I hate this shit so much and I refuse to play the “city dwellers must always be humble and servile to their noble country lords” game that too many Americans still buy into.
I am very tired of the way the GOP can say the absolute vilest things imaginable about cities but doing anything other than singing the praises of rural communities is politics suicide.
Problem:
A lot of rural people think they can starve the cities into submission.
I hate to say this but, until we figure out how to synthesize everyone, we're kinda at their mercy.
They’re mostly corn & soy farmers, sucking the USDA tit. They’ll shrivel up & die without their crop insurance and federally subsidized loans. They’re the biggest welfare cheats on this planet, usually to the tune of 7 or 8 figures annually. And every penny of that is blue state, blue city income.
There’s a part of me really wanting the staff attorneys at the various green-progressive environmental NGOs to fire up their printers and start suing BLandManagement for failing to protect the land. If Chevron’s dead, flood the zone with our wishlist. Throw enough at the wall, some’ll stick.
A huge proportion of our arable farmland is left fallow while the "farm" corporations who own them gobble up all the subsidies and tax breaks they can without actually producing anything. It's a good grift if you can get into it. 🙃
Yup.
And the corn being grown for food — both field and sweet — are mostly grown by farmers not getting the federal money, whose livelihood depends on selling to cities.
Meat might get (more) expensive. Which wouldn’t harm most of us, because we need to reduce that, anyway.
My brother lives & works in a very rural area and there's a sharp divide between wealthy, subsidized "farmers" who don't actually do much work and not-wealthy not-subsidized farmers who don't have much time (or money) to socialize. One group likes to brag about how hard working they are.
Which aligns with our childhood in a different rural area where farmers decided they didn't want to pay property taxes because they owned most of the property so they'd be paying a lot in taxes for schools and stuff so they just... didn't have to pay property taxes. Because of where we lived...
(unincorporated area) we WERE paying property taxes but ALSO had to pay extra for library services and otherwise taxpayer funded summer camp services and were not eligible for taxpayer funded transit to summer camp services. Thanks, "farmers"! Fuck you.
Even the most well armed farmer isn't gonna repel a few dozen people dragging him off his farm and using it to grow food again.
Besides, most farmers are in debt up to their eyeballs, they can barely keep their farm afloat in the best of times. And the bank always gets its due.
Honestly, if they tried, the actual impact would probably be the cost of meat going up (since so much of what rural America grows is corn for animal feed, as well as soybeans) and people moving to plant-based diets from crops grown in CA and overseas.
I am currently in a relatively rural area and, frankly speaking, the overwhelming majority of the food grown locally goes elsewhere. I can’t find affordable fresh produce to save my life!
Not really.
If that were the case (setting aside how little arable land is [anymore] used for human foodstuffs) farmers would have had the upper hand throughout history.
1: They did grow all the good.
2: They were the VAST majority of people.
3: Have never been at the top of the political heap.
The US Presidency is not a direct election; and was designed to make it so hoi polloi didn't make the decision about who was in charge.
The Senate; as designed, was the same way.
And if you think Trump's administration (and so the exercise of power) was run by Farmers, well I can't help you.
Remember Trump lost the popular vote, which was also the case for Bush's first term.
Which is before the question of "farmer" vs. Landholder comes into the various equations.
Yes, the past couple of hundred years have see the source of wealth shift, but actual farming has never meant power.
But even on that metric it's not true.
It's the suburban voters the "white flight" crowd who opposed bussing in the 70s, and continue to let racism shape whom they vote for (and what they see as the important aspects of party platform) who put the GOP where it is.
No, it didn't.
Trump lost the vote. (how he, or anyone in the US would do if we had wholehearted turnout is a different question).
But even if it were the case; those aren't "farmers".
At most 2 million people are Farmers.
NYC has about 9 million people. Of those who voted in 2016, about 10 percent voted for Trump.
Which equals a significant portion of your "farmers".
If every farmer voted for Trump they still need a lot of other people.
"It was the small towns" is just like "Black Churches kill Prop 8", not true.
Fun fact: guess who their customers are? And guess what happens when they can't make the payments on their expensive farm equipment because they don't have any money coming in?
Eh, even if the farmers could afford to starve the cities, those big cities are pretty much all on seagoing ports.
It's already the case that stores get winter vegetables from overseas, cities could last longer importing all their food needs, than farms could last waiting for their cash.
Also, cities recently went through a period where there were major supply shortages, and we made do. We found other sources. The same would happen in a siege.
