AgriCULTURE outsiders tackle powerful agriBUSINESS
In the 1980s, when I was Texas Ag commissioner, my staff and I proposed a comprehensive set of state rules to protect farmworkers, public health, our water supplies, and farmers themselves from the life-threatening consequences of toxic pesticides.
But trying to enact these policies in Texas (a state that back then made and sprayed more agricultural poisons than any other) meant taking on the enormous money and power of the chemical lobby, as well as a hostile Republican governor and a legislature largely made up of corporate lapdogs. All of the above were howling furiously at us, snarling that they’d kill the new protections we’d laid. When I told my legislative director that it seemed like the political odds were against us, his response was not a confidence booster: “Some of the evens are against us, too,” he said.
Yet-by rallying a big coalition of family farmers, consumers, environmentalists, church leaders, and others – then bringing these “outsiders” inside the usually closed legislative lair to confront the cozy club of lawmakers and lobbyists – we won!
As in that firefight, today’s Good Food forces (made up of the grassroots people and groups across the country striving to build a sustainable, equitable agriCultural system) are under constant attack by the moneyed forces of agriBusiness, which view food as nothing but another assembly line product to be fabricated by any means that fatten the corporate bottom line. We’re in an ongoing, momentous struggle (cultural, economic, political, and moral) over the very nature and future of food, and our best path to victory is to do as we did in Texas three decades ago: Forge coalitions of outsiders to confront and expose the self-enriching cabal of insiders.
To join the fight, visit www.OrganicConsumers.org/Campaigns.
How America’s middle class rose… and fell
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From 1776 forward, the “common yeoman” – America’s middle class – has been hailed as the virtuous heart and backbone of our nation. How ironic, since it took 150 years before we actually created a broad middle class. Before the 1930s, most Americans were poor, or near poor. And, yes, “created” is the correct term for how our middle class came to be, pushed by two historic forces of social transformation. First, the devastation of the Great Depression created a grassroots rebellion of labor, farmers, and others against the careless moneyed class that caused the 1929 crash. These forces produced FDR and his New Deal of union rights, Social Security, and other tools that empowered ordinary Americans to begin rising up from poverty. Second, the government’s national mobilization for World War II created an explosion of new jobs and opportunities for millions, opening people’s eyes, boosting confidence, and raising expectations. A post-war rise in unionism, passage of the GI Bill, a housing program, and other progressive actions led to a doubling of the median family income in only 30 years, creating a middle class that included nearly 60 percent of Americans by the late 1970s. Then – phfffft – Washington’s commitment to a middle class suddenly fizzled in the 1980s as Republicans and many Democrats switched from supporting egalitarianism to backing the elitism of their corporate donors. Ever since, they’ve steadily disempowered workers and enthroned the rich, thus imposing today’s abominable, un-American culture of inequality across our land. Just as progressives deliberately pushed public policies to create the middle class, so are today’s economic royalists deliberately pushing plutocratic policies to destroy it. That is the momentous struggle that calls us to action in this political year. |
