The Obama administration is taking on Big Agriculture on behalf of farmers and ranchers. It's a two-pronged effort, using antitrust powers of the DOJ and the USDA's authority to put in new regulations that strengthen farmers and ranchers against the mega-corporations that (mis)manage America's food system.
There are several ways in which one could respond to these developments. One is the entirely predictable route taken by the journalist, which focuses on things like "OMG look at the country yokels and union thugs working together" and "Democrats and Republicans both suck" - though to be fair, in this issue they really do.
My initial reaction is to wonder how I could get on the platform at their meeting at Fort Collins to let the attendees - especially the red-staters like my fellow Kansans - know that if they want to preserve their way of life at all, they need to be willing to support the rare politicians like Barack Obama who actually want to do something to break the stranglehold corporations like Monsanto and Tyson have on our food production system. Because most politicians, no matter their party, will gladly bleed these ranchers and farmers dry, destroying not only their families but also the land itself so that an extremely rich minority - who can afford to buy all their food from a privately-run farm in the hollow center of the Earth if they wanted to - can make a few extra bucks. And then when the crops have been genetically engineered to the point of being toxic to human life, when the land is so drained on the one hand and pumped full of toxins on the other that no food could grow anyway, these same politicians will gather up the farmers, ranchers and their families and bodily feed them into Big Agriculture's gaping maw as protein sources for hydroponic tomeatoes, now will extra Soylent!
Ahem.
What I think we need to take from this, however, is that when we elect Democrats - even with all the mistakes they make - good governance happens. This fall, remind everyone you can that not only do we want to stop the GOP from destroying the country, we also want to have more stories like this one.
