zohran did.”

I have my own theories about the Democratic leadership. You can read more about them here, here, here and especially here. Basically, it’s that leaders don’t want to fight, because fighting is risky. But I wanted to bring into the conversation someone who has deep insight into the party, and who understands its mechanics and what it takes to win.

So I got in touch with Dana Houle. He has worked in organized labor, was once a congressional chief of staff, and managed campaigns from the local to the statewide level. His Bluesky feed is indispensable.

In this first of two parts of our conversation, Dana explained the true root of the problem: defeat in November. Whenever the Democrats, or the Republicans, lose a presidential election, Dana told me, there’s always a period of anger and distrust between the base and the elites.

Dana told me that as a consequence of this fundamental, it’s tempting to look for an “insurrection” of some kind, like the one that took place in 2010, when the Tea Party destabilized the old GOP establishment.

But, as Dana told me, the Tea Party is a terrible analogy. For one thing, it was a phony “revolt.” For another, it represented a serious policy fracture between Republican elites over the issue of immigration. Dana told me that the Democrats, meanwhile, agree on virtually everything, policy-wise. What they disagree on is style and strategy. More than anything else, however, the Democrats still believe in democracy.

“I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.”

Do the Democrats have a trust problem? The base of the party is restless and its leaders don't seem to be hearing it. I am thinking of Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York City, but not only that.

Whenever a party is locked out of power at the national level, there's a trust problem. It was different in 2021 with the Republicans, because, well, almost everything is different with Trump. But Democrats in 2017, Republicans in 2009, Democrats in 2001-2006 – people get mad at their party for losing. And obviously the stakes are much higher now.

I'm not sure Mamdani fits here. First, it's a local race, in a city that's unique and that gets far more attention than LA or Chicago or Houston or Phoenix, because that's where the national media and the financial industry are based. Second, it was a weird race; other than Jerry Brown, it's hard to think of an ex-governor who ran for mayor.

Unlike Brown, Andrew Cuomo was disgraced, and he was also widely loathed. That's how the race started. Mamdani and Brad Lander joining together on the "don't rank Cuomo" and then seeing the results shows a lot of that race was "anyone but the sex pest." That's probably one of the reasons all the big players except Tish James stayed out of it.

There is, of course, the fact that both Democratic congressional leaders are in New York, but I don't think they were factors in the race, and I don't think the mayoral race has anything to do with their challenges and what people think of their performance as leaders.

https://bsky.app/profile/kenklippenstein.bsky.social/post/3lsmxrs4z3k2w

To what extent is the Tea Party angle within the Democratic Party real or imaginary? Lander said the true fault line in the party is not between moderates and progressives, but "fighters and folders." No is really saying "tea party" because it was mostly astro-turf, but lots of people want confrontation by the Democrats, a la the tea party.

That's an important point – that the Tea Party was largely astro-turf. I think Lander is correct, but if I had to look for a recent analogy I'd go back to 2002-2005, when disgust over too many Democrats supporting the Iraq War contributed to the rise of the Netroots, propelled the campaigns of General Wesley Clark and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and led to the election of Dean as DNC chair.

I don't think anyone has a clear idea of what the base-leadership tension will create, but I don't think it will lead to nihilism, and the Tea Party definitely was part of the GOP's devolution into nihilism.

Voxposted a headline recently thatasserted as fact the existence of a Tea Party-type movementwithin the Democratic Party. But the interview was highly informed by Bernie Sanders' rhetoric, especially understanding the problem as between progressives and "the establishment." What are the real fault lines in the party?

The Tea Party is a horrible analogy for the current Democratic Party. The Vox piece made it sound like it was a response to deficits. That was part of the astroturf messaging, but that wasn't and isn't a fault line in the Republican Party: elites and the base care about deficits when Democrats are in charge, not when Republicans are in charge.

But there was a big policy rift in the Republican Party.

Remember when George W Bush, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback and most of the Republican leaders tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform along the lines of what the United States Chamber of Congress had wanted? That was a policy rift.

And it remained one that Trump exploited. In that first Republican primary debate, he mentioned ending birthright citizenship and most of the other Republicans on the stage were dumbfounded.

With Democrats, there really aren't those kinds of policy rifts.

In Congress, there's wide agreement on most policy matters, from the most moderate Democrat to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. That's in part, because much of the last 15 years has been about the ruralification and dumbification of the Republican Party.

In 2010, Democrats held three of the four Senate seats and both House seats in the Dakotas. They held both Senate seats and two of three House seats in West Virginia. They held three of the four House seats in Mississippi. Their congressional majority was still, as it had been since the Civil War, rooted in the South. That's all changed.

There are hardly any Democrats representing large numbers of rural whites. Democrats are no longer split between northern/urban liberals and white rural southerners. They're now the party of cities and suburbs, with some rural Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.

And they largely agree on policy!...

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politico

Agriculture Department employees have been ordered to delete landing pages discussing climate change across agency websites and document climate change references for further review, according to an internal email obtained by POLITICO.

The directive from USDA’s office of communications, whose authenticity was validated by three people, could affect information across dozens of programs including climate-smart agriculture initiatives, USDA climate hubs and Forest Service information regarding wildfires, the frequency and severity of which scientists have linked to hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change. And it is reminiscent of moves made during the first Trump administration to remove references to climate change from federal government websites.

The email sent Thursday afternoon calls on website managers to “Identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change” and “Identify all web content related to climate change and document it in a spreadsheet” for the office to review. It set a Friday deadline for handing over titles, links and “your recommendation on how the content should be handled.”

The action comes as funds for clean energy and agriculture programs remain in limbo amid a federal spending review ordered by the Office of Management and Budget. The Trump administration has pushed to halt and reverse spending from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provided billions of dollars for wildfire management, clean energy investments and credits to store carbon dioxide that benefit rural communities USDA serves.

A spokesperson for USDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the first Trump administration, officials buried government-funded research that showed the impacts of climate change on American farmers, including issues like volatile weather and increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In 2019, USDA also refused to release a multiagency plan to help farmers respond and adapt to a changing climate.

As of Friday, some landing pages remained active, such as for USDA Climate Hubs, a cross-agency effort to address and adapt to climate change. Others already appeared mothballed, like a page on USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities.

Extreme weather events just in the last few years have devastated the entire peach crop in Georgia, flooded farms in North Carolina and a disease called citrus greening — made worse by climate change — has led to sharp declines in Florida’s famed citrus crop. Smoke from wildfires in the West have ruined fields of grapes, and drought has forced ranchers to shrink their cattle herds.

The USDA instructions also come as California recovers from wildfires that could amount to the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, which scientists said climate change exacerbated. The U.S. Forest Service is the primary federal agency for preparing for and mitigating wildfires.

Under former President Joe Biden’s Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, USDA spent $3.1 billion on the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, working with private food companies, nonprofits and universities to research ways for farmers to reduce their carbon footprint, develop more resilient crops and restore land. But Trump’s executive order targeting climate spending in the IRA forced officials at USDA to temporarily pause funding disbursements through the program.

Under the IRA, Congress directed USDA to pay billions of dollars to farmers for conservation practices, including some that address climate change. But Trump’s Day 1 executive order aims to halt agency payments for major climate, energy and infrastructure projects — and could jeopardize billions in payments as farmers prepare for planting season.

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Played for suckers: Kansas farmer blasts Trump voters in scathing editorial

an 2 25

'I feel so stupid': These 'horrified' Trump voters are having serious buyer’s remorse

'Act of God': Trump-supporting farmers reel from funding cuts

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NOTE CASACADE EFFECT

AN 2 25

'Diseases of despair': Rural Americans don’t live as long as those in cities - Alternet.org

Rural Americans – particularly men – are expected to live significantly shorter, less healthy lives than their urban counterparts, according to our research, recently published in the Journal of Rural Health.

We found that a 60-year-old man living in a rural area is expected on average to live two fewer years than an urban man. For women, the rural-urban gap is six months.

A key reason is worse rates among rural people for smoking, obesity and chronic conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. These conditions are condemning millions to disability and shortened lives.

What’s more, these same people live in areas where medical care is evaporating. Living in rural areas, with their relatively sparse populations, often means a shortage of doctors, longer travel distances for medical care and inadequate investments in public health, driven partly by declines in economic opportunities.

Our team arrived at these findings by using a simulation called the Future Elderly Model. With that, we were able to simulate the future life course of Americans currently age 60 living in either an urban or rural area.

The model is based on relationships observed in 20 years of data from the Health and Retirement Study, an ongoing survey that follows people from age 51 through the rest of their lives. Specifically, the model showed how long these Americans might live, the expected quality of their future years, and how certain changes in lifestyle would affect the results.

We describe the conditions that drive our results as “diseases of despair,” building off the landmark work of pioneering researchers who coined the now widely used term “deaths of despair.” They documented rising mortality among Americans without a college degree and related these deaths to declines in social and economic prospects.

The main causes of deaths of despair – drug overdoses, liver disease and suicide – have also been called “diseases of despair.” But the conditions we study, such as heart disease, could similarly be influenced by social and economic prospects. And they can profoundly reduce quality of life.

We also found that if rural education levels were as high as in urban areas, this would eliminate almost half of the rural-urban life-expectancy gap. Our data shows 65% of urban 60-year-olds were educated beyond high school, compared with 53% of rural residents the same age.

One possible reason for the difference is that getting a bachelor’s degree may make a person more able or willing to follow scientific recommendations – and more likely to work out for 150 minutes a week or eat their veggies as their doctor advises them to.Rural communities are increasingly hampered by their lack of access to health care.

Why it matters

The gap between urban and rural health outcomes has widened over recent decades. Yet the problem goes beyond disparities between urban and rural health: It also splits down some of the party lines and social divides that separate U.S. citizens, such as education and lifestyle.

Scholarship on the decline of rural America suggests that people living outside larger cities are resentful of the economic forces that may have eroded their economic power. The interplay between these forces and the health conditions we study are less appreciated.

Economic circumstances can contribute to health outcomes. For example, increased stress and sedentary lifestyle due to joblessness can contribute to chronic health issues such as cardiovascular disease. Declines in economic prospects due to automation and trade liberalization are linked to increases in mortality.

But health can also have a strong influence on economic outcomes. Hospitalizations cause high medical costs, loss of work and earnings, and increases in bankruptcy. The onset of chronic disease and disability can lead to long-lasting declines in income. Even health events experienced early in childhood can have economic consequences decades later.

In tandem, these health and economic trends might reinforce each other and help fuel inequality between rural and urban areas that produces a profoundly different quality of life.

What still isn’t known

It should be noted that our results, like many studies, are describing outcomes on average; the rural population is not a monolith. In fact, some of the most physically active and healthy people we know live in rural areas.

Just how much your location affects your health is an ongoing area of research. But as researchers begin to understand more, we can come up with strategies to promote health among all Americans, regardless of where they live.

*:{The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy, University of Southern California; Bryan Tysinger, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, University of Southern California, and Jack Chapel, Postdoctoral Scholar in Economics, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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alternet-no lnx

When it comes to 'rage' of white rural voters, liberals may not be asking the right questions

Former President Donald J. Trump arrives to deliver remarks Thursday, August 6, 2020, at the Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Reverend Daniel Schultz May 16, 2024

Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman have a new book out titled White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. It has proved controversial. There are two major objections, as I understand them. First, Schaller and Waldman may have misrepresented or misunderstood scholarship on the rural context. Second, their thesis — white rural voters pose a unique threat to American democracy — may be overstated and under-supported.

I've known of Schaller and Waldman's work for a long time, and know Tom himself at least a little. So I was a bit surprised to see the vehemence and breadth of the pushback on the new book. I was equally surprised to see other folks I know strongly defend their thesis. The authors got their own word in at The New Republic.

Is it rural or is it race?

It may surprise you to hear this, but I am neither a rural sociologist or political scientist. I decided I was in no place to give an authoritative assessment of these arguments. Then, while I was groping around for what I did want to say, Noah Berlatsky ... just went ahead and nailed it?

Democrats struggle not with rural voters in general, but with white rural voters in particular. And white rural voters do not vote for the GOP because they are rural. They vote for the GOP because they are white.

That's pretty much it. As one scholar argues, if you control for other factors, the difference between rural and urban voting patterns essentially disappears. Race is a much stronger predictor than things like income, religion or place of residence.

Let's put that more anecdotally. I've known some straight-up, stone-cold racists in rural areas. But then I've also known some in urban areas.

It's not quite as simple as saying that rural whites are a bunch of racists. But for at least some people, it's a straightforward enough syllogism:

Cities are the source of all our problems.

Black people live in cities.

Democrats run cities.

Ergo, Democrats and everything they stand for are bad and wrong.

There are variations on this theme. Illegal immigrants are overrunning our society! Democrats let them all in! Therefore, etc. Or: covid is a city problem, Democrats run cities and liberals run health departments. Therefore, we're not interested in getting vaccinated or practicing social distancing.

As with any white people, rural or urban, the supremacist elements of these formulas are more or less explicit, depending on the individual and their community. It could be that rural whites are more prone to bias due to lower levels of education. But other than that, racists are racists, no matter where you find them.

Social incentives

There is one factor particular to rural areas that deserves consideration before we look at potential answers to the "rural problem." Rural folks traditionally don't move around as much as city folks.

Deep roots feed social capital through rich networks of relations, neighbors and friends. Rural communities are able to offer impressive support to those in need or to accomplish shared goals. Think food pantries, volunteer fire companies, churches that persist with a handful of members.

But those same roots provide lots of incentives not to rock the social boat. This boils down to "Don't tick off the neighbors because you're stuck with those assholes for a long time and you never know when you might need their help." That makes it difficult to confront your loudmouth bigoted uncle. It makes it even harder to disagree with those weird dudes down the road with all the AR-15s. It also can create a "culture of bullying" that reflexively smashes down anyone who doesn't conform to gender, political or racial norms.

Asking better questions

I don't say these things to valorize or demonize rural areas. It's just that knowing them helps us to ask the right questions.

For example, Kathy Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, tells Tyler Austin Harper:

The question of our time is not who are the bad Americans, but what is wrong with our systems — our government, our economy, our modes of communication — that means that so many people feel unseen, unheard, and disrespected by the people in charge? And what can we do, constructively, about that?

On the surface, this seems like a decent enough question. But it falls apart when you consider its easiest answer. Some people feel unseen, unheard and disrespected because they're bigots who have been spoon-fed a diet of resentment and entitlement courtesy of rightwing media. That leads to the practical but not very satisfying conclusion that they're best ignored in any kind of political project to the left of Attila the Hun.

You might also ask, as Thomas Frank did, What's The Matter With Kansas? Or as Frank's thesis is often formulated: Why do white rural residents vote against their economic interests?

The usual hot take is that they've been hoodwinked by Republicans into voting on culture rather than cold hard cash. But that doesn't give them much credit. They're not fools. What if they know what they're doing? What if there's something they value more than economics?

To put it more exactly: What is it that white rural voters are willing to sacrifice so much for? It could be maintaining various forms of privilege, especially racial hierarchies. Or it could be saving a rural way of life that they perceive to be under threat of vanishing. (These options are not mutually exclusive.)

Getting better answers

Whatever the case, I suspect the most productive response to the situation will involve two things. They might seem like pie-in-the-sky projects at first. But I at least think there's some cause for a bit of optimism for each of them.

Democrats and progressives will need to do a lot less writing off rural districts as hopeless and a lot more intentional work on developing solidarity with them. A revived union movement such as we're currently seeing could go a long way toward meeting this goal. So could a new "green economy." It would help if there were a leftwing media ecosystem to push the good news coming out of those developments. Rural voters may not be fools, but there is evidence that messages of economic success aren't getting through to voters. There is also a desperate need for more positive racial narratives than the ones provided by Fox News and AM radio. But that might be too much to ask, given the kind of investment it would take.

And in the end the answer to overcoming divisions between rural and urban areas will have to come from within the communities themselves. They'll never accept a solution imposed from outside, and it is their community, after all.

It may very well be that cultural differences and the tensions between extractive and information economies are too big to bridge. On the other hand, maga extremism might prove finally too much even for country mice. Trump's unpopularity might create an opening for home-grown — and less extreme — leadership to emerge. And as Schaller and Waldman point out in their New Republic piece, there is a sizable rural minority population to build upon.

On the third hand, I despair.

Why bother?

But on the fourth hand, I'm pleased to see homegrown rural Democratic candidates emerging to challenge Republican hegemony. I'm also encouraged to hear of communities adopting more inclusive policies out of self-interest, if nothing else. With time and investment, I'm fairly confident liberal messages can get through to rural voters and a progressive vision can take root.

Rural white voters aren't more extreme than anyone else in my experience. Nor are they more racist. Your mileage may vary. They are, however, primed to support Republicans in a lot of ways. It would take a lot of time and investment to overcome those factors. There are legitimate arguments to be had about how worthwhile the effort would be. I've made some of the same arguments about religious outreach.

But it can be done, and I think it should at least be attempted. It won't win Democrats the next election, probably not the next few either. But if the nation is ever to emerge from the shadow of racialized politics, it will have to confront white beliefs and practices. White racism may not be all that different in the cities than it is in the country. Still, it's as good a place to start as any. Which, come to think of it, is the tacit motto of a lot of rural places.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Why do white rural voters vote for Republicans? ›

America’s second civil war? It’s already begun ›

Economist Paul Krugman: Here’s what’s driving 'white rural rage' and 'the MAGA narrative' ›

Yes, the South is actually in crisis

First, let’s back up. One might be tempted to ask: Are things really that bad? Hasn’t the Sun Belt been booming? But in fact, by a range of economic indicators — personal income per capita and the proportion of the population living in poverty, for starters – large parts of the South, and particularly the rural South, are struggling.

Gross domestic product per capita in the region has been stuck at about 90% of the national average for decades, with average income even lower in rural areas. About 1 in 5 counties in the South is marked by “persistent poverty” — a poverty rate that has stayed above 20% for three decades running. Indeed, fully 80% of all persistently poor counties in the U.S. are in the South.

Persistent poverty is, of course, linked to a host of other problems. The South’s rural counties are marked by low levels of educational attainment, measured both by high school and college graduation rates. Meanwhile, labor-force participation rates in the South are far lower than in the nation as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, these issues stifle economic growth.

Meanwhile, financial institutions have fled the region: The South as a whole lost 62% of its banks between 1980 and 2020, with the decline sharpest in rural areas. At the same time, local hospitals and medical facilities have been shuttering, while funding for everything from emergency services to wellness programs has been cut.

Less wealth, less health

Relatedly, the rural South is ground zero for poor health in the U.S., with life expectancy far lower than the national average. So-called “deaths of despair” such as suicides and accidental overdoses are common, and rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and stroke are high – much higher than in rural areas in other parts of the U.S. and in the U.S. as a whole.

Manufacturing counties in the rural South are particularly unhealthy. Residents there die about two and a half years younger than the average American, which to demographers is a staggeringly high differential.

These things, of course, didn’t happen in a vacuum. The Obama-era Affordable Care Act encouraged states to expand Medicaid coverage, but Southern states largely refused to do so. That left large portions of the low- and lower-middle-income population in the rural South uninsured. This has pushed many medical facilities in the region into a death spiral, as their business models — predicated on governmental insurance of one kind or another — became untenable.

Given all this, is it any wonder that rates of upward mobility in the rural South are among the lowest in the country? Alas, probably not — certainly not to residents of rural North Carolina, a state where more than half of its counties lost population between 2010 and 2020.

It wasn’t always this way

Although some people think that these areas have forever been in crisis, this isn’t the case. While the South’s agricultural sector had fallen into long-term decline in the decades following the Civil War — essentially collapsing by the Great Depression — the onset of World War II led to an impressive economic growth spurt.

War-related jobs opening up in urban areas pulled labor out of rural areas, leading to a long-delayed push to mechanize agriculture. Workers rendered redundant by such technology came to constitute a large pool of cheap labor that industrialists seized upon to deploy in low-wage processing and assembly operations, generally in rural areas and small towns.

Such operations surged between 1945 and the early 1980s, playing a huge role in the region’s economic rise. However humble they may have been, in the South — as in China since the late 1970s — the shift out of a backward agricultural sector into low-wage, low-skill manufacturing was an opportunity for significant productivity and efficiency gains.

This helped the South steadily catch up to national norms in terms of per-capita income: to 75% by 1950, 80% by the mid-1960s, over 85% by 1970, and to almost 90% by the early 1980s.

Although today the rise of the Sun Belt is often associated with, if not attributed to, climate, low housing costs and the growth of the South’s booming metropolitan areas, all those rural sweatshops and humble-looking processing sheds opening up in the early postwar era mattered a lot. They elevated the living standards of countless once-desperate and impoverished farmers.

The origins of the rural crisis

By the early 1980s, however, the gains made possible by the shift out of agriculture began to play themselves out. The growth of the rural manufacturing sector slowed, and the South’s convergence upon national per capita income norms stopped, remaining stuck at about 90% from then on.

Two factors were largely responsible: new technologies, which reduced the number of workers needed in manufacturing, and globalization, which greatly increased competition. This latter point became increasingly important, since the South, a low-cost manufacturing region in the U.S., is a high-cost manufacturing region when compared to, say, Mexico.

Like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” the rural South’s collapse came gradually, then suddenly: gradually during the 1980s and 1990s, and suddenly after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001.

Between 2000 and 2010, for example, manufacturing employment in North Carolina, one of the South’s leading manufacturing states, fell by about 44%. Starting a bit earlier — in 1998, when the Asian currency crisis squeezed Southern manufacturers — we find that the Tar Heel State lost 70% of its manufacturing jobs in textiles and 60% in furniture between then and 2010.

Other states in the South’s “manufacturing belt,” such as South Carolina and Tennessee, lost about 40% of their manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. Although they have recouped some jobs since then, not one Southern state has as many manufacturing jobs as it did a generation ago. And most of the job growth in the southern manufacturing sector in recent decades has taken place in or near big cities.

The proportion of craftsmen and factory workers in the rural Southern labor force fell from 38% in 1980 to a little over 25% by 2020 — a trend that was particularly striking in rural manufacturing counties.

Factory jobs there increasingly gave way to low-level service-sector gigs, which generally paid less. As a result, median income per capita in rural manufacturing counties in the South has stagnated and is much lower than in rural manufacturing counties elsewhere in the U.S.

The first step is recognizing there’s a problem

Those parts of the rural and small-town South that were once heavily involved in manufacturing are in economic crisis today.

One might argue that the current mess is a legacy effect of the South’s historical dependence on a low-skill, low-cost growth “strategy” — beginning with slavery — that privileged short-term economic gains over patient investment in human capital and long-term development. That’s a big claim about a larger, more complex story.

For now, our aim is simply to call attention to the problem. One must first acknowledge it before there can be any hope of a remedy. Until then, the inhabitants of such areas will remain feeling, as the Southern writer Linda Flowers vividly put it, “throwed away.”

Peter A. Coclanis, Professor of History; Director of the Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Louis M. Kyriakoudes, Director, Albert Gore Research Center and Professor of History, Middle Tennessee State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an kos 2 23

The GOP continues to sling whatever trash they’ve got at President Joe Biden in the wake of his historic trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, and his total dunking on them about the debt ceiling, Social Security, and Medicare. They’re taking their talking points from Tucker Carlson, keeping up the narrative Biden is responsible for the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, because he hates white people.

Here’s the repugnant Sen. Josh Hawley doubling down on that, and throwing in some antisemitism for the heck of it: “My message to congressional Republican: you can either be the party of Ukraine & globalists or you can be the party of East Palestine & the working people of American.”

[twt w tukr]

Let’s talk about the working Americans of East Palestine, Ohio, and who is really helping them. The population of the town is 4,761 as of the 2020 census. It’s in Columbiana County, population 101,877 in 2020. In 2021, the last year statistics are available from, there were 32,077 people in the county who were enrolled in Medicaid, the joint federal/state funded health insurance program for low-income individuals and families.

So, yeah, that’s about a third of the population of the county—the smallest geographical area for which Medicaid data is available. Ohio as a whole saw a nearly 28% hike in Medicaid and CHIP enrollments during the pandemic. (CHIP is the program for children’s health.)

More than 7,500 households in Columbiana County were receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or food stamps, in November 2022. That’s 14,407 people, including 5,421 children.

This is not a prosperous place. The median household income for the county was $49,265 in 2021, the latest figures available. That’s $12,997 lower than the median Ohio household income and $20,452 less than the U.S. median household income. The minimum wage in Ohio is $10.10/hour, $5.05 for tipped employees.

At the same time, though, the unemployment rate for the county is just 4.3%, all of which means that there are a lot of working people in this place who are living in or very nearly in poverty. And yes, you hardly need to ask: Those people voted for Trump in 2020, 72% to 27% for Biden. They’re probably now lining up in diners all through the county to be interviewed by New York Times reporters.

These are the very programs the GOP always wants to destroy, the programs that truly help working people. Medicaid, food assistance—they’re all on the chopping block as far as the GOP is concerned, and always have been.

This isn’t about Ukraine, and it sure as hell isn’t about the working people of East Palestine, Ohio—where were any of them when Trump was deregulating the rails and making this kind of disaster almost inevitable? Oh, that’s right, supporting an insurrection against the government.

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an 2 23

ahead of former President Donald Trump's Wednesday visit to East Palestine, Ohio—where a Norfolk Southern-owned train transporting carcinogenic chemicals derailed on February 3, prompting a mass evacuation and release of pollutants—progressive critics highlighted the key role his administration played in making the fiery crash and its toxic aftermath more likely.

During his speech, Trump—considered a leading GOP presidential candidate for 2024 despite spearheading a deadly coup attempt following his 2020 loss—criticized how President Joe Biden's administration has responded to the environmental and public health disaster unfolding in East Palestine, a poor rural town of about 4,700 people located a few miles west of the Pennsylvania border.

But as critics noted beforehand, the Trump administration's gutting of train safety rules at the behest of railroad industry lobbyists was instrumental in creating the conditions for the derailment and ensuing chemical spill and burnoff, which has provoked fears of groundwater contamination and air pollution.

"He should be apologizing to that community for his administration rolling back rail regulations," progressive stalwart Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator, tweeted prior to Trump's address.

philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made a similar point in an opinion piece published earlier this week.

"If residents of East Palestine—a**modern news desertof downsized or disappeared news sources, which allows misinformation to fester—truly knew the reality, a delegation of townsfolk would likely greet Trump with tiki torches and pitchforks," Bunch wrote, comparing the former president's visit to "the tendency of a criminal to return to the scene of his crime."

Bunch noted that "Trump acted specifically to sabotage a nascent government effortto protect citizens from the growing threat posed by derailments of outdated, poorly equipped, and undermanned freight trains that were increasingly shipping both highly flammable crude oil from the U.S. fracking boom as well as toxic chemicals like the ones that would derail in East Palestine."

"Trump had been in office for less than a year when he moved to killthe 2015 rule change initiated by the Obama administration that would have required freight trains to upgrade the current braking technologythat was developed in the 19th century for state-of-the-art electronic systems," wrote Bunch, who pointed out that this came after Norfolk Southern and other rail carriers donated more than $6 million to Republican candidates in 2016 and spent millions more on lobbying.

"With the investigation into the East Palestine wreck still in its early phases, it's not clear if the modern brakes—originally required for installation by 2021—could have prevented the toxic derailment or whether the specific Obama rule would have applied," Bunch continued. "But experts do believe the new brakes could have mitigated the wreckage—and thus the release of so many hazardous chemicals."

"The rule reversal wasn't the only time that Team Trump sided with Big Rail over the forgotten Americans who live on the wrong side of their tracks," he added. "In 2019, for example, the Trump administration moved to not strengthen but relax regulations on shipping fracked natural gas through communities like East Palestine. The same year, Trump's White House also killed an Obama-era proposal that would have required two crew members in freight-train locomotives."

Ahead of Trump's visit,More Perfect Union also argued on social media that the ex-president's "attempt to portray himself as a friend of the town and as someone who would have stood up to Norfolk Southern... couldn't be further from the truth."

As the progressive media outlet observed, the Trump administration "withdrew multiple rail safety recommendations and moved toward a 'self-regulatory approach' where rail companies could do as they pleased."

"It's no surprise that the Trump years were filled with dangerous deregulation," More Perfect Union asserted, describing his decision to nominate top rail industry executives to lead the Federal Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration as "a prime example of the revolving door between business and government."

"The Trump approach to the rail industry was to let the companies do what they wanted, which was to avoid regulations, slash jobs, and extract profit," the outlet continued. "This approach, and rail companies' greed, has led to over 1,000 derailments each year. Some are massive catastrophes like East Palestine. But every single one is harmful. And if the industry isn't regulated and forced to change, we'll soon be seeing more disasters."

When Trump "pretends to care about rail workers, or the people of East Palestine, we can't believe him," More Perfect Union added. "His record tells a very different story, the story of his own role in creating this problem in the first place."

Even some conservative critics of Trump have questioned the sincerity of his visit.

"It's clear that it's a political stunt," Ray LaHood, a Republican ex-member of Congress who led the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) during former President Barack Obama's first term, told Politico on Wednesday. "If he wants to visit, he's a citizen. But clearly his regulations and the elimination of them, and no emphasis on safety, is going to be pointed out."

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wasted little time in doing exactly that, calling the GOP's indignation "fake" soon after Trump announced his travel plans.

Bunch acknowledged that "it's beyond hypocritical for Trump to bring his Harold Hill-huckster shtick to East Palestine when residents are still experiencing headaches and breathing foul air from the kind of catastrophe he didn't lift a finger to stop from the Resolute Desk."

"But also it's a bit baffling why Biden or his Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who seems to be channelinghis inner McKinsey & Co**. these days—haven't gone to Ohio," he argued. "Especially when Trump and any other Republicans hoping to make political hay off of East Palestine's misery are coming to town empty-handed."

"None of the anti-Biden critics on this issue have offered a solution, because they can't," wrote Bunch. "The only fix for the kind of runaway abuses of modern capitalism that cause these environmental catastrophes isgovernment regulation, aided by empowering worker safety with strong unions—two things that the Trump-led GOP has opposed at every turn."

Even in the wake of the disaster, Republican lawmakers have refused to demand stronger regulations, as HuffPost reported:

:{:{Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), a vocal Biden critic who represents East Palestine, on Tuesday dismissed immediate calls for stricter rail regulations, saying actions toward accountability will hinge on the findings of a National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] investigation into the derailment}::{.}:

'That will dictate whether there are laws, regulations that need to be changed, whether there were rules that were violated,' he said during a news conference in East Palestine. 'We don't know any of that yet, and we won't know that until NTSB releases its report.'}:

Hours before Trump spoke, Buttigieg announced that he plans to travel to East Palestine on Thursday. His visit is expected to coincide with the publication of the NTSB's preliminary report about its ongoing probe into the crash.

On Tuesday, Buttigieg unveiled DOT's recommendations for improving the safety of the nation's rail system, though an inter-union alliance of rail workers immediately criticized the plan as inadequate.

Given the scale of the problems—and in light of the transportation secretary's ongoing refusal to exercise his authority to reinstate previously gutted rules along with his consideration of an industry-backed proposal to further weaken the regulation of train braking systems—union leaders have called for nationalizing the railways and implementing their proposed solutions.

Turner, for her part, emphasized that she has "been outspoken about the two years the Biden administration had [to] fix these problems."

"The Trump administration is at fault, as is the Obama administration," Turner contended, referring to the fact that the latter's regulations were also watered down in response to industry pressure.

"The Ohio GOP is to blame as well," she added, echoing recent reporting on Norfolk Southern's campaign to influence state-level lawmakers and officials. "Failure at every level of government and multiple administrations led to this."

---

ingraham

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-host-blames-diversity-initiatives-ohio-train-derailment

---

palestine OH neglected

how much BS is deflection from trump incomp deregulation corruption free mkt libtard BS /grievance victim conspiracy

IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT GOP DID OR WILL DO, CHECK THEIR ACCUSATIONS/ PROJECTION:

projection rubber glue retaliation

vs trump dereg vs chris christie bridge shutdown

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-suggests-residents-east-palestine-are-being**-punished-voting-republican

https://www.mediamatters.org/cable-news/study-national-television-coverage-east-palestine-train-derailment-ignored-industry

https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/right-wing-media-weaponize-east-palestine-train-derailment-claim-white-0

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an 2 23

Donald Trump Junior conjured up a new conspiracy theory over the weekend regarding train derailments. His hypothesis is that hackers working on behalf of the Russian government were responsible for the February 3rd East Palestine, Ohio Norfolk Southern disaster as well as, perhaps, other incidents involving railcars disconnecting from their tracks.

Shortly after the crash that spilled toxic substances like vinyl chloride and forced thousands of residents to evacuate, many began to recall that Junior's father, former President Donald Trump, loosened regulations on braking mechanisms and safety features during his term.

But that is not the narrative that Junior was presenting.

"No MSDS for the chemicals on train. Yeah, I don't know what that, I don't know what the acronym is. I'm sorry. Um, but yeah, there, it's just gonna keep going. And I read about a spill in Houston and another one in Detroit," Junior said. "And again, it feels like a lot. Hey, maybe there's a train derailment every day. I, I don't know, but like, it seems like we're having an awful lot of train derailments that we're finally hearing about, uh, in the last few days."

Statistically, these are common occurrences, with around three per day on average according to the United States Department of Transportation Federal Railroad Administration. Junior also was unaware that MSDS stands for Material Safety Data Sheet, which is used to catalog hazardous materials and the potential harm that they can cause.

Nevertheless, Junior pressed on, positing that Moscow could be retaliating for the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline last September:

And all of that happens to come, after, you know, an alleged US attack on a Russian pipeline. And, you know, we know they have very sophisticated, uh, hackers working in the systems and like, does anyone even ask the question? I'm not saying it is. I'll say I'm a conspiracy theorist. Like, uh, I, I don't know, seems like a question we'd wanna ask even if it's refuted with actual evidence. That would be nice. Like, I'd love that for it to not be the case, but maybe it's just a whole sh*t ton of coincidence. Uh, but, I don't believe in that much coincidence anymore.

MSDS material safety data sheet. Ah, yeah. I don't, they have 'em, but they have 'em, but they burned them up. Yeah. That wouldn't surprise me. It seems like the evidence always magically disappears, right? It, it always goes away. Or it, it's discovered conveniently after the other side gets what they want. Uh, again, if you still believe in this much coincidence, folks, I got some, uh, oceanfront property in Colorado to sell you.

Watch below or at this link.

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an me 2 23

The official Twitter account for the Republican Party is being trolled for a flawed tweet that was shared on Monday, February 6.

According to SFGate, the tweet featured an image of an aerial view of farmland that included the caption, "Wait until the coastal elites find out that this is where their food comes from!"

The news outlet highlighted the main issue which the tweet, which was meant to be a political jab at high-earning Democrats.

"The tweet was clearly meant to be a jab at hypothetical wealthy Democrats who look down on rural farmers, despite the fact that those farmers produce a majority of the nation's food," the outlet reported. "There's only one problem with the tweet: The land in the picture appears to be in California, the home of many so-called 'coastal elites.' Moreover, it appears to be an area that elected a Democratic congressman."

Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.), the lawmaker who represents the area featured in the image, quickly slammed the tweet and pointed out the main issue with it. Retweeting the image, he tossed the party's caption back at them tweeting, "Wait until the @GOP find out this is my district."

It didn't take long for Twitter users to chime in with critical remarks. Historian Kevin Kruse tweeted, "All you had to do was find a picture of farmland in the Midwest and you somehow screwed that up. Amazing."

Clara Jones, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine also offered blistering remarks tweeting, "Bow down to CA's food production. With 4% of nation's farms, we produce 13% of all ag products, 1/3 of all veggies, 2/3 of nation's fruit and nuts, 81% of wine..."

Since the post remained despite the barrage of critical responses it received, the news outlet speculates that it likely will not be removed.

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an 2 23

From Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a frequent claim among far-right GOP culture warriors is that urban and suburban Democrats disrespect and ignore rural areas. A recurring theme in the MAGA movement is that rural areas are “the real America” and that major urban centers are not.

Right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV, although dominated by urbanites, regularly and eagerly feed the resentment and anger of rural Americans. But liberal economist and syndicated New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman, in a late January column, argues that the “justifications for rural resentment don’t withstand scrutiny.”

“Rural resentment has become a central fact of American politics — in particular, a pillar of support for the rise of right-wing extremism,” Krugman explains. “As the Republican Party has moved ever further into MAGAland, it has lost votes among educated suburban voters. But this has been offset by a drastic rightward shift in rural areas, which in some places, has gone so far that the Democrats who remain face intimidation and are afraid to reveal their party affiliation.”

Krugman goes on to lay out some reasons why the “perception” that rural areas are “ignored by policymakers” and “don’t get their fair share of resources” is “largely wrong.”

“I’m sure that my saying this will generate a tidal wave of hate mail, and lecturing rural Americans about policy reality isn’t going to move their votes,” Krugman argues. “Nonetheless, it’s important to get our facts straight. The truth is that ever since the New Deal, Rural America has received special treatment from policymakers.It’s not just farm subsidies, which ballooned under President Donald Trump to the point where they accounted for around 40 percent of total farm income. Rural America also benefits from special programs that support housing, utilities and business in general.”

Krugman points out that although rural areas of the United States have some legitimate complaints — poverty, job losses — those areas “disproportionally benefit” from “major federal programs” because they “have a disproportionate number of seniors receiving Social Security and Medicare.”

“Because rural America is poorer than urban America,” Krugman observes, “it pays much less per person in federal taxes. So, in practice, major metropolitan areas hugely subsidize the countryside. These subsidies don’t just support incomes, they support economies…. What about rural perceptions of being disrespected? Well, many people have negative views about people with different lifestyles; that’s human nature.”

Krugman notes a major double standard in U.S. politics: Republicans can get away with insulting urban areas, but Democrats won’t dare insult rural areas.

The New York Times columnist writes, “‘I have to go to New York City soon,’ tweeted J.D. Vance during his senatorial campaign. ‘I have heard it’s disgusting and violent there.’ Can you imagine, say, Chuck Schumer saying something similar about Rural Ohio, even as a joke?”

Read Paul Krugman’s full New York Times column at this link (subscription required).

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an 1 23 maya

The rural-urban voter divide has plagued the United States for nearly three decades, and only continues to increase. For decades now, rural districts are typically governed by Republican House members, while suburban and urban areas tend to be governed by Democrats.

New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall spoke with many political science experts who have done extensive research on how rural voters’ growing "resentment" continues to fuel a rural-urban “apartheid,” and why it will likely persist for years to come.

MAGA politician Ron Johnson’s Senate win over Democrat Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin last year, Edsall wrote, is the one of the best case studies for“rural realignment and the role it plays in elections.”

Johnson is a Trump-backed lawmaker who staunchly denies the reality of climate change, has referred to Jan. 6 rioters as “people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement,” and proposed cuts to social programs. Still, he has managed to win reelection.

Edsall talked to Marquette Law School scholar Craig Gilbert who found in his analysis that Johnson’s votes were much lower in the “red and blue suburbs of Milwaukee” compared to his 2016 race, but the group of voters that ultimately steered his win came from “white rural Wisconsin.”

He won the rural vote by 25 points in 2016, but that increased to 29 points this time around, leading him to victory.

University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Katherine Cramer summarized the reasons for this shift in her study “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker," highlighting three points: “A belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policymakers; a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources; and a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.”

Edsall likens rural voters’ resentment towards Democrats to the “upheaval in the white South after Democrats, led by President Lyndon Johnson, won approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

But the start of the rural-urban split, according to Boston College political scientist David Hopkins's book “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics,” began during a “conflation of cultural and racial controversies starting in the late 1980s and accelerating into the 1990s,” such as two major Supreme Court abortion rulings and the 1993 debate over gay people in the military.

However, Hopkins says the milestone that really solidified the divide was the 1992 presidential election, as it started “the emerging configuration of ‘red’ and ‘blue’ geographic coalitions that came to define contemporary partisan competition.”

After the election, the percentage of House Democrats representing suburban districts increased by nearly 20 percent while Democratic seats in rural districts dropped from 24 percent to 5 percent.

Hopkins wrote in a 2019 study, “The Suburbanization of the Democratic Party, 1992-2018, that “Democratic suburban growth has been especially concentrated in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, reflecting the combined presence of both relatively liberal whites (across education levels) and substantial minority populations, but suburbs elsewhere remain decidedly, even increasingly, Republican in their collective partisan alignment.”

One of the reasons Republicans continue to pull in rural voters, Jordan Gest of George Mason University gathered in recent research, is that “Republicans are now beginning toattract socioeconomically ascendant and white-adjacent members of ethnic minorities who find their nostalgic, populist, nationalist politics appealing (or think Democrats are growing too extreme).”

Harvard postdoctoral research fellow Kristin Lunz Trujillo and University of Minnesota Ph.D candidate Zack Crowley, in their research found, “the key factor driving rural voters to the Republican Party: anger at perceived unfair distribution of resources by government, a sense of being ignored by decision makers or the belief that rural communities have a distinct set of values that are denigrated by urban dwellers.”

The scholars also found that, “culture differences play a far stronger role in determining the vote than discontent over the distribution of economic resources.” And stances on what they call symbolic issues “positively predict Trump support and ideology while the more material subdimension negatively predicts these outcomes, if at all."

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GOP voters have bought into an 'apocalyptic, grotesquely distorted' view of 'Blue America': Paul Krugman

Over the years, far-right pundits at Fox News and Fox Business have spent a great deal of time railing against “coastal elites” who don’t understand “the real America” and rural voters. The ironic part is that Fox News and Fox Business are full of New York City residents who spend most of their time in Manhattan, not rural areas of Oklahoma or Kansas. But they typically describe Blue America in apocalyptic terms even though they live and work in the heart of Blue America.

Liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman discusses that type of “apocalyptic” view of Blue America in his June 25 column, stressing that much of Red America has little or no interaction with a part of the United States it has been conditioned to fear.

“At this point, most political observers simply accept it as a fact of life that an overwhelming majority of Republicans accept the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen — a claim with nothing to support it, not even plausible anecdotes,” Krugman explains. “What I don’t think is fully appreciated, however, is that the Big Lie is embedded in an even bigger lie: the claim that the Democratic Party is controlled by radical leftists aiming to destroy America as we know it. And this lie in turn derives a lot of its persuasiveness from a grotesquely distorted view of what life is like in Blue America.”

Krugman notes that “urban elites” are “constantly accused of not understanding real America,” acknowledging that “most big-city residents probably don’t have a good sense of what life is like in rural areas and small towns.”

“I’d argue that right-wing misperceptions of Blue America run far deeper — and are far more dangerous,” Krugman writes. “Let’s start with the politics…. How many Republicans believe that President Biden and other leading Democrats are left-wing radicals, indeed Marxists? Relatedly, I’d like to know how many Republicans believe that Black Lives Matter demonstrators looted and burned large parts of America’s major cities.”

Krugman continues, “Now, the reality is that the modern Democratic Party is a mildly center-left coalition, consisting of what Europeans would call social democrats, and relatively conservative ones at that. To take one measure, I can’t think of any prominent Democrats — actually, any Democratic members of Congress — who have expressed admiration for any authoritarian foreign regime. This is in contrast to widespread conservative admiration for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who recently denounced other Europeans for ‘mixing with non-Europeans’ and declared that he doesn’t want Hungary to become a ‘mixed-race’ country.”

Republicans who live in the Red America bubble, according to Krugman, fail to realize (or simply ignore) that most of the political violence and domestic terrorism in the U.S. has been coming from the far right, not the left.

“On the domestic violence front,” Krugman observes, “a study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 75 percent of extremist-related domestic killings from 2012 to 2021 were perpetrated by the right and only 4 percent by the left. Finally, about (Black Lives Matter): The protests were, in fact, overwhelmingly peaceful. Yes, there was some arson and looting, with total property damage typically estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion.”

Krugman continues, “That may sound like a lot, but America is a big country, so it needs to be put in perspective…. The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.”

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hit 1st and worst [// EJ POC] in terns of systemic trend eg health care/hospitals and

[doh i had seen as escalator/echo source of hype fear]

an 7 22

The internet and the digital revolution have changed journalism dramatically in the United States and other countries. What were once strictly weeklies (Time, Newsweek) now function as dailies on their websites, and daily newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune aim for a national audience. Moreover, something that would have been treated like strictly local news 25 or 30 years ago — for example, two people getting into an angry political argument in a local convenience store in Nevada — can easily become a national story in online journalism.

In the high-tech journalism landscape of 2022, according to Axios reporter Sara Fischer, one of the things that is suffering the most is local journalism. And Fischer, in an article published by Axios on July 4, points out that this “local news crisis” is aggravating the United States’ political divisions.

Discussing a new report from Northwestern University in the Chicago area, Fischer explains, “Around two newspapers in the U.S. are closing every week, according to a new report, suggesting the local news crisis spurred by the pandemic will worsen in coming years. Why it matters: Hyperlocal communities are being disproportionately impacted by the fall of local newspapers compared to bigger cities.”

Penelope Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications and the report’s primary author, described theshortage of local journalism as “a crisis for our democracy and our society” in an official statement on the report. And she elaborated during an interview with Axios.

Abernathy told Axios, “While the economic decline in many communities was occurring prior to the rise of news deserts, the loss of a local news organization will leave local residents without the critical information to begin to address those problems. At a minimum, the loss of local news worsens the political, cultural and economic divisions in this country."

Fischer notes that “news deserts” in the U.S. tend to have more poverty and less education than areas that aren’t news deserts.

“The average median annual income of a home in a news desert is $15,000 less than the average U.S. household,” Fischer observes. “Only 20% of adults living in news deserts have bachelor’s degrees compared to 38% in the U.S. The lack of reliable local news compounds governance issues that make communities less efficient and prosperous.”

Fischer describes the “local newspaper sector” as being “in in a state of terminal decline.”

“More than 360 newspapers shuttered between late 2019 and May 2022, according to the report,” Fischer explains. “The vast majority of those papers were printed weekly. At this rate, the country is on track to lose more than one-third of its total newspapers by 2025. It's already lost more than a quarter, 2500, since 2005.”

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aha covid reveal or ATTACKS [VIRUS PICKS THE LOCK] SYSTEMIC STRUCTUTAL PRPOLEMS/INEQUALITY:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-americas-wealthiest-are-profiting-in-the-time-of-the-pandemic/

is understandably tempting to drop all the blame for America’s catastrophic response to COVID-19 on the big desk in the Oval Office. But there’s more to the story than epic incompetence, grift and delusion at the highest levels of government. The stark divide in the level of health care from testing to treatment is divided by wealth and the legacy of systemic racism.

In the words of Ed Yong of the Atlantic: “Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID-19.” Yong could also add Hispanics to that list, along with virtually any person of limited economic means, regardless of race.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, income and zip code determine everything. And this is not a new phenomenon. In a recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique, historian Thomas Frank quotes physician Dr. Michael A. Shadid, who was a longtime advocate for cooperative health care from the 1920s onward until his death. In his 1947 book, Doctors of Today and Tomorrow, Shadid made the case for socialized medicine on the grounds that “[p]oor people get sick quicker, stay sick longer, need medical aid most, get it least. Some are poor because they are sick. Others are sick because they are poor.”

Nothing has fundamentally changed since Shadid’s time. The United States continues to have the most expensive health care system in the world, yet a 2019 comparison of health indicators in the United States versus those of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries’ averagereveals a system that persistently produces inferior outcomes relative to other nations (in spite of higher expenditures) and has done so for decades.

cOVID-19 has both amplified and revealed these long-standing flaws, tragically reflected in its death count, but it is by no means a historical anomaly. Earlier pandemics reveal a similar pattern, suggesting a more widespread systemic problem: namely, that the high death counts relative to the rest of the world are an inescapable consequence of our for-profit, pervasively oligopolistic health care system. The problems of a for-profit health care system are exacerbated by the diversion of resources and skills into militarism, and unequal food distribution systems’ effect on diet and obesity. All of these pre-existing problems contribute to higher mortality rates, as does access to proper medical care, which is heavily circumscribed by income.

In terms of fatalities, COVID-19 now ranks as one of the most severe pandemics in modern history, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The most deadly was the 1918 influenza pandemic: 50 million deaths globally out of a worldwide population of 1.8 billion, or 2.7 percent, while the U.S. recorded 675,000 fatalities, or 0.65 percent on a per capita basis out of a population of 103 million. The only “good” thing that can be said about the 1918 tragedy is that the United States fared relatively better than the rest of the world, by this measure.

By contrast, a notable feature of four major pandemics over the past 63 years* (the 1957-1958 H2N2 influenza virus, the 1968 H3N2 influenza virus, the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus or so-called “swine flu,” and COVID-19 today) is America’s persistent underperformance in terms of fatalities relative to the rest of the world in spite of the vastly higher sums the country devotes to health care expenditures (in both absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP). For all of the talk about American exceptionalism, the only thing “exceptional” about the U.S. health care system is this profound systemic failure.

The 1957 H2N2 flu virus caused 1.1 million deaths globally out of a worldwide population of 2.9 billion, or 0.038 percent on a per capita basis; whereas in the United States, it caused about 116,000 deaths out of a U.S. population of 178 million, or 0.065 percent on a per capita basis. The 1968 H3N2 virus resulted in 1 million fatalities worldwide out of a global population of 3.6 billion, or 0.028 percent on a per capita basis; in the United States, there were 100,000 deaths out of a population of 203 million, or 0.049 percent on a per capita basis. The 2009 H1N1 virus caused far fewer overall deaths both globally and within the U.S., with 284,000 fatalities globally and a mere 12,469 fatalities in the U.S.; per capita fatality rates were the same (.004 percent on a per capita basis). But COVID-19 has reflected the reversion to American underperformance: as of August 13, confirmed global fatalities (out of a worldwide population of 7.8 billion) were 749,776, or 0.0096 percent on a per capita basis, versus 169,488 deaths in the United States out of an existing population of 331 million, or 0.051 percent on a per capita basis.

Even more disturbing is that American fatalities are profoundly impacted by income disparities. Low-income communities and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) are experiencing substantially higher rates of mortality. Examining by zip code the geographic distribution of the segments of the population most likely to die from COVID-19—BIPOC, as well as people over the age of 65, and those of any age who are nursing home residents (other than those in luxury elderly care facilities)—these three overlapping segments account for most deaths. It may be that in the northern states these most vulnerable people are heavily concentrated in densely populated areas and thus are quickly exposed to infection and die relatively soon after COVID-19 starts spreading in their area. The New York experience validates that assessment.

In the southern and western states, these most vulnerable populations are more widely scattered across vast suburban and rural areas, which likely explains why the United States as a whole has experienced rolling hot spots, in which the more diffuse population centers become infected and die relatively later after the initial outbreaks of the virus that were largely experienced in heavily urbanized regions. We see this pattern manifested in a recent Arizona compilation of new cases by zip code, as AZ Family reports using analysis by CBS 5 Investigates. Arizona has been one of areas most badly affected by COVID-19 during the summer months, and the AZ Family report illustrates that the hotspots for new cases are dominated by zip codes with “large minority populations” living in areas that are rural or on the outskirts of urban centers.

Why is this significant? David Dayen of the American Prospect explains: “Rural hospitals… are in total crisis in the U.S., with 19 closures last year and 120 since 2010. As hospital networks consolidate and strive for ever-greater profits, rural hospitals that fail to bring in the necessary revenue fall away.”

In the same piece, Dayen quotes a study from Health Affairs, which reports that “49 percent of the lowest-income communities had no ICU beds… whereas only 3 percent of the highest-income communities had no ICU beds.” He highlights an extreme example of this problem, originally reported by the Houston Chronicle: the Rio Grande Valley, along the Texas-Mexico border, “home to 1.3 million residents… [with] no public hospital. Starr County is one of the only in America to have to resort to triage, choosing who to care for and who to send home to die.”

Dayen’s analysis illustrates the fundamental flaw in the system: Levels of provision are a function of profitability; they do not reflect health care priorities. Hence the lowest-income hospitals are often shut down, which means worse health care outcomes for residents in these poorly serviced areas.

The other problem in Texas is that the state historically has also featured a high concentration of undocumented (largely Hispanic) immigrants (the second-highest “unauthorized immigrant” population in the U.S., behind only California), who are being forced to work even when sick, since they are, by virtue of their undocumented status, largely excluded from any and all virus-relief economic aid and access to primary health care. As ProPublica noted: “Texas is also the largest state in the nation that refused to expand health insurance for low-income residents under the Affordable Care Act… Nearly a third of adults under 65 in Texas lack health insurance, the worst uninsured rate in the country, and more than 60% of those without health insurance in the state are Hispanic.”

Furthermore, living in crowded multigenerational settings, workers infected on the job come home and risk spreading the illness to their parents and grandparents (many of whom may also have problematic immigration status in the country and risk deportation if they seek to address their health issues). Consequently, Hispanics are now suffering some of the worst health outcomes in the U.S.

With this information in context, it’s clear the more we lay blame at Trump’s feet, the further we’re going to be from confronting that COVID-19 fits neatly into a decades-old pattern of pandemic response. American health care can literally impoverish its citizens even as it undermines their physical well-being. Breaking the pattern can only happen if Americans keep putting pressure on institutionalized racism, get serious about inequality, and flip the switch on our employer-based private health care system.

*Franklin “Chuck” Spinney provided research assistance on the compilation and analysis of the pandemic data.

Marshall Auerbackis a market analyst and commentator.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute

===

omg

https://www:{.buzzfeed:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:news.com/article/annehelenpetersen/forrest-lucas-hammond-pardon-bundy-trump-pence#.syD8RwE3w

no lnx many pix

the last call Oregon rancher Dwight Hammond Jr. made before heading to federal prison on two counts of arson in 2016 was to a man he hardly knew. Forrest Lucas, who made his fortune on oil engine additives, promised Hammond that he would do whatever he could to get him and his son, Steven, out of prison.

Early Tuesday morning aboard Air Force One, en route to the NATO summit, President Donald Trump signed an official clemency order pardoning the two men. Lucas — a 76-year-old Indiana self-made millionaire with tight ties to the Trump administration — had fulfilled his pledge.

For nearly two decades, the Hammonds had been engaged in skirmishes with the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that functions as a go-between for ranchers and the federal land they lease for grazing. They pushed back, often threateningly, on regulations regarding the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, which bordered the Hammonds’ grazing allotment, and they set unpermitted fires on BLM land. After a second fire in 2006, the pair were charged with 19 different crimes, but eventually arranged a plea deal for just two charges of arson on federal land, which carried a minimum of a five-year sentence. The judge declared that such lengthy jail time qualified as cruel and unusual punishment, instead sentencing Dwight to three months and Steven to one year and one day. The pair served their time and returned home. But the federal government successfully appealed the sentence, and on Jan. 4, 2016, the Hammonds were ordered to return to prison.

[US Department of Justice

Steven Hammond (left) and his father, Dwight Hammond, after their arrest.

The verdict brought Ammon and Ryan Bundy — who, along with their father, Cliven, had been involved in an armed confrontation with BLM officials over the management of their grazing allotment in Nevada — to Eastern Oregon. On Jan. 2, Ammon led several hundred people on a peaceful march through Burns, Oregon, in support of the Hammonds. At the end of the march, he made a declaration: Whoever wanted to take a “hard stand” against the government should follow him — thus launching what would become the 41-day armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

The Hammonds, however, weren’t there. Nor did they condone what the Bundys and others had done in their name. When the occupation began, they were back on their ranch with Dave Duquette, Lucas’s close associate.When the Hammonds flew back to a hero’s welcome in Burns, Oregon, it was aboard Lucas’s private jet. Lucas, whose company, Lucas Oil, currently holds naming rights for the Indianapolis Colts’ stadium, has made a pro-agriculture, anti-regulation agenda his mission over the past eight years — and had decided that the Hammonds fit into his larger master plan.

To achieve his goals, Lucas has used a nonprofit he founded, Protect the Harvest — devoted to “working to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own pets” — as well as his close ties to Vice President Mike Pence, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose top adviser is a former employee of Lucas’s. As Duquette puts it, “the access is very good.”

“Most people wouldn’t get involved,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News in early June. “But thank god for Forrest Lucas, because he’s been willing to take on the hard issues.” Among those hard issues: fighting environmental activists, pushing back against regulation, and protecting farmers and ranchers from what they see as federal overreach. That’s why Lucas grew interested in the Hammonds in the first place. “We’re all about affordable food and land use and personal rights,” Duquette explained. The Hammond case “intersects perfectly with the Protect the Harvest mission.”

Protect the Harvest has built a positive rapport with the ag community by sponsoring scholarships and racetracks and film festivals. But the nonprofit has also benefited by inflaming the community’s anxieties that a time-honored way of life is coming to an end — while eliding the fact that its own lobbying on behalf of corporations and against regulations has hastened the destruction of that lifestyle.

For those active in the agricultural world, Lucas has primarily been known for his strong stance on animal regulation, actively opposing attempts to limit or monitor mistreatment of pets and livestock with laws that would, for example, establish minimum spacing for hen cages or veal calf pens, crack down on puppy mills, or prevent intentional mutilation of Tennessee walking horses. A particular target of his efforts has been the Humane Society of the United States — the national organization that has spearheaded the vast majority of initiatives related to animal regulation, and which Lucas has referred to as “terrorists.”

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Ammon Bundy (left), the leader of an anti-government militia, prepares to speak to members of the media in front of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters on Jan. 5, 2016, near Burns, Oregon.

But Lucas’s agenda is hardly limited to cage sizes and puppy mills, as reflected by his support of the Hammonds and, by extension, the Bundys and others opposed to federal control of public lands. And to get what he wants, Lucas has employed a highly sophisticated lobbying and messaging machine, which does everything from funding opposition to municipal spaying and neutering ordinances to orchestrating “range rights” conferences, streamed live on Facebook to an audience of thousands.

Protect the Harvest has spent millions producing web videos and memes that spread across the dozens of Bundy-adjacent Facebook pages that have popped up in the last decade. It also focuses on messaging to children: There are anti-regulatory Protect the Harvest coloring activity sheets, and a pro-ag Protect the Harvest–branded teaching curriculum available for download on their website.In 2015, Lucas began producing feature-length films — starring Hollywood actors like Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, and Jane Seymour — to promote his strongly anti-regulation agenda.

In 2015, Lucas began producing feature-length films — starring Hollywood actors like Sharon Stone, Jon Voight, and Jane Seymour — to promote his strongly anti-regulation agenda.

Lucas’s film and television production studio, the Corona, California–based ESX Entertainment, currently has five films in production — including Stand at Paxton County described as the story of a rancher and his daughter who “face off against state and local authorities who by questionable means relieve local ranchers of their livestock and way of life.”

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After Trump took office, Lucas made the short list of potential appointees for interior secretary. Although Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke ultimately got the job, he has provided an open door to both Lucas and Protect the Harvest. Meanwhile, Brian Klippenstein, who is still listed as PTH’s executive director, now works as senior adviser to Perdue. Pence’s vice presidency has been a boon for Lucas, who, according to a Protect the Harvest spokesperson, has been friends[funder]with Pence since before he took the office of Indiana governor.

In addition to Lucas’s own role as one of Trump’s agricultural advisers, public records indicate that Lucas met with Zinke in April 2017 to discuss wild horses, grazing access issues, and national monument designations. In October, when Pence flew to attend an Indianapolis Colts game, abruptly leaving when players knelt during the national anthem, he first spent time posing for photos with Lucas and Duquette. Protect the Harvest also has ties to former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who was a featured speaker at a Protect the Harvest event in Indianapolis on Jan. 26, 2016.

Protect the Harvest / Facebook

Lucas, the Hammonds, and Duquette on Lucas's private plane back to Burns.

Lucas’s investment in the Hammonds — and the Bundys, who’ve been invited to Protect the Harvest–sponsored forums — is a means to an end. They have become symbols of the way many rural Americans feel they’ve been wronged byfederal overreach, and Lucas, much like Trump, leverages those feelings to build support for one of his overriding goals: wide-scale deregulation of big business.

This is the story of how Forrest Lucas became the behind-the-scenes architect of a multipronged political and propaganda machine — unknown to most Americans, yet with an outsize influence on the current administration and the way millions think of their rural way of life, the industries that shape it, and the government’s role within it.

“This administration has been pretty good at asking for problems,” Duquette explained. “And then addressing them.” The Hammond pardon is the first such Protect the Harvest “problem” that’s been directly addressed on the national stage. But with Lucas’s direct access to multiple wings of the administration, it’s unlikely to be the last.

Dave Duquette /Facebook

Lucas, Duquette, and Ramona Hage Morrison at the Department of the Interior.

To understand why an incredibly wealthy man like Lucas would care about the fate of a pair of Oregon ranchers, you have to consider the concept of “the harvest” as Lucas is using it: a stand-in for everything from actual crop yields to what he views as the fundamental right to make a living as one sees fit off the land. In tax filings, Protect the Harvest describes its mission as educational: “to ensure accurate information is communicated to the general public with the rise of various groups threatening to end modern agriculture and hunting in the United States.”

In practice, this “accurate information” has centered on a cluster of issues that are closely tied to Big Ag’s priorities: portraying animal rights activists and environmentalists as out-of-touch liberals bent on ending the rural way of life; characterizing regulation and federal oversight, particularly on public lands, as a means of curtailing American liberty; and advocating for and providing platforms for public figures — such as the Hammonds — to function as symbols of widespread persecution of the ag community.

That this apparatus was built in just eight years, by a man with little in the way of a visible political profile, is a testament to what a few million dollars can do in our current American ideological landscape. And while Lucas may seem like an unlikely political figure, his “all-American” rise, and the obstacles that defined it, go a long way toward explaining the ardor and anger fueling his cause.

While Lucas may seem like an unlikely political figure, his “all-American” rise goes a long way toward explaining the ardor and anger fueling his cause.

At age 76, Lucas has deep brown hair that seems to belie the natural aging process. When he speaks with the press, he tends to wear shirts emblazoned with the Lucas Oil logo of his company, or a race car jersey. He’s the sort of man who’d commission a documentary about his own life — titledAmerican Real: The Forrest Lucas Story— show it at a film festival, and then make it nearly impossible for anyone to view it again. He considers himself an embodiment of the American dream: a boy who, as he tells it, grew up without electricity in rural Indiana but then, over decades of hard work and fair dealings, scraped his way to a multimillion-dollar company.

Born in 1942, Lucas grew up on a farm in Elkinsville, Indiana — living, as he put it, “pretty much like people lived in the 1800s.” “Most people now could only read about that,” he said, “but I got to see the tail end of it. Most people think it’s kind bucolic, but it’s actually a pretty hard way to go.” According to Lucas, when he was 9 years old, he got his start as an entrepreneur by going door-to-door, barefooted, selling a supposed miracle cure called Cloverine Salve.

Lucas was, in many ways, a typical farm kid. He’d wake in the morning to take care of the cows and pigs, go to school, and return home to care for them again. At age 15, he left home to work at a cattle ranch in Harrison County, near the Kentucky state line. He graduated high school, then, as he later put it, “went to a long college called hard knocks.” By age 18, Lucas was a married man with a child — and left the ranching life to make a living for his family, hauling dirt, finding odd construction jobs, selling Singer sewing machines, and working a muffler assembly line at night.

But what Lucas really wanted was a semi. “I’d see these guys going down the road,” he said, “and maybe they were going somewhere. I wanted to get into the truck and go somewhere.” At 21, he pulled together enough money to buy his first semi — the first in what would eventually become a fleet. Two years later, the creek that ran near his childhood farm would be dammed in order to power the nearby city of Bloomington. The entirety of Lucas’s hometown of Elkinton was acquired through eminent domain. His childhood farm was gone, superseded by the needs of those in the city nearby.

Lucas didn’t make his fortune on trucks. He made it on oil additives, created using a “secret formula” that Lucas claims to have discovered almost by accident and which, his company claims, has seemingly miraculous effects on the performance of engines: It reduces wear, lengthens engine life, improves gas mileage, and makes motors run quieter, among other things. Lucas Oil is marketed to car aficionados, gearheads, and truckers with aging rigs.

Getty Images; Alamy

In the ’80s, Lucas Oil began putting its logo on race cars as a means of advertising. The Lucases bought a cattle ranch in Cross Timbers, Missouri, that has grown to 15,000 acres, with over 3,000 cattle. They opened an oil processing plant in Corona, California, and a second one in Corydon, Indiana, where they also purchased the local railroad. In 2011, Lucas acquired a television channel, MAVTV, and filled it with races featuring cars emblazoned with the Lucas Oil logo. “I realized several years ago that people were starting to [skip] commercials,” Lucas told Autoweek. “We needed to be in the TV show itself, more so than just be on the car.”

Lucas began to acquire the entire means of production: He sponsored the cars, he built or bought the tracks, he owned the broadcasting network, and when the production company he’d employed to make commercials went bankrupt, he bought their gear and trained his loading dock employees to operate it, moving to a dilapidated Sunkist factory in Corona. By 2012, at least 700 different racing teams wore the Lucas Oil logo; today, many of those teams have transitioned to wearing the logo for Protect the Harvest. It’s vertical integration, done the Lucas way: first to promote his oil brand, now to promote his ideological one.

Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

“The thing that’s interesting about Lucas — I don’t think anyone realizes what kind of reach he has,” a correspondent for Speed magazine said in 2012. Apart from the racing, Lucas’s name and brand is broadcast into millions of homes every week via nationally televised games at Lucas Oil Stadium. The $121.5 million gambit, which affixes the Lucas Oil name to the stadium where the Indianapolis Colts play until 2028, launched Lucas and his second wife, Charlotte, onto the radar of the Indiana elite. Suddenly, the farm boy was a person to know.

The Indianapolis elite began actively courting his full-time return from California, where he’d been running Lucas Oil for decades. “Forrest would be a big fish in this pond,” then-mayor Bart Peterson told Indianapolis Monthly in 2007. “He would be somebody who would be noticed, because of his roots, and the fact that he’s proud of those roots.” In 2010, the Lucases purchased a sprawling mansion, known as Le Chateau Renaissance, outside of Indianapolis, with the primary intention to use it for fundraisers and benefits. He added a 220,000-square-foot expansion to his Indiana plant, effectively making it the home base for Lucas Oil operations. Seven decades removed from an electricity-less farm in Elkinsville, Indiana, Forrest Lucas had arrived.

Like many who find their fortunes secure, Lucas decided to throw his newfound influence around. He began donating to political figures — to then-governor Pence, but also to multiple representatives in Missouri, where Lucas ran a cattle ranch. It was there, in 2010, that he took on his first major political fight against Missouri’s Proposition B, colloquially known as the “puppy mill bill.” The bill aimed to limit dog breeding facilities to 50 unspayed/unneutered animals, which would effectively eliminate the “puppy mill” industry in the states where such facilities are most concentrated.

“We’ve got to go on the offense. We’ve got to start staking out ag turf.”

For outsiders, regulating dog breeding and preventing abuses might seem like an easy call, but to dog breeders, it felt like a threat to their way of life. The fight over Proposition B became a proxy for a much larger battle, between animal rights activists — and HSUS in particular — and the agricultural industry writ large. Prop B ultimately passed with 51.59% of the vote — only to be overturned by the Missouri legislature. The struggle over Proposition B emboldened Lucas. Together with other ag producers, he constructed a blueprint for a larger organization that would promote the interests of agriculture. “We’ve got to go on the offense,” Erik Helland, then-majority whip of the Iowa House of Representatives, and one of early architects of this organization, said. “We’ve got to start staking out ag turf.”

In 2012, Protect the Harvest filed paperwork with the FEC to create a political action committee known as the Protect the Harvest Action Fund.Brian Klippenstein — the son of a longtime Missouri state senator, who’d spent the previous five years as then-senator Kit Bond’s chief of staff— became the group’s executive director. While Klippenstein comes from a long ranching heritage, he has the polish and hairstyle of someone who’s spent decades rubbing elbows in DC. According to his Protect the Harvest bio, Klippenstein has “completed over 50 marathons, including over a dozen 50-milers and four single-day 100-milers…all fueled by a high-protein diet centered around nutrient-dense red meat.”

Source: Pro Publica Nonprofit Explorer

Protect the Harvest expenditures 2012-2016

Between 2012 and 2016, the latest year for which tax returns are available, Protect the Harvest Action Fund has spent close to $4 million on influence and lobbying activities. (All tax filings are available here.) Since 2012, the vast majority of Protect the Harvest’s PAC money has been directed toward supporting “Right to Farm” legislation and combating initiatives, most of them spearheaded by the HSUS, that Lucas’s group sees as infringing upon agricultural liberty. The language of contemporary Right to Farm amendments guarantees farmers and ranchers the right to engage in their livelihoods and produce food for others. If that sounds vague, it’s purposeful: It’s less intended to address a current threat than future ones. In practice, it helps bolster the feeling that an industry is vulnerable.

You can get a sense of that perceived vulnerability in a post in ranching publication Drovers, written by cattle genetics specialist Jared Wareham: “Our industry has plead [sic] for a way to help block and then counterpunch anti-ag initiatives and the well-funded organizations that spearhead those efforts,” Wareham writes. “It is unnerving to know that if left unmonitored, these groups could lead initiatives to change the laws of a state or influence the language of those laws so something we have done for a living could be unlawful. If these organizations can win battles in one state, it could easily open the door to successes in other states.”

And who happens to be defending the industry from this alleged war? Protect the Harvest, which Wareham describes as “the shield of armor we’ve been looking for.”

Protect The Harvest / Facebook

Protect the Harvest’s first foray into the fray came in Missouri, where it offered broad media support for a 2014 Right to Farm amendment, copied from a 2012 version drafted in North Dakota. For that campaign, Lucas enlisted then–state senator Mike Parson, who is now governor, and to whom Lucas has given more than $175,000 in campaign donations. The two men first connected in 2010, during the campaign against Proposition B. After it passed, Parson, whose district included Lucas’s cattle ranch and one of his speedways, sponsored the legislation that effectively defanged the bill. From 2013 to 2015, Parson served as the treasurer of Protect the Harvest, and when Parson ran for lieutenant governor in 2016, Lucas and his wife campaigned alongside him; after he won, he framed a Protect the Harvest poster in his office.

In North Dakota, the Right to Farm amendment had sailed to an easy victory, winning two-thirds of the vote. But in Missouri, it was hotly contested. One public radio story framed it as pitting “farmer against farmer,” leaving little way for small producers to defend against the incursion and growth of larger ones. Protect the Harvest argued, “Our rights don’t come from government. They are God-given freedoms that come with our humanity. However, bureaucrats and activist judges have made it clear that they will not respect those rights unless they are codified in statutes or constitutions.” Together, both sides spent a total of $1.5 million on messaging. The amendment barely passed, eking out 50.12% of the final vote.

A version of the amendment then migrated to Oklahoma, where Protect the Harvest was joined in support by the Oklahoma Cattlemen’s Association, the Oklahoma Farm Bureau, and the Oklahoma Pork Council.Their opposition, led by HSUS, the Sierra Club, the ASPCA, and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, argued that the bill, SQ 777, would make it impossible to act if and when ag polluted or otherwise threatened a water source or the land.

“I work with family farmers from all over the state,” said Adam Price, a representative of the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. “And I can say with absolute certainty that SQ 777 was not conceived with them in mind.” The “yes” argument was crystallized in a television ad created by Protect the Harvest: “Have you seen the ads attacking 777? ALL LIES. Paid for by the same out-of-state animal rights groups that oppose the right to hunt and fish.”

In the end, the Yes side lost by 20 points — the first major defeat for the new wave of Right to Farm legislation and Protect the Harvest.Brian Jones, an attorney who spent a year working for the “no” side, links the amendment’s failure to reactivated memory: “Most people in Oklahoma have an agricultural heritage, meaning their grandparents or parents were farmers,” he told BuzzFeed News. “One of the consequences of the industrialization of ag is that fewer and fewer people are involved in it. Most of what is out there, in the market right now, is Big Ag.”

During this same period in the ’90s, there was enormous consolidation in ag production — basically, big farms buying up smaller ones — that marked an end to many farming families’ way of life. “There were some fights about all this back then,” Jones said. “But 777 reraised all these questions: Where did the jobs go? What happened to the people?”

Protect The Harvest / Facebook

In Missouri, Protect the Harvest had effectively mobilized those rural anxieties, papering over the role of larger industrial and legislative forces that had ended that way of life years before. In Oklahoma, that project failed — but their defeat has only served to bolster Protect the Harvest’s argument that outsiders are determined to fight against one’s “right to farm.” (In an email to BuzzFeed News, a spokesman responded to a question about the effects of deregulation on small farms with the following statement: “Protect the Harvest supports all forms of agriculture. Our mission is to educate and inform the public about issues that impact our American traditions, heritage and way of life. There are many overreaching regulations that impact farms, both large and small which ultimately affect the American public as both large and small farms feed our nation.”)

Lucas’s design to “protect” the harvest has largely entailed fighting regulation. Like many conservative operatives, Protect the Harvest views any type of regulation, whether on the hours a long-haul trucker can legally drive or the conditions for raising chickens, as unnecessary and restrictive incursions on free enterprise, but one area of particular interest has been wild horses.

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Back in 2012, Dave Duquette attempted to bring a horse slaughterhouse to his hometown of Hermiston, Oregon, promising much-needed economic stimulus to the area, but local leaders balked at the prospect of the town being equated with a taboo industry. Fast-forward six years, and Duquette is the “equine specialist” for Protect the Harvest.

Duquette, who is rarely without his cowboy hat and a cowboy shirt embroidered with the Protect the Harvest or Lucas Oil logo, has spearheaded Protect the Harvest’s efforts to change the messaging around wild horse management from cruelty to benevolence.

“It was really scary to be targeted by that machine.”

“American wild horses are suffering due to overcrowding, which has led to starvation and death,” the opening to a four-part series on Protect the Harvest’s homepage claims. “We have the opportunity and obligation to protect them from long and painful suffering by controlling their numbers.” A 15-minute PTH-produced video, titled “Horses in Crisis,” features an array of sick and starving horses, as well as ranchers and others condemning “horse advocates” for their lack of knowledge about horses on the range. “It’s time to bring facts, reason, and a special perspective to an issue dominated by emotion,” a solemn-voiced narrator says. The overarching message: Those who deal with wild horses on the land should dictate how to manage horses on the land, and not faraway regulators.

That was Duquette’s message in 2015, when he visited Nevada in support of a rancher named Kevin Borba, who had repeatedly and progressively flouted rules governing the treatment of wild horses on his grazing allotment. Duquette posted a picture of Borba in a Protect the Harvest–branded four-wheeler, out to “document” the “lies” spread by Laura Leigh, who was heading up an experimental fertility control program on the horses. Protect the Harvest created a series of videos framing Borba as a victim of the BLM, whose “mismanagement hurts both the horses and the ranchers whose livelihood are being taken away.” According to Leigh, an initial version of the video, later taken down, included her name, prompting immediate harassment. (Protect the Harvest disputes this claim.) “I was getting a dozen death threats with my morning coffee,” Leigh told BuzzFeed News. “It was really scary to be targeted by that machine.”

George Frey / Getty Images

Wild horses are held in a BLM holding/adoption facility after being rounded up from BLM land in the western United States on June 1, 2017, in Delta, Utah.

Lucas has repeatedly referred to HSUS and animal rights activists as “terrorists” intent on “passing laws to ruin America” that deliberately impugn the small-time farmer’s way of life. Lucas’s political donations and Protect the Harvest’s messaging around ballot initiatives underlined that ideology. But to make those ideologies even more robust and persuasive required something more effective than political ads. They needed propaganda.

Propaganda is anything from a pamphlet to a television program that attempts to make an argument for a particular political stance, whether on the right, left, or center — but much of it can be heavy-handed, simplistic, or misleading. When it comes to agriculture and animal rights issues, both sides of the issue produce propaganda. But only one side has its own film studio.

When Lucas first started producing television programming for his television channel, the focus was vehicles to broaden his company’s name recognition. “We got into the entertainment business to sell oil,” Lucas once said. “And nothing is more entertaining than fast cars, trucks, planes, and boats.” By 2015, his intentions had expanded. “For me, venturing into the film business is not about money, glamour or fun,” Lucas said. “It’s about being able to deliver messages and having a viable vehicle to do so.”

“For me, venturing into the film business is not about money, glamour, or fun. It’s about being able to deliver messages and having a viable vehicle to do so.”

But what sort of “messages” did Lucas want to transmit? Protect the Harvest messages.

Last year’s Pray for Rain, starring Jane Seymour, suggests that corrupt environmentalists, in league with shady gangsters, are prolonging the terrible drought afflicting Central California and threatening the livelihoods of desperate local farmers.Running Wild, also from 2017 and starring Sharon Stone — who also coproduced — depicts a wild horse advocate, whom Laura Leigh believes is loosely based on her, as an evil villain trying to shut down a horse rehabilitation program. The 2016 film The Dog Lover, featuring Lea Thompson, involves a young woman who volunteers with an animal protection group to go undercover at a puppy mill — only to discover that the organization is far more dangerous than the “mill” itself, which, turns out, is actually a kindhearted breeding operation.

ESX films are regularly panned by critics, do not receive theatrical releases, and go straight to video or VOD. But profits, according to Lucas, are secondary. They’re reaching an audience: ag families who don’t feel that their way of life is represented accurately onscreen, and those who may not know a thing about agriculture but will be called upon to vote or think about the issues represented in the films. Watch The Dog Lover, for example, without much understanding of the dog breeding industry, and it’s easy to believe that “puppy mills” are an idea concocted by manipulative animal rights activists who have no idea what they’re talking about.

ESX Entertainment

The feature films are only one arm of Protect the Harvest’s messaging apparatus. Back in 2014, Lucas commissioned a documentary about his life (produced by advertising company MARC USA), which screened at the Heartland Film Festival. (Earlier that month, Lucas’s wife, Charlotte, had drawn national attention for a Facebook post, later deleted, that declared, “I’m sick and tired of minorities running our country! As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think that atheists (minority), muslims (minority) or any other minority group has the right to tell the majority of people in the United States what they can and cannot do here. Is everyone so scared that they can’t fight for what’s right or wrong with this country?”)

The day after the Facebook post, Lucas — who has previously acknowledged that his workforce is largely composed of immigrants — issued a full-page apology in the Indianapolis Star for his wife’s post, explaining that it did not “reflect the feelings in her heart,” and underlining that Lucas Oil “is proud to have employees, friends, customers, and business partners reflecting ethnic and racial diversity.”

Apart from the films, Protect the Harvest maintains a robust Facebook presence: Its page currently has 258,000-plus followersand posts links, petitions, editorials, and memes five or six times a day. The Protect the Harvest website features links to civics workbooks that can be suggested as additions to local curriculum; at the bottom of the first page, a logo declares, “You could be forced to give up your freedom to hunt, fish, and own animals. Learn more at ProtectTheHarvest.com.” For class activities, the workbook suggests observing the judicial branch at work in movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, My Cousin Vinny, or Protect the Harvest’s own The Dog Lover. For kids, there’s a section of downloadable coloring sheets bordered with “PROTECT YOUR PET! PROTECT AMERICA! PROTECT THE HARVEST.COM!”

In Range magazine — an independently owned quarterly publication full of beautiful rural landscapes and essays about how “the U.S. government has inflicted 40 years of abuse on Nevada’s Hage family” — Protect the Harvest now occupies about half of the ad space, promoting Protect the Harvest films and the Hammond pardon. Partnering with Range, Protect the Harvest has helped fund three “Range Rights” conferences — in Layton, Utah; in Bellevue, Nebraska; and in Modesto, California.

The two-day conference was founded in 2015 as a way to harness the energy following the Bundys’ Malheur occupation; attendants include a mix of Malheur devotees and local ranchers. In Modesto this April, the attendance hovered around 40, and half the attendees were speakers themselves — but the real range rights audience was online, where each of the speeches was streamed in full.Rep. Devin Nunes,once part of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, attacked the press; the local sheriff emphasized that his officers knew to look the other way when local ranchers had an unlicensed firearm. The daughter of LaVoy Finicum spoke about the legacy of her father, the rancher who was killed by Oregon State Police in what have become heavily contested circumstances, effectively rendering him a martyr for the Bundy movement. Finally,Ammon Bundy preached the latest chapter in the family’s gospel, emphasizing that environmentalists are “an enemy to humans” practicing their own heretical religion.

The entire event was hosted by Trent Loos, a Nebraska farmer, member of President Trump’s Agricultural Advisory Committee, and one of Protect the Harvest’s most visible activists, united with Lucas in his fierce opposition to HSUS. (When HSUS began using Michael Vick’s role in dogfighting and other forms of animal abuse to make the case for tougher legislation, Loos wrote that Vick was being persecuted for “not ... treating his dog like a kid.”) With his bushy mustache and ranching vest, Loos — who pleaded no contest in 2005 to charges of cattle fraud — looks the part of the cowboy, and will play one in a forthcoming PTH film.In Modesto, Loos took the stage with Nunes. “As a member of the ag committee, we have a certain level of frustration that we haven’t drained the swamp quicker, that we still have old-school bureaucrats in the positions of decision-making,” he said. “So how do we get that fixed? Because obviously there’s a bigger plug in the swamp than anticipated.”

Juice Images Ltd / Getty Images

At that point, Protect the Harvest had been working to “unplug” the swamp for well over a year. When journalist Michael Lewis began investigating the transition officials appointed by the Trump administration, he zeroed in on Brian Klippenstein’s USDA role. In an interview with Fresh Air, Lewis described Protect the Harvest as an organization that sees its job “as essentially trolling the Humane Society,” and is “hypersensitive to animal rights people and tries to respond to animal rights activists wherever it can.” USDA employees found Klippenstein’s appointment odd because, as Lewis put it, “one of the things the USDA does is stand up for the rights of animals in animal-people disputes.”

Dogfighting, circuses, animal slaughter, animal testing — the USDA is charged with documenting and monitoring those operations. In the subsequent weeks, Klippenstein alone took on the responsibilities of a transition team that usually would’ve been entrusted to a team of at least 20. Through his briefings, he became intent on figuring out which of the existing Department of Agriculture employees had been researching climate change and its ramifications.

The request was denied, but Klippenstein made his mark in other ways. He now serves as a senior adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, who has overseen the removal of USDA documents detailing past animal inspections, enforcement actions, and annual reports on 7,800 different facilities. The removal was prompted by a lawsuit, filed during the Obama administration, alleging that a report identifying Tennessee walking horse owners as “violators” of anti-soring regulations impinged on their rights to due process and privacy. To address the suit, Perdue has removed all records.

According to Duquette, Lucas first brought up the idea of a pardon to then-governor Pence before Trump’s election.

The move was celebrated by Tennessee walking horse groups, but it has broader beneficiaries: practitioners of industrial agriculture, whose husbandry, living, and slaughter practices are also monitored by the USDA. The lack of publicly accessible monitoring records will make it increasingly difficult to prosecute, legislate, or otherwise regulate current agricultural practices.

“We’re lucky with the things this administration has been doing,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News. “It’s been really good to deal with, and find problems to fix. That’s probably been the best thing to happen for animal agriculture, the pet industry, and the food supply.”

This sort of access and influence helps explain how the Hammonds’ appeal made its way to President Trump’s desk. According to Duquette, Lucas first brought up the idea of a pardon to then-governor Pence before Trump’s election. When Lucas and Pence had dinner in May, Lucas brought up the case again, making the argument for a commuted sentence. Soon after, the case was moved to the office of Pence’s chief counsel.

“You know, it’s ‘a squeaky wheel gets the grease’ deal,” Duquette told BuzzFeed News. “And I know the president needs help from people to highlight injustices.” Since late May, Protect the Harvest’s social media accounts have been in overdrive eliciting popular support for the Hammonds’ cause. Protect the Harvest has also moved to distance itself and their cause from the Bundys, who’ve been grouped with the Hammonds since the days of the standoff.

Indeed, Duquette believes that if the Malheur occupation hadn’t happened, the Hammonds would’ve been pardoned long ago. “I don’t disagree with [the Bundys’] issues, but the tactics are...” he said, pausing for a moment. “I understand the tactics because of their frustration with what they’ve had to deal with over the years.”

During the occupation, Duquette and Trent Loos posed for a photo with Ammon Bundy;while a representative from Protect the Harvest has denied offering material support to the occupiers, Todd Macfarlane — a lawyer, Bundy supporter, and standoff spokesperson — blogged that Protect the Harvest had made “its people, resources and checkbook available.” Protect the Harvest counters that a representative “went to Malheur Refuge one week into the occupation to do an interview with Ammon Bundy.”

But as the Hammond petition made its way to the White House, Duquette told BuzzFeed News that he called Ammon Bundy to let him know that Protect the Harvest would be publicly distancing itself from the Bundy family. Still, the Bundys threw themselves behind the pardon petition, posting multiple links to it. When the news was announced, the Bundy Ranch Facebook page’s post alluded to the connection: “Thank you @POTUS for carrying out justice and pardoning Oregon ranchers Dwight & Steven Hammond. Many ranchers in the West have suffered under the heavy hand of the federal government. These men are great patriots.”

Pardoning the Hammonds suggests not only that this particular case was mistreated, but that fears of government are warranted.

Duquette acknowledges that a Hammond pardon will be treated as a win for the Bundys and their supporters. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he said. “The president would have an outpouring of support in the West, and throughout the Midwest, from all the people that are his base for doing this. It would show a good sign of goodwill for all the people out there.”

To pardon the Hammonds is to ratify that their case, like so much of what Protect the Harvest lobbies against, is an example of federal overreach — engineered by ignorant outsiders who resent and misunderstand the people who make American life possible. As Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte phrased it in a public statement, “President Trump’s decision to pardon Dwight and Steven Hammond is a win for property rights and our way of life.”

But like so many of the issues on which Protect the Harvest’s advocacy pivots, the reality is far less stark. The Hammonds were sentenced for committing arson on federal land. An appeals court vacated that sentence because it did not satisfy the mandatory minimum sentencing requirements, and resentenced them for the mandatory minimum for that crime. Apart from the back-burning, the Hammonds have a long history of taunting BLM management and flouting their regulation. Like the Bundys, the Hammonds have long believed that the federal, public land they pay pennies on the dollar to graze should be considered their own, to manage as they please — including setting fires. The federal government, at least for the time being, disagrees.

Pardoning the Hammonds suggests not only that this particular case was mistreated, but that fears of government overreach are warranted — and that Trump will continue to act in a way that acknowledges those fears.

[Protesters on horseback ride above a rally site in Bunkerville, Nevada, April 12, 2014.

All over ag country, Oregon to Arkansas, small schools are closing their doors. Part of the reason is that the consolidation of agriculture — larger farms gobbling up smaller ones to stay alive — has made it impossible for those onetime small farmers to remain. The population of the small town dwindles, and the schools close, which makes it even less desirable for others to move to that town, provide services, attract jobs, or maintain the “way of life” associated with rural America.

When you look at the Protect the Harvest logo, you don’t see a family. You don’t see a way of life. You don’t see a person at all. You see a combine harvester — one of the primary advances in farming technology that led the agricultural industry to the place it is today. “All of their imagery is of big, beautiful tractors churning through a commodity crop, essentially dripping Lucas Oil,” Ryan Bell, a journalist and close observer of fights around the agricultural way of life, told BuzzFeed News.

Protect the Harvest and Lucas Oil logos are displayed at Dover International Speedway on May 6, 2018, in Dover, Delaware.

“But that tractor, that’s what took the community away from ranching. It undercuts a long-term, sustainable agrarian society,” he said. “There’s no need for a big family to work the farm, and no need for the family you have to stick around. Today, a man might have a thousand acres of corn, and he’s tilling it all alone with a $250,000 combine. His kid’s gone. And oddly enough, this is exactly the type of person who’s pretty susceptible to Protect the Harvest rhetoric.”

There are dozens of intersecting reasons for the end of the agrarian way of life. Some of them stem from bad legislation, improper federal regulation, and advocacy from groups with little sense of the larger effects of a disruption in the food chain. There is an impending food crisis in the world’s future. To solve it, however — while also preserving the Earth long enough for our descendants to confront that crisis — all sides of the issue need to spend less time creating bogeymen of the others; less time on “offense” or “defense.”

The production of food may be an industry, but it’s not a game. Whether in the form of government subsidies or a vaunted position within the American imaginary, the harvest has been protected for centuries.

Taken separately, Protect the Harvest’s initiatives — the feature films, the fight against HSUS, the move to root out those studying global warming, the Right to Farm advocacy, the Hammond pardon — none of it seems, on its face, like a means of protecting business interests. It’s only when examined together, as part of a larger, motivating whole, that Lucas’s actual passion becomes clear. It’s not the small-time farmer. It’s certainly not the harvest. It’s not dogs, or hunting, or horses. Forrest Lucas prides himself on his identity as an all-American man. And nothing is more all-American than unfettered industry, and the profits that flow from it.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Missoula, Montana.

Contact Anne Helen Petersen at anne.helen.petersen@buzzfeed.com.

Ken Bensinger

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Contact Ken Bensinger at ken.bensinger@buzzfeed.com.

also hernandez

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/marco-rubios-final-humiliation-gops-seven-year-campaign-against-key-obama-policy-was-just-terminated-by-the-supreme-court/

“Q: Did Marco Kill Obamacare?” asked a 2015 tweet from the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., before presumptively answering the question: “A: You bet he did.”

OK, so who wants to tell him?

Rubio, like his fellow failed presidential aspirant Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, staked his campaign on bringing down Barack Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Rubio began his specific effort to sabotage the law in 2013, a few short years after entering the Senate and before setting out to win the White House. Seven years later, the Supreme Court made clear what was otherwise evident then: Rubio and his fellow Republicans didn’t kill Obamacare, they only made it a bigger mess.

While Cruz’s infamous stunt to undermine the ACA by shutting down the government — complete with his 2013 reading of Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor — proved he was willing to “troll the libs” at any cost, Rubio’s less flashy legal assault was meant to cement his status as the Obama-slayer.

At the time, Rubio was still making an attempt to burnish his Tea Party bonafides. As congressional Republicans unsuccessfully voted to defund the ACA more than 50 times he went on the warpath against an obscure portion of the law meant to safeguard participating insurance companies against crippling financial loss as a result of the new requirement to cover clients with pre-existing conditions. Under what was known as “risk corridors,” the law helped some companies defer the cost of lower premiums in the early days of the ACA marketplaces. If an insurance company priced its plans less than 3% below a set target, the government would cover the losses. Conversely, an insurer that benefited from millions of new customers under the law’s individual mandate had to pay its excess profits to the government. Ultimately, the goal was to entice more insurers on the markets, leading to lower prices for consumers. Like the ACA itself, risk corridors have a Republican pedigree and were even included inGeorge W. Bush’s Medicare Part D program .

Still Rubio picked the program to push forward his presidential ambition by promoting what he thought would prove a poison pill to the larger health care law.

Decrying it as a “taxpayer bailout,” he testified against risk corridors as the star witness at a House Oversight Committee hearing and penned op-eds against the program. In a classic case of a solution in search of a problem, Rubio claimed that the ACA was suffering a “death spiral,” an actuarial term used to describe a marketplace spinning out of control, to push for the demise of the law’s infrastructure. Although Rubio didn’t actually sponsor the provision in Congress’ 2014 appropriations bill that prevented the federal government from using certain funds to make the required payments to insurers, he took credit for it. The Rubio-inspired provision also required the program to become budget-neutral.

The Republican rider effectively pulled the rug out from under insurers. After companies had already locked in their 2015 rates on the assurance of a government stopgap, Congress changed the rules such that the federal government could only afford to pay 13 cents of every dollar owed to the insurance companies. Insurers compiled an overall loss of $5.5 billion the year after the Republicans blocked one avenue of funding. The risk corridors were a temporary program, which expired after 2016, but insurers ultimately lost $12 million due to Rubio’s shenanigans.

“So far, we’ve succeeded in stopping the Obama administration from bailing out healthcare companies under ObamaCare, and it’s critical that Congress once again stand with taxpayers to stop any taxpayer bailout of health insurers from happening,” Rubio wrote to Republican leadership at the time.

As lawyers for the insurance companies argued before the Supreme Court, Rubio and congressional Republicans orchestrated “a massive government bait-and-switch.” Republicans weren’t able to muster the votes to repeal the ACA outright, so they just tried to bail out on the law’s statutory obligations. The end result was weakened Obamacare markets with fewer insurers and higher premiums. Premiums that, as the Supreme Court just ruled, must still be subsidized by the federal government.

On Monday, the Supreme Court voted in an 8-1 decision against Rubio’s gimmick to take down Obamacare. Justice Samuel Alito was the sole dissenter, arguing that the decision provides “a massive bailout for insurance companies that took a calculated risk and lost.” Writing for the majority, Justice Sonia Sotomayor relied on what she called “a principle as old as the nation itself: The government should honor its obligations.” Republicans in Congress could not simply decline to fund the program, the Supreme Court ruled. The government still has to pay insurers $12 billion all of these years later.

So the man Donald Trump derided as “Little Marco” didn’t win the White House, and didn’t kill off Obamacare either. He simply drove small insurers out of rural America, leaving many coverage areas with no competition in the marketplace. In effect, he created a monopoly by driving out small insurers, quite likely so he could attract Koch brothers funding for his ill-fated presidential campaign.

Of course this was all eminently predictable, according to a plain reading of the relevant laws and long-standing jurisprudence. But Rubio’s instance on a vanity campaign that cost millions of dollars and denied millions of people access to affordable health care feels like more than a pathetic afterthought now, as our embattled health care system struggles to meet the challenge of a global pandemic.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/kentuckys-gravy-train-is-now-in-danger-thanks-to-mitch-mcconnells-heartless-greed/

no lnx

Kentucky’s gravy train is now in danger — thanks to Mitch McConnell’s heartless greed

Written by Daily Kos Staff April 26, 2020

As of 48 hours ago, few people knew that Kentucky was the nation’s leading recipient of federal largess, and certainly had no clue just how much the state received compared to the rest of the country. Then, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican from Kentucky, started whining about “Blue state bailouts,” and the shit has hit the fan.

Andrew Cuomo

@NYGovCuomo

NY has given $116 billion more to the federal government than we received since 2015.

Kentucky *took* $148 billion more from the federal government than it gave.

Just give NY our money back, Senator McConnell.

Embedded video

Looks like it’s time to reexamine Kentucky’s privileged status.

Blue states have been happy to carry the burden of funding red states for … kinda forever. California, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, in particular, have pumped untold hundreds of billions over the last several decades into mostly rural red states.

That dynamic carries forth in states themselves, with large urban centers paying for rural regions, like the upstate-downstate divisions in Illinois and New York, or Philly-central Pennsylvania.

And that would be fine! Liberals are okay with helping out those that are less well off. Liberals have no problem with the federal government subsidizing telephone and mail service to rural areas—services that would not be justified by capitalistic math. We’re okay subsidizing rural health care. We’re okay subsidizing rural education, or opioid treatments, or transportation networks (e.g. roads).

The problem here isn’t our willingness as liberals to help our disproportionately rural Conservative brothers and sisters. The problem is twofold: 1) the bullshit pretense that these same people are “anti-government” and that urban liberals are somehow feeding off the government trough, and 2) the refusal of these same assholes to help when blue states get hit with catastrophe. Instead, Mitch McConnells and his asshole buddies suddenly discover the evils of the budget deficit—a deficit that wouldn’t be so large if Kentucky wasn’t bleeding the country dry.

Still, once upon a time, liberals and Blue states were like “whatever, we’ve got it good, we’re the United States of America. We’ll help.” But McConnell’s toxic brew of greed and cruelty has shattered that pretense.

Conservatives have pretended for far too long that it is they, the “heartland,” the “real America,” that supposedly makes this country great, and it is the cities, the Brown and Black people, the feminists, the liberals, who are dragging it down. Yet it is us paying for their infrastructure, for their health care, for their Medicare and Medicaid and food stamps and aircraft carriers and all the things that make their society functional.

They wouldn’t last a week without our assistance. Yet not only is there zero appreciation, but they act like they’re the ones being screwed over.

If Republicans want to finally acknowledge that we are all in this thing together, that we are a United States of America, then great, we can continue being generous.

But that’s not what’s happened. Quite the opposite. Their divisive up democratic talk, in fact, has sown the seeds for a national breakup.

And so now, Kentucky’s largess is firmly in the sights of Democratic lawmakers. No more flying under the radar. No more free ride. I’m going to embed this tweet one more time for effect:

No more red-state bailouts.

So every time Mitch McConnell mentions the deficit? Kentucky first.

Mitch McConnell doesn’t want state bailouts? Kentucky first. Return the $148 billion in extra money it received the last five years.

Mitch McConnell wants to rail against the evil federal government? Then by all means, Kentucky, return that evil tainted federal cash.

Mitch McConnell wants to rail against New York or California? Return the money paid by New York and California taxpayers.

The red-state anti-government scam is fully exposed. No more.

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320 aha lt gov dan patrick sportscaster career revived by talk radiom one of the 1st to sign up rush; do we need a tag? poster?

it's the petri dish of the fever swamp ? [freepers?] the bottom of the escalator, unheard in flyover country? an older tech that older ppl use/trust? on some rural hiway the only signal?

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AHA: TALK RADIO + POL-OP + TWITTER = DJT

trump trolls soc med TV etc for odd story, repkg retweet amplify, seeking retweets, constant instant feedback via crude stats

TWITTER is reductionistic, it's "killer app" attraction is 140 character, why?

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/this-is-wrong-bipartisan-lawmakers-slam-betsy-devos-for-yanking-funds-from-800-schools

no lnx

‘This is wrong’: Bipartisan lawmakers slam Betsy DeVos for yanking funds from 800+ schools

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon March 3, 2020

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos came under fire after her department made a bookkeeping change that would result in major funding cuts for America’s rural schools.

The Department of Education quietly informed state education officials that it would change how districts report the number of students who live in poverty, which could result in funding cuts for more than 800 of the “poorest” and “most geographically isolated” schools, according to The New York Times.

The changes to the Rural and Low-Income School Program came after the department found that some districts “erroneously” received funding despite being ineligible. The department previously allowed schools to report the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which it used to calculate poverty rates, for nearly two decades. Under the new rule, districts will be required to use data from the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates to determine if they meet the threshold of 20% of students living below the poverty line to qualify for the program.

Education spokeswoman Liz Hill told The Times that the department’s new rule follows existing law, but added that it had “drafted the legislative fix needed to use a free-and-reduced-lunch funding formula.”

“When you discover you’re not following the law Congress wrote, you don’t double down. You fix it,” Hill said. “If that’s what Congress wants, Congress should pass it, and the Education Department will happily implement it. We will also continue to look for ways to help ensure students are not unnecessarily harmed.”

The move stunned rural school leaders, who said they rely on the funding.

“Rural districts have budgeted for these resources, and the administration has given no consideration to how they will be impacted by this immediate cut to their funding,” Sasha Pudelski, the advocacy director at the School Superintendents Association, told The Times.

Some southern states are expected to be hit especially hard. Oklahoma, for example, will likely see the number of schools eligible for the program shrink by half. Matt Holder, the superintendent of Sulphur Public Schools in Oklahoma, said the cuts will force him to cut resources for students in a district where 60% live in poverty.

“It’s important for us to have someone on staff to work with these students and get them where they need to be,” Holder told the outlet. “I feel like we’re cutting from the most vulnerable.”

The move was met with bipartisan criticism. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the chairman of the committee which oversees education, said he was “very concerned” about the rule change. Alexander vowed to work with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, to “solve this problem for hundreds of rural schools around the country,” a committee spokesperson said in a statement.

“There is no reason that a change was made this year and the Department of Education should listen to Congress and fix this problem quickly,” the statement said.

Collins, one of the authors of the Rural Education Achievement Program, said in a letter to DeVos that 100 of the 149 Maine schools that qualified for the program would lose funding, which would result in about $1.2 million in cuts.

“If this decision is not reversed,” Collins said, “the department risks denying thousands of students living in rural Maine the chance to reach their full potentials.”

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., wrote to DeVos that impoverished school districts would lose $400,000 from the rule change.

“The department should be focusing on elevating school districts with the fewest resources instead of punishing small schools with harmful, last-minute policy changes,” Tester said.

The funding cuts come as rural schools struggle to stay afloat. The nonpartisan advocacy group Rural School and Community Trust issued a report warning that many of these districts “face nothing less than an emergency.”

“Many rural students are largely invisible to state policymakers, because they live in states where education policy is dominated by highly visible urban problems,” the report said.

Alan Richard, a board member of the group, shared his hope with The Times that the Trump administration would focus on rural issues because rural voters played such a large part in his election.

“Rural education advocates definitely hoped that a president elected, in part, because of rural and small-town voters would pay more attention to rural children,” he said. “Even after the last election, with all the attention to rural America, little has been done to correct the inequity so many rural students face.”

“This is wrong,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., one of the remaining Democratic presidential candidates, tweeted.

Former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer added that the move was an example of Trump’s “war on America’s rural communities.”

“First, it was the tariffs that hurt farmers, now he’s targeting students in rural school districts,” he wrote.

“Providing a quality public school education is one of government’s biggest responsibilities. With this decision, Trump and DeVos earn yet another ‘F,'” said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, adding that the move was particularly suspicious because Trump is “also doing everything in his power to undermine he accuracy of the 2020 census.”

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djt promised cheaper better rx, then tried hard repeatedly to kill ACA; will rural ppl continue to beleive/support?

an 1219

‘People have died as a result’: Residents of rural Missouri are furious with greedy corporation for closing their only hospital

:{:{}:

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/people-have-died-as-a-result-residents-of-rural-missouri-are-furious-with-greedy-corporation-for-closing-their-only-hospital/

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https://theconversation.com/as-rural-americans-struggle-for-health-care-access-insurers-may-be-making-things-worse-128583

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family

House Democrats are failing to protect America’s farmers from Trump

Jeff Hauser, Eleanor Eagan / The Washington Monthly

no lnx

House Democrats are failing to protect farmers from Trump — here’s how

Written by Jeff Hauser, Eleanor Eagan / Washington Monthly October 20, 2019

Times are tough for American farmers. Everything from corporate consolidation to falling commodity prices is making it harder to get by. Strange, then, that the person most responsible for safeguarding their wellbeing, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, brought the following message to a gathering of Wisconsin dairy farmers: “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out. I don’t think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.” In other words, he was telling the farmers: you’re probably screwed and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Contrary to Perdue’s claims, the deaths of small farms are not a result of natural forces. They are a consequence of explicit policy choices that have allowed for the rampant consolidation and disinvestment that are crushing rural communities. Only two decades ago, there were 600 companies that sold seed. Today, there are only four. It’s no wonder that the cost of seeds and plant corn has risen 329 percent in that time period, with similar increases for other crops.

Perdue hasn’t just failed to recognize the root causes of farmers’ pain; he has actively aided the forces responsible for it. From his first days in office, he has turned the full power of the USDA against farmers and rural communities on behalf of Big Agriculture, betraying one of the constituencies most vital to Trump’s 2016 win.

None of this should surprise anyone. What should be genuinely shocking, however, is that Congressman Collin Peterson, a Democrat from Minnesota and the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, has been practically silent about these attacks. Over the past nine months, he has only convened one full committee hearing. And while his panel heard testimony from Perdue in February, Peterson has yet to call him back despite his committing numerous transgressions since, including his continued efforts to impose work requirements on access to food stamps and pressing ahead to relocate the department’s research wing out of D.C.

Peterson, who declined our request for comment, has failed to fulfill his obligation to protect farmers and rural communities. That is not only bad on the substance, but it is a missed opportunity for Democrats to win back support among American farmers, who overwhelmingly pulled the lever for Trump in 2016.

In recent years, consolidated agribusinesses have translated their rising profits into formidable political power. They have successfully weakened or killed many measures that would have limited their control over farmers’ lives and livelihoods,including fighting laws that would give farmers the right to repair their own equipment, something that overzealous copyright protections have prevented them from doing. When these and other nasty practices get too much attention, Big Agwields its considerable weight to silence critics, whether that means getting a newspaper cartoonist fired or suing the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to close a public comment period on a proposed merger.

Over the past few decades, Democrats have too often either supported the policies that got us here, or fallen short in resisting them. In 2008, Barack Obama made fighting consolidation a feature of his agricultural policy platform. But once in power, he failed to act decisively on those promises. His administration hesitated to enact proposed regulations that would have made it easier for contract farmers to sue packing and processing companies for unfair practices. Then, it found itself unable to move forward once Republicans took the House in 2010.

As with most things, however, the Trump administration has taken a bad problem and made it worse. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice approved a merger between two agricultural industry giants, Monsanto and Bayer, allowing for the creation of a new behemoth. And those Obama-era contracting rules? They were eventually approved in 2016, but Perdue promptly scrapped them after taking power. Worse yet, Perdue’s USDA has walked back enforcement of many of the remaining rules to protect contract farmers.

This is all without mentioning what’s at the forefront of people’s minds when they think about Trump’s impact on farmers: trade policy. Yet as these examples should make clear, the harm this administration is inflicting on farmers goes well beyond trade.

Unfortunately, House Democrats have done little to draw attention to Trump’s deleterious agricultural policies When they do respond by holding a hearing, like over the decision to move the USDA’s Economic Research Service to Kansas City, they fail to confront those responsible for their actions, or take definitive actions to stop them.

Meanwhile, in the same time span that Peterson only convened one full committee hearing, Agriculture’s six subcommittees have held a combined 19 hearings, seven of which involved testimony from USDA officials. The Committee has issued zero subpoenas to corporate or governmental actors.

Peterson should reverse course and start from the top. The USDA is a big department with a diverse set of important responsibilities, ranging from protecting farming and rural economies, to ensuring food safety and administering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

There have been other ways Perdue has materially hurt farmers and others working in the industry. In addition to cancelling the aforementioned Obama era contracting rules, Perdue announced, in 2018, that the USDA would begin to allow poultry processing plants to increase line speeds, putting already vulnerable workers at even greater risk of injury.

Trump has also failed to nominate an undersecretary of rural development almost three years after taking office, meaning there is no dedicated advocate for rural communities empowered to support rural businesses, utilities, housing, broadband, and more in the federal government.

But that’s not all. The USDA is also making meat more dangerous for consumers byallowing pork processing plants to perform their own inspections. Indeed, the USDA’s chief veterinarian from 2016 to 2018, Pat Basu, refused to sign off on the system and left the agency in protest. Basu recently said, “Look at the FAA. It took a year or so before the crashes happened. This could pass, and everything could be okay for a while, until some disease is missed, and we have an outbreak all over the country.” It seems like Basu might make for an interesting witness at a Agriculture Committee hearing.

Democrats need to perform meaningful oversight of the Trump administration’s assault on American farmers. Impeachment doesn’t obviate the need for skeptical oversight. It underscores it. Oversight is, put simply, a basic fulfillment of Congress’ governing obligations. It can uncover abuse, create pressure for change, and facilitate the development of much needed policy alternatives. And, as an added bonus, the political upside seems clear.

This strategy might seem somewhat unorthodox. It contravenes the gospel that Democrats can only win agricultural districts by espousing a quiet, inoffensive centrism. But that would cede control of the political debate to Trump. If Democrats only play on the president’s terms, the conversation will always shift away from the real issue.

Democrats must therefore redefine the debate on agriculture policy through rigorous oversight. In rural America, they have to demonstrate their willingness to take on political corruption of all shades, and to challenge corporate America’s chokehold over the political process.

Yet Democrats have been surprisingly unwilling to take on one of the most unifying issues across the electorate: how the system is rigged to hurt ordinary people and boost big corporations.

Trump has created an opportunity for Democrats to take up this message in virtually every area of policy, but now especially with farmers. House Democrats have a unique opening to prove to rural voters that they are serious about taking on structural inequities. All they have to do is highlight and push back against the administration’s efforts to enrich corporations at the expense of small farmers. In other words, they have to simply do their jobs.

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Trump tweets from his alternate universe about a windfall for famers as farm loan delinquencies surge in Wisconsin

Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos

As reports surface of farm loan delinquencies surging in Wisconsin, Donald Trump dispatched some news for farm country from his alternate universe. “Billions pouring into USA,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in defense of his trade

no lnx

Trump tweets from his alternate universe about a windfall for famers as farm loan delinquencies surge in Wisconsin

Written by Kerry Eleveld / Daily Kos September 6, 2019

As reports surface of farm loan delinquencies surging in Wisconsin, Donald Trump dispatched some news for farm country from his alternate universe.

“Billions pouring into USA,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in defense of his trade war. “Targeted Patriot Farmers getting massive Dollars from the incoming Tariffs!”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, U.S. News & World Report notes that Wisconsin’s community banks saw a record high number of delinquencies on farm loans in June. The percentage of past-due loans at community banks hit 2.9% in June, reaching rates that are comparable to those back in 2001.

The rate of Wisconsin farm loan delinquencies has doubled since Trump took office, soaring higher than in any of the other top-producing farm states. Nationwide, June saw some 1.5% of farm loans at FDIC-insured banks that were either 90 days past due on their payments or no longer accruing interest due to doubts of repayment.

Wisconsin farmers have been hit particularly hard because their crops had found markets in multiple countries impacted by Trump’s trade standoffs, including China, Canada, and Mexico.

Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by a narrow margin of less than one percentage point. Democrats are aiming to win it back in 2020.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-devastation-of-farm-country-is-biting-us-all-on-the-loin/

no lnx jim h

Te devastation of farm country is biting us all on the loin

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 581026957 agriculture industry, farming and animal husbandry concept - herd of cows eating hay and man in cowshed on dairy farm.

written by Jim Hightower / Common Dreams July 3, 2019

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 Agriculture head. “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% 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, chickens, etc. 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.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/most-of-americas-rural-areas-are-doomed-to-decline/

the conv swenson

Since the Great Recession, most of the nation’s rural counties have struggled to recover lost jobs and retain their people. The story is markedly different in the nation’s largest urban communities.

I’m writing from Iowa, where every four years presidential hopefuls swoop in to test how voters might respond to their various ideas for fixing the country’s problems.

But what to do about rural economic and persistent population decline is the one area that has always confounded them all.

The facts are clear and unarguable. Most of the nation’s smaller urban and rural counties are not growing and will not grow.

Let’s start with my analysis of U.S. Commerce Department data.

Employment after the Great Recession

Between 2008 and 2017, non-farm jobs grew in most U.S. counties, but a few, mostly rural places were left behind.

Metropolitan areas consist of those counties with central cities of at least 50,000, along with the surrounding counties that are economically dependent on them. They make up 36% of all counties. Between 2008, the cusp of the Great Recession, and 2017, they enjoyed nearly 99% of all job and population growth.

What remained of job and population growth was divided among the 21% of counties that are called micropolitans, which have midsized cities with between 10,000 and 50,000 residents, and the remaining 42% of counties that are rural.

Nationally, 71% of all metropolitan counties grew between 2008 and 2017, but more than half of the remaining micropolitan and rural counties did not grow or shrank in population.

Population after the Great Recession

Nearly 99 percent of all population growth between 2008 and 2017 occurred in metropolitan counties or in counties directly adjacent to them.

Regional breakdown

Regional outcomes were also sharply divergent. The West and the South combined had 72% and 82% of the job and population gains, respectively, while the Northeast and the Midwest split the remainder.

Economic and population declines among micropolitan and rural areas were especially strong in the Northeast and the Midwest. Eighty-seven percent of the micropolitan counties contracted in the Northeast, as did 85% of their rural counties. In the Midwest, 61% of the micropolitans contracted, as did 81% of the rural counties.

Geographically, a large fraction of the nation is struggling to simply maintain the status quo. Yes, there are many struggling metropolitan regions, but there are many more midsized and rural counties wrestling with decline.

Bringing it back home, 69 of Iowa’s 99 counties have contracted since 2010, along with 10 of its 15 micropolitan counties. This ongoing struggle of midsized counties has negative economic and social consequences. Residents in surrounding rural areas depend on them for jobs, essential services, public goods and other commercial and recreational amenities.

There is, in short, a regional ripple effect. When micropolitan counties falter, neighboring rural counties that depend on them often falter, too. This is true in Iowa and evident as well across much of the U.S.

What’s behind the trends

Scholars and analysts have varying explanations for these outcomes.

The more rural areas are hollowing out the middle of the workforce. They contain lower percentages of people in the prime working ages of 25 to 54 because of persistent outmigration.

Others define the population losses in terms of widespread declines in demand for middle skill jobs due to automation and outsourcing in manufacturing, as well as technology advances in mining, forestry and agriculture.

Of late, manufacturing and technology firms claim that the woes of small urban and rural areas are due to skills gaps – that distressed economies could grow and their populations could stabilize if more people acquired more technical skills.

US growth after the Great Recession

Between 2008 and 2017, the lion’s share of population growth and non-farm job growth occurred in metropolitan areas, primarily in the south and west.

Fated to dwindle

The U.S. has been consistently urbanizing, especially for the past 100 years. Technology advances in manufacturing, agriculture, mining, fishing and forestry accelerated migration from rural to urban areas.

Over time, incremental innovations in those original core industries required fewer workers, further boosting migration away from rural areas. Much of the blue-collar and middle-income shares of more rural economies dwindled as a result.

Small and medium-sized urban areas – and the rural counties that are linked to them – are left with transportation, public works, housing and commercial bases that they struggle to maintain. Inevitably, blight ensues. Most micropolitan and rural communities have no viable economic Plan B, so I believe that the majority of them are fated to dwindle until eventually reaching some level of stability.

Federal and state governments provide them fresh water and wastewater treatment assistance, health care access, subsidized transportation and workforce training, but none of that alters the underlying forces inhibiting their collective prospects for growth. Every core industry originally undergirding these areas continues to shed jobs.

Meanwhile, the nation’s metropolitan cities continue to accumulate greater opportunities for meaningful jobs, career advancement and enhanced qualities of lives.

As a researcher who has studied rural economies for more than three decades, I urge policymakers to seriously consider the fact that most rural areas will not grow. It is important to develop policies that assure access to necessary public services, connect rural residents to modern technologies for the sake of participating meaningfully in modern society and safeguard that which is good and appealing about these less populated places.

Academics are good at isolating the causes and the consequences of rural decline, but we have yet to figure out what to do about it.

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If one word can capture the sentiment of rural and small-town dwellers in recent years, it is “resentment.”

I am a scholar who studies politics at the state and local level. Residents of rural and small-town communities believe they are not getting their fair share of government attention and vital resources compared to urban dwellers. They believe that America is moving away from them.

As the 2020 presidential campaign gears up, these resentful Americans will play a key role. How strong supporters of Donald Trump in the 2016 election vote in 2020 will depend on whether the president has delivered on the promises he made to help them out.

Will this growing divide affect American politics beyond Trump?

Left behind

Political scientist Katherine Cramer has spent over a decade doing field work in 27 small Wisconsin towns to understand how people use social class identity to interpret politics. Cramer found that people in these rural areas feel as though they are being ignored by urban elites and urban institutions like government and the media at a time when they are struggling to make ends meet.

They believe their communities are dying, the economy is leaving them behind, and that young people, money and their livelihoods are going somewhere else.

They think that major decisions affecting their lives are being made far away in big cities. And perhaps most importantly, they feel that no one is listening to them or their ideas about things that are important to them.

Most distressing to those living in this situation is the belief that no one, and especially no one in government, really cares.

From resentment to division and deadlock

To date, the phenomenon of “resentment” has been responsible for adding another layer of heightened division among Americans, including an increase in political polarization.

That makes it much more difficult for federal government officials, as well as those at the state and local level, to reach consensus on important issues of the day.

University of California, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” helps in explaining how this frustration and anger of small-town and rural area dwellers has resulted in increasing political support for Republican candidates, generally, and for Trump, specifically.

Hochschild contends that the changing and turbulent politics of Wisconsin, a so-called purple state with a stark urban-rural divide, mirror the national rage that swept Trump into the White House.

Given their intensifying feelings of resentment for being ignored and left behind, rural and small-town dwellers were particularly receptive to the slogan touted by Trump in his campaign – “Make America Great Again!”

Trump won the country’s small town and non-metropolitan areas by 63.2 percent to 31.3 percent, with his largest vote shares coming from the most rural areas.

Like other Republican presidential candidates over the last 10 years, Trump garnered a large majority of the vote in traditional rural areas like Appalachia, the Great Plains and parts of the South.

Surprisingly, however, Trump also won a substantial proportion of the traditionally Democratic small town and rural vote in several key Midwestern industrial areas. He won 57 percent of that vote in Michigan, 63 percent in Wisconsin and 71 percent in Pennsylvania.

Why Trump triumphed

Trump implied or clearly promised to repeal Obamacare, build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and deport around 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.

Other appealing policies were tax cuts for both businesses and individuals; significant reductions in the regulation of business and industry; and import tariffs on foreign goods that compete unfairly with American-made products.

Data collected by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (from a national survey of more than 54,000 respondents) clearly show that people living in small towns and rural areas who supported these kinds of policies were decisively more likely to vote for Trump rather than Clinton in 2016.

Above all, Trump promised a shift in the focus of the national government so that much more attention would be directed to rural areas and small towns and the challenges they faced.

This evidently buoyed the hope of Trump supporters in these areas that they would be getting something closer to their fair share of government attention and resources.

Voters’ party breakdown by community, November 2018 election

Residents of small-towns and rural areas are more supportive of the Republican Party and its candidates than people in urban and suburban areas.

Voting implications

There is ample evidence of voting patterns in recent years – even before the 2016 election – that suggest that voters in rural areas and small towns were increasingly voting for Republican candidates in national and state elections. This trend was quite visible from Republican and Democratic vote proportions in the 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012 elections.

In 2008, 53 percent of rural voters cast ballots for the Republican presidential candidate; 59 percent did in 2012; and 62 percent did in 2016.

This was most clear in the 2016 election in the 2,332 counties that make up small-town and rural America, where Trump swamped Hillary Clinton by winning 60 percent as opposed to 34 percent of the vote.

Trump’s 26-point advantage over Clinton in rural America was much greater than had been the case for Republican presidential nominees in the four previous elections.

The Trump appeal and the growing urban-rural division in the country is also evident from the fact that Trump’s vote percentage in rural America was 29 points higher than he received in the nation’s urban counties and far larger than for Republican presidential nominees between 2000 and 2012.

Moreover, responses to a 2017 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation survey of rural and small-town voters in the 2016 election indicate that they were more likely to vote for Trump and also agree with him on a variety of issues.

Those included immigration, tax cuts, eliminating regulations on businesses, making better trade deals, targeting more infrastructure projects and federal government services to rural areas and small towns, and appointing more conservative judges to the federal courts.

But, did this trend of strong support from rural voters for Republican candidates, including Trump, continue into the 2018 midterm election?

About half of Trump’s ideas and policy proposals have been accomplished, with the others yet to gain traction in Congress, two years after his election. So his record of delivering for these rural voters is mixed.

Nevertheless, they stuck with Trump in the 2018 election.

“Rural voters stormed to the polls in virtually unprecedented numbers in 2018 and once again delivered for the president they voted for in 2016,” The Hill reported. They delivered Trump “a handful of critical Senate and gubernatorial elections in ruby red states.”

While not totally surprising, the Trump camp did not know what to expect going into the midterm election, given the numerous investigations of the president and his low public approval rating.

Somewhat more surprising is what has been happening in a purple state like Florida, where Republicans have improved on both their turnout and overall performance in rural areas for several elections in a row.

Newly elected Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ran ahead of Trump’s 2016 performance and former Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s 2014 vote share in 13 of 16 counties in the Florida Panhandle. Rick Scott unseated longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by piling up large margins in the small towns and rural areas of the state. Similar scenarios in U.S. Senate races took place in key states like Missouri, Indiana, Texas and Tennessee, where Republicans won huge victories in rural counties.

Survey data collected from over 90,000 people by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in November 2018 paint a vivid picture of the continuing urban-rural/small-town divide.

Results show that residents of small towns and rural areas are much more supportive of the Republican Party and its candidates than people in urban and suburban areas.

In addition, the most ardent supporters of Republicans are among those small-town and rural dwellers who are white and male, have less than a college education and vote on a regular basis.

I believe that the urban-rural/small-town divide will continue to act as a major force in politics for the remainder of the Trump era – and probably longer.

J. Edwin Benton, Professor of Political Science and Public Administration, University of South Florida

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