Yeah, a bunch of farmers vote Republican but take the Democratic farm subsidies, but it's hard to save the Farmers Union members without helping the Farm Bureau members too. Sure, farmers would like to open foreign markets so they can export grain, because the market price of corn in the US is basically the same as it was in the 1950s, but I think they were misled into pushing for free trade, particularly in the case of China, which also is a grain exporter. You would think they would have learned from their experience with NAFTA that the multinational grain dealers are not going to do them any favors. Neither can they expect largess from the big livestock and poultry combines such as Smithfield and Tyson, which through "vertical integration" have reduced chicken farmers to peonage and now are attempting to do the same thing to pig and cattle raisers. Now you can take the view that as long as Safeway or Albertson's has its shelves stocked then it does not matter whether the food was grown by a family farmer in the Midwest or one one of Othal Brand's plantations in Mexico, where workers are underpaid and crops are dosed with pesticides that are banned north of the border, but I don't understand how that squares with a socialist worldview either.
-- Jim Cullen