Sure you have, it was called Trump’s first term.
Dont worry. Hard working people from blue states will bail them out. Again
I have more sympathy for my toenail clippings than I do for Trump voters getting exactly what they voted for.
Oh noes! Reich Wingers getting exactly what they demanded, and feeling the consequences of it!
They wanted money for nothing
And their chicks for free.
Perpetual Mo
tionney Machine
A really good piece on the realities of this topic is here: https://youtu.be/badGHJLDpP8
TL;DW: Farmers thought they were voting for cheap labor and a bailout, like they got last time. They also thought that, as wealthy landowners1, they were on the “right side” of these disastrous trade policies and were going to be carried through this mess.
1. I struggled with this concept at first. Things have changed a lot since the pre-WWII era that conjures up images of Ma & Pa Kent in a weathered century-home, on a lonely corn farm in Kansas. It’s big business now. Good farm land isn’t cheap, equipment is expensive, (legitimate) labor is expensive, fertilizer & irrigation costs a lot, pest control costs, crops are risky in general, and so on. When you work out how much money is moving around and what a farm’s net worth is, these people are millionaires even if they’re not in the black all the time.
What’s really funny to people outside of the US is that cheap labour and a bailout is exactly what they would hve received from Harris.
Agreed. Considering that the alternative to that is always higher food prices, it’s political suicide to not do this.
Unless you are planning on not having elections.
They wont get any sympathy from me. They voted for it and they got what was coming to them.
I’ll buy tofu $1 per pound
I don’t live in the USA, but I wanted to check.
Remind me, do areas that have more agriculture/farmland usually vote for the Democrats, or the Republicans?
I’m kidding, I know the answer.
Suck it farmer’s. You voted for this, now enjoy the “freedoms” that you have been granted by your political party.
are the farmers in dire straits, or are independent farmers in dire straights?
i make the distinction because if the purpose is to make the rich, richer, then this is a feature, not a bug for republicans
Yeah it’s just the independent farmers. Here in Arkansas they’re either losing their farms or straight up killing themselves, at a brisk pace too.
Happens here too. And who scoops up the land when it gets liquidated? JD goddamn Vance and his vultures.
All part of the plan :(
People like to use the example of Crassus’ fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.
Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They’re in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It’s a problem for them, too.
Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they’re in the same boat.
The goal is the collapse and consolidation of farms for private equity. JD is being loud about supporting one venture group buying up farms but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was a proxy group and the one he is parading is supposed to take on liabilities and shed its assets, typical venture cap behavior.
Well the Trump cronies are investing in their failure. I’m sure there will be ample debt based sharecropping opportunities working for the shareholders like Vance and theil in their future.
But at least the leopards are still well-fed
Modern day leopard farmers canNOT understand why grain and soybean farmers forgot where their bootstraps are.
This was all a calculated strategy to make independent farmers go bankrupt and into foreclosure, so that the big agritech companies could snag prime agricultural land for pennies on the dollar.
At some point, most food will be grown by corporations that can set whatever price they want for that food, and people will have to pay that price or starve to death. It’s the definition of “captured audience” that makes the Parasite Class extract so much wealth from the working class and become so fantastically wealthy.
Has this not already happened? The mythos of the independent farmer has existed since the great depression. I’m not convinced independent farmers actually exist anymore. Farmers are serfs who buy their seeds and their herbicides/fertilizers from Monsanto, and their tractors from John Deere. They lease the land from generational trusts and wall-street speculators.
Why would a corporation want to assume the risk of actually producing anything?It’s been happening steadily for a while, Trump just opened up a lot of avenues to accelerate it. There are still a lot of small and medium family farms that own their land and equipment.
I sincerely doubt it was calculated. This regime can’t think past its next Big Mac. The toddler in chief is far too reactionary to actually have a strategy beyond tomorrow’s unconstitutional removal of a public figure speaking out against republicans. It is highly convenient and will be taken advantage of by Big Ag to the fullest - and expect there to be clear favorites among Agribusiness just like when the media bent a knee to Trump and showered him with money.
The regime struggles to operate coherently, but certain elements of the regime are certainly capable of this sort of thing.
For instance, Vance has invested in the “AcreTrader” app, which is designed to take advantage of exactly this situation.
They’re stupid in every way except to grift to enrich themselves for the short term.
This has absolutely been planned, JD Vance is invested in AcreTrader and what’s a better way to buy thousand’s of acres for pennies on the dollar than to bankrupt farmers? And at the end of the day, I really don’t think they deserve a bailout.
We’re well on our way towards famine.
Well, you folks are just speed running the apocalypse, aren’t you.
Pestilence, War and now potentially Famine.
I think it’s more of the old republic Roman issue, the small farmers are being eaten up by giant corporate mega farms. Food production will continue but as a monopoly, where they can charge you $100 for a head of lettuce if they feel like it.
At what point do the eight different megacorps who each want half of my money go to war with each other when I can’t actually buy their product anymore and just die?
After their private armies nuke each other, maybe we can plant some Mutfruit and raise some Brahmin on the irradiated soil that’s left behind
No, you’re not. The average US consumer, even those who are desperately poor, still has significantly more buying power than the vast majority of the planet. A collapse in American agriculture will just mean a vast upswing in food imports, because for most of the world it will always be more profitable to sell that food to a US grocery chain than it will be to sell it locally. This will increase costs for US consumers, and push more Americans into poverty, but it won’t cause a famine in the USA.
What you are well on your way towards is causing famines across vast portions of the world that aren’t you. Famines that Americans will barely even notice, much less care about.
Yeah poor people can just make more money to buy the more expensive food, it’s genius
I think they are saying that our poor people already have “more money,” at least relative to others who might get that food.
And the bug you describe is also a feature if you’re the greedy fucker at the top trying to take advantage of desperate people.
Show me in my previous comment where I said that.
My point was not “Americans will be OK.” I explicitly said that a collapse of American agriculture would push many more Americans into poverty.
But poverty is not famine. As awful as poverty is, famine is actually, somehow, worse. Poverty kills people, and in the scenario imagined it would kill many more people, but the absolute worst impacts would still be felt in places much further afield. America’s failure would create destructive ripple effects across the world.
IDK, there are already a lot of people hanging on by a thread in the US. A collapse in domestic production that leads to higher prices will push more people under the “secure” line. I think it’ll also cause food shortages worldwide but I think you’re overestimating how many Americans will be insulated.
Yes, I believe I covered that when I said “and push more Americans into poverty”.
I’m not ignoring the plight of those people for whom starvation would be a very real threat in this scenario. But that’s not the same thing as famine, and thinking that it is reflects a uniquely American level of isolation from the realities of the world. Poverty is terrifying - I’ve experienced it myself - but it is an entirely different order of magnitude from famine.
I know people who’ve experienced famine. I know people who’ve told me stories about taking a shit, and then immediately scooping it up and eating it just to sate the desparate, unbearable need to have some kind of food in their stomach. That’s the level of insanity famine drives you to. It’s a scale of hunger you and I can’t even comprehend.
Nowhere in my previous comment did I say “It will be OK if American agriculture collapses.” It would be awful. Many people would die, many more would suffer. But the absolute worst of that suffering wouldn’t happen in the US, it would happen in other parts of the world that most Americans can’t even name.
I don’t know what the odds are on the US or a part of the US reaching the technical definition of famine, I’m just saying I wouldn’t put it in the “definitely not happening” category. And it wouldn’t be because there’s not enough food available, more like the government is actively aggravating domestic food production and international trade and they’re bumbling morons, which is a combination that could easily get us into shortages where a large chunk of the population is starving. And depending on which Americans it affects (or affects the most), the government may not care. Not saying it’s definitely going to happen, but I think it’s naive to say it definitely won’t just based on America’s buying power.
FWIW I agree that the current situation, whatever it’s impact on America’s food security, will impact other parts of the world more severely. I’m sure America’s shit will still roll downhill.
What about the last time he was president?
Durrrrrr I’m gonna crack down on immigrant farm labor while I add lots of tariffs to foreign food durrrrrrrrrr
Fuckers trying to make America North Korea again
