I grew up rural poor in the US South and we grew both a garden and an orchard on our land. We had fresh vegetables - potatoes, squash, pumpkin...Yeah... none of that helps if you don't have land.
...Many in this country who have access to good food and can afford it simply don't think it's important. To them, food has become a front in America's culture wars, and the crusade against fast and processed food is an obsession of "elites," not "real Americans."I think it's important to acknowledge that some of this food-movement backlash that focuses on the activities of the rich is fueled by populism, often ill-informed populism, and by those who continue to support an industrialized and corporately owned food system.
Consider these shots from leading conservative voices in just the past month: Rush Limbaugh, responding to the report of a Kansas State nutrition professor who says he lost 27 pounds eating mainly Twinkies, said: "I know liberals lie, and if Michelle Obama's gonna be out there ripping into 'food deserts' and saying, 'This is why people are fat,' I know it's not true." Sarah Palin took cookies to a Pennsylvania school to register her disapproval of policies that forbid sweets. Glenn Beck suggested that food-safety legislation was a government plot to raise the prices for beef and chicken and thereby turn us all into vegetarians.
The math is stark. Prices paid to farmers per hundredweight (about 12 gallons) have fallen from nearly $20 a year ago to less than $11 in June. Earlier this month, the Federal government raised the support price by $1.25, but that is only a drop in the proverbial bucket. It costs a farmer about $18 to produce a hundredweight of milk. In Vermont, where I live, that translates to a loss of $100 per cow per month. So far this year, 33 farms have ceased operation in this one tiny state.posted by Miko at 9:01 AM on November 29, 2010
Meanwhile, the price you and I pay for milk in the grocery store has stayed about the same. Someone is clearly pocketing the difference. Perhaps that explains why profits at Dean Foods—the nation’s largest processor and shipper of dairy products, with more than 50 regional brands—have skyrocketed. The company announced earnings of $75.3 million in the first quarter of 2009, more than twice the amount it made during the same quarter last year ($30.8 million). (Dean countered that “current supply and demand is contributing to the low price environment.”)
But rote statistics have a way of masking reality. So last week, I drove up to the village of West Glover for a firsthand look at the human side of the dairy crisis by attending the Borland auction. “You will be witnessing what is going to be the fate of all heritage farms,” Carol Borland told me.
Forbes: America's Richest Families Of the 25 families we've identified, 44% owe their fortunes to companies founded in the 19th century. Another 36% trace their wealth to businesses started in the first half of the 20th century...One of the longest-running fortunes in American history belongs to the du Pont family, who rank eighth with a fortune of at least $15 billion. The du Ponts trace their ancestry to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (d. 1817), a French Physiocrat, who survived the Revolutionary Terror by immigrating to America in 1800.
...Wealth distribution has been extremely concentrated throughout American history, with the top 1% already owning 40-50% in large port cities like Boston, New York, and Charleston in the 19th century. It was very stable over the course of the 20th century, although there were small declines in the aftermath of the New Deal and World II, when most people were working and could save a little money. There were progressive income tax rates, too, which took some money from the rich to help with government services.posted by Miko at 7:52 PM on November 30, 2010
Then there was a further decline, or flattening, in the 1970s, but this time in good part due to a fall in stock prices, meaning that the rich lost some of the value in their stocks. By the late 1980s, however, the wealth distribution was almost as concentrated as it had been in 1929, when the top 1% had 44.2% of all wealth. It has continued to edge up since that time, with a slight decline from 1998 to 2001, before the economy crashed in the late 2000s and little people got pushed down again."The public vastly overestimates the prosperity of lower-income Americans" relative to the very wealthy.So I don't believe there's a smoke-filled room where people figure out how the Conspiracy is going to work. Because you don't need it. Collectively, through political action, think tanks, policy groups, lobbying, and sweetheart deals, the benefits to the elite class are the same whether the conspiracy is official or not. A thousand aggregated actions in favor of the wealthy elite might be the result of a thousand separate conversations by a thousand different people who think a lot alike rather than one thousand-point agenda by one specific group, but regardless, in the aggregate, the effect is that wealth stops moving through the economy.
I'm not speaking as a paranoid person with a lot of nutty ideas. What I'm saying is not wacky conspiracy theory - it's a fairly neutral description of the interaction between wealth in the private economy and government in American history. I think what strains belief is not that there is a lot of agreement among the elite classes about how to keep wealth flowing upward to them, but the idea that so much concentration over only a few centuries could just happen...by accident.
The Red Carpet Campaign: No effort or expense can make any of the Academy’s members vote for an actor, director, or screenplay they don’t like. But what a smart Oscar campaign (like a successful political campaign) can do is to make someone or something part of a larger story.... In the strange etiquette of Oscar competition, a hard-core, balls-out campaign to get Academy Award nominations is permissible, under the justification that everyone is just helping their movies, whereas pushing hard for an actual win not only looks narcissistically needy but also may be pointless, since most voters decide whom they want to win before the nominations are even announced. So the real work happens during a mid-January sprint, when actors, writers, and directors suspend their lives to embark on an ego-bruising bi-coastal nightmare carnival of awards and lunches, brunches and teas, screenings, Q&As and tributes, diving into the soul-depleting madness of what Evelyn Waugh long ago called Hollywood’s “continuous psalm of self-praise.” Movies that don’t join the fight get lost in the shuffle.
Academy rules ban filmmakers from giving parties for Academy members and forbid studios to hold screenings that “feature the live participation of the film’s artists before or after the screening” or include “receptions, buffets or other refreshments”—even a lousy bag of popcorn. But if somebody else throws the party, or if non-Academy riffraff are also invited to the screening, then bring on the caviar and the stars. In other words, “independent expenditures” are O.K. So is negative campaigning...Hollywood, it may seem, has learned all there is to learn from the world of “real” politics.
During Oscar season, studios heavily campaign for their films to win, spending large amounts of money in an attempt to influence Academy voters. Harvey Weinstein, of Miramax, was especially notorious for his campaigning.[4] Weinstein was alleged to have spread rumors that John Nash was antisemitic, to hurt the chances of A Beautiful Mind, a competing contender for the awards with the Miramax film, In the Bedroom.[5] It was also suspected, although unproven, that Weinstein was involved with the nomination of The Reader in 2009, a film that received mixed reviews from critics.[5]
The studio head is usually personally responsible in campaigning for the films. This comes in the form of hosting celebrity-filled private parties for "friends" before the Awards.[4] The CEO of Universal Studios, Ron Meyer, as an example, attempted to influence Academy members such as Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Frank Langella, by hosting a cocktail party at Nobu West.[4]Actors involved in this do know that if they're successful in getting the win, the other nominees (perhaps more deserving) will not be successful. Their choice to accept the nomination and go forward is a knowing, active choice. Their choice to participate in activities designed to influence what is supposed to be an independent choice is a knowing, active choice.
They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30...years ago. You know what they want? They want obedient workers...people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money...They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it...they’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this...place. It’s a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in The Big Club.posted by five fresh fish at 6:40 PM on December 1, 2010
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I'm elite, so I get my rice from the paddy at my urban garden.
posted by melissam at 7:41 PM on November 27, 2010 [3 favorites]