Whenever Daschle comes up as the prime mover in some sort of initiative, I am reminded of Matt Taibbi’s description of him, “In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.”
This will generate PR for the principals, and perhaps some fees and speaking gigs, but that is it.
Another generation of farmers lost to the Rs. Over-regulation, telling farmers that their shit really stinks bad, error after error.
Yes, stopping kids from walking down the grain is necessary. But usually people end up with idiotic requirements. And farmers get annoyed.
It’s clear that you are well inside the nanny state mentality. If there is any specific thing that farmers do not want, it is being told what to do by a bunch of elites.
that is just false… there is typically A REALLY GOOD REASON THAT LAWMAKERS IMPOSE STRICTURES ON FARM FAMILIES USING THEIR OWN CHILDREN FOR LABOR!
Nannys care.
If it were farmers complaining about regulations, it might be different, usually its the elevator managers or Monsanto (same thing) doing the politics, and rarely does it really have to do with farm-worker rights, family or not.
Our farmers have been subsumed, politically, by the Chem Farming Industry and the implement manufacturers, and too often we assume they speak for the farmer, when they really speak for poison producers and implement manufacturers.
The farmer’s just the littlest pawn on their big chess board.
This is the same guy who sabotaged Obamacare in the final yards before passage.
How?
no, that isn’t organic to this site, at all, it is contrived by fakes… clever ones, I’ll give “them” that, but it isn’t hard to trace back the pattern of falsehood posed as farmer-bashing here and across the “liberal” blogosphere. The most clever are those we mistook for fellows. But over and over again, posters accusing “us” of farmer-bashing were either responding to one of their own sockpuppets or posing as one… nick.
Go ahead, quote those"hate passages" you are trying to pose as real, you will make my point for me.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’ve posted this story to Facebook and via Twitter where I’ve received similar “not those guys!” responses, but no one has come back with any suggestions for alternate persons or approaches.
sounds like something Daschle said… you don’t even realize (maybe you do) that you are proposing exactly what they are proposing.
And if you think those four people don’t have “local” connections, you are naive. But I think we know better, YOU know better, if you took the time to look at the list of folks signing up, you’d see just how local it already is. Something’s stinky about your thread.
I agree that if these Democratic operatives are respectful and knowledgeable about their concerns, it could be a worthwhile effort. We should be proactive in trying to convince these people of the benefits of our policies.
I used to really like Matt. His description of Goldman Sachs as a giant vampire squid was awesome. Personally, I don’t think Daschle would sell out that cheaply.
Okay, way late to this thread; but I’m feeling obsessive about getting this distributed as widely as possible, and spotting you, champion commenter Plucky, gives me an excellent first target:
Turns out simply focusing on what the Republicans are taking from you doesn’t change votes much, because it doesn’t address the resentment of those the Dems are supposedly shoveling benefits to at your expense. But when the focus is on how the Republicans are attempting to keep us divided so they can keep taking, votes actually switch in our favor. A bunch of us have been talking about this since even before the 2016 primaries; so nice to have some empirical confirmation. Every single person with any connection to any Dem organization (this new one most definitely included) needs to read this, and internalize it. Spread it around.
Thanks, I’ve saved that for further study. Very interesting results.
What is needed in rural areas is something that would help people directly. I think that the most destructive thing in rural areas is big interstate conglomerates like WalMart. They take small towns, and remove the ownership. If the rural areas used to be an area of small shopkeepers, now they are an area of clerks. There is no place for a man to be a man - owning his own store, making his own decisions. Everyone is forced to work for WalMart/Target/ShopKo/Hy-Vee.
Some method of restoring ownership to areas is needed.
One chain that does work is TrueValue/Ace/DoItBest Hardware. These are locally owned with a buying cooperative approach. They work together to buy stuff, and each store sells it. Local ownership.
Rural folks do cooperatives. Often the grain storage cooperatives are used to store grain. These are not remotely owned companies. They are owned by farmers.
Finding a way to work more cooperatives into rural areas is needed. That means taking on WalMart, which is very difficult. But WalMart must be taken on - it is the single company which has done more to blight rural areas than any other.
WalMart has ruined a lot of towns. Only the very small villages have been left to carry on business at the local level. And the little Dollar stores are doing a job on those communities that are too small for WallyWorld.
But back to the farmers and ranchers. I have found that most are glad to tell you what they think if they are approached respectfully. I don’t look to change any ideas right away; just to establish trust and get a dialog going. I might even have to change a few of my ideas as the process goes on.
Farmers have NO PROBLEM with the Farm Bill?! Bloated “Nanny State” billions EVERY year! The WORST kind of Socialism imaginable!
We could deregulate that for starters, but then the “Heartland Harrys” would really scream!
Frankly, Daschle and the other “centrist” Democrats don’t have a lot to say with this. Daschle could have ended this in 2002, instead of falling in line with Bush and the DLC (and costing himself his Senate seat).
More importantly, a lot of this is demographically idiotic. Let’s look at South Dakota, population about 850,000. Of that, 350,000 (40%+) live in metro Sioux Falls or Rapid City. (Sioux City, Iowa’s suburbs also bleed into South Dakota.) A lot of the rest of the population is in smaller cities, not rural areas.
The largest growth in population comes from Hispanics. The main employment base is all the big banks who set up their credit card operations in SD to get better credit card rates, and there is some branch industry looking for cheap labor. A lot of those progressive voters of yore took advantage of the new deal, sent their kids to college, and the latter got the hell out and moved to Minneapolis or Chicago. This is what happened. The remainers are either (a) too poor to be sociologically significant (poor people don’t vote and are discouraged from voting), or (b) social conservatives who simply do not share either my or Daschle’s concept of improving their lot.
If Daschle had acted like a Democrat rather than having a health care lobbyist on his staff, maybe he’d be more credible. “Centrist” democrats are either (a) warmed over confederates, or (b) as is the case with Daschle, Democrats on the take from someone.
They take small towns, and remove the ownership. If the rural areas used to be an area of small shopkeepers, now they are an area of clerks. There is no place for a man to be a man - owning his own store, making his own decisions. Everyone is forced to work for WalMart/Target/ShopKo/Hy-Vee.
A few points. Walmart’s initial strategy was to find places where the retail business community wasn’t very strong in terms of running a business, but was an effective monopoly. This is a small town. The shopkeepers were all part of the same crony group (that also included local banks and loan officers at the local branches of larger banks). There’s no other source of capital to start a business. Walmart benefitted from two things. First was the advent of the Interstate highway system and, in the Great Plains, a considerable amount of exurban road construction. Second was incredibly cheap land by today’s standards. So they bought up large parcels of land with good road access from town centers, and built their megastores. These might not be models of good management, but they were far better in terms of basic merchandising and distribution than anything the locals could do. (This formula quit working once they came to the suburbs of blue state country – a lot of retailers simply knew how to take WalMart on. And they couldn’t always be the low price because they didn’t have access to cheap, empty land and underserved communities.)
You are disrespecting Daschle, as did Matt Taibbi. Of course he wouldn’t suck off corpses for cheeseburgers. He only deals with other DC insiders, and then only for large amounts of money. He’s right at the top of the prostitution, I mean lobbying, business.
I would really love to see a correlation study between the concentration of churches per-capita and drug use. One thing these atrocities do is hollow out the cultural opportunities around them to make themselves the only social and cultural venue. Low mental stimulus puts people at greater risk for having a “what the heck” outlook that can make drug/alcohol look more inviting.
I never said that WalMart wasn’t good at what they do. They are very good at 2 things - getting vendors to cut costs (often forcing vendors to offshore production) and computerization of inventory, which they did early and effectively. They are/were extremely effective. They offered lower prices, and honestly, it’s difficult to tell people to spend more money on less selection.
The only retailer that has really offered an alternative to WalMart is Amazon, and I have more problems with them than with WalMart.
We need to find a way to restore agency to local places. You criticized the “local mafias”. Yes they were a crony group. But, they kept the profits in the town. They propped up the local sports teams, led the local charity events. They offered the dignity of owning your own business. That is one thing rural areas increasingly do not have - the dignity of being the hardware store owner, the local banker. That’s a huge loss.