Jim heartfield wrote:
> Continuing my daily bulletin against the Kulak class, I note that
> organic farming is responsible for eight per cent of all E-Coli cases in
> the US, while contributing just one per cent of the US food market.
> Unlike GM food, E-Coli is a proven killer.
>
> In message <199908130720.QAA29303 at violet.sun-net.ne.jp>, Brian Small
> <bjsmalld at sun-net.ne.jp> writes
> >
> >Jim Heartfield wrote something about the farmer not getting his products
> >sold due to the good will of consumers. Bankers and Plumbers buy the
> >cheapest goods available and he doesn't care if farmers enjoy producing
> >our food.
>
> I was paraphrasing (and reversing) Adam Smith 'It is not from the
> benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
> dinner, but from regard to their own self-interest.' (Wealth of Nations,
> Penguin Classics, 119).
>
> >How do you go about socializing the world market if you don't expect
> >people to care about each other's working conditions?
> >
> >Maybe Jim Heartfield is underestimating people.
> >
>
> I'm confident that people do care about each others working conditions,
> but not when they're in the supermarket. Consumer boycotts are a
> predominantly middle class form of protest, full of all of the mixed
> political judgements that you expect of them. Organic food makes up just
> one percentage point of food sold in the United States. I think it is
> pretty clear what class it is that constitutes its market. For those of
> us whose wages do not allow self-actualisation in consumer choice, it's
> still a question of going down to 'pick up the rations', as my mother
> would say.
>
> >Anybody know the title of that book Upton Sinclair wrote a couple years
> >after _The Jungle_ . That book triggered a big outcry and led to some
> >reofrms.
>
> Reflecting on the storm over the Jungle, Sinclair wrote that he was
> primarily moved by the condition of the workers, not the meat: 'I aimed
> at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. I am
> supposed to have helped clean up the yards and improve the country's
> meat supply - though this is mostly delusion. But nobody even pretends
> that I improved the condition of the stockyard workers.' (Kolko,
> p103&7). Economic Historian Gabriel Kolko explained 'The reality of the
> matter, of course, is that the big packers were warm friends of
> regulation, especially when it primarily affected their innumerable
> small competitors.' (p107)
>
> In message <37B35DEF.99FB514A at ecst.csuchico.edu>, Michael Perelman
> <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> writes
>
> >I suppose that he could say that the ability of the large farmers to get
> >subsidised water, better access to government (in addition to) private
> >credit and the like all represent a form of efficiency. In that case,
> >financial difficulty is proof of inefficiency -- just as lower wages for
> >blacks and women is proof of their inferiority as workers. I have a
> >problem in believing market outcomes represent some sort of absolute
> >indication of efficiency.
>
> I find it hard to associate farmers with oppressed minorities. Maybe it
> is a national difference, but farmers in England have generally been the
> most reactionary section of the population. 'Businessmen in boots', and
> the backbone of the Tory vote. I think it must be right to say also that
> farmers in America today are the benefactors of the great shake-out in
> the 30s that annihilated the truck farmers, leading to the dispossession
> and internal migration of more than a million black truck farmers from
> the rural South to the northern cities.
> --
> Jim heartfield
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu