Trump wants to pay farmers $12Billion to watch their crops rot.
Trump is creating welfare for farmers.
Let me make this very clear: the people who will benefit from this are not the nice family that sells beets and greens at the Wednesday afternoon farmer’s market. These are not small family operations, these are not local area or subsistence farms.
These are corporate monstrosities.
Until you’ve seen a field that stretches on for twenty minutes down the highway of dead, unharvested corn that takes until almost the new year to finally rot off, it can be hard to separate the concept of corporate farming from the notion of the down-home American farmer. If you, like me, grew up in a rural area where you and everyone you knew was a subsistence farmer, it can be hard to recognize the scale, damage, and genuine monstrousness of corporate farming.
And indeed, even the people who plant corporate crops and till corporate fields- the actual farmers– will not be the ones who see benefit from this.
The companies that own those people will be the ones to see these benefits, and they will no more share them with the folks doing the tilling than they will with you or me.
The use of “farmer aid” and the idea of the farmer is a blatant political ploy to present an already generally poor and financially unstable group of people as being “rightfully” helped by these expenditures, while straight up pouring money into some of the largest corporations in the country.
Let me also clarify, because someone will point this out, yes, the vast bulk (around 90%) of farm land in the US is “family owned.” However, only corporations tend to see this aid, and most of the reason farms aren’t directly owned by corporations (rather they are “organized” by coroporations), is so that if there’s a horrible price flip- such as say by the fucking President completely screwing international trade in farm commodities like soy- the farmers get fucked and the Ag Corps have no risk or losses to speak of.
Reblogging because this last comment really nails it. I grew up in an agriculture city (a small city but definitely a city). Farmers and orchardists owned thd land but got the bulk of their income from the corporations they sell to. Its the corporations that sell to other countries. Wit the tariffs so high, those countries aren’t buying, which means the corporations aren’t going to buy. Which means the farmers lose their income, and so do the people who work the fields and orchards. And so do the people that work in the processing plants (where fresh corps are sorted and packaged for selling) of those corporations because not buying crops means not processing them either, and they won’t see a dime of that.subsidy money either because it will al go to paying the salaries of the top tier of those corporations.
For those of you playing at home, this is yet another way in which Trump is taking money from the poor and middle class to give to his friends in the 1%. Straight up.
