By Neil the Ethical Werewolf Leave it to me to attack a sector of the American economy on exactly the day that we engage in massive ritual consumption of its output, but wouldn't it be nice if we could beat up on agribusiness more? The number of bad things those guys do is pretty tremendous -- dumping pesticides all over the place, destroying the soil through bad crop rotation, occasionally cheating immigrant workers out of their wages, raiding the treasury, adding to fossil fuel dependence through petrochemical fertilizer use, and worst of all, impoverishing Third World farmers who can't compete with our government-subsidized agriculture. Different but similarly huge problems are caused by factory farming of animals -- I heartily recommend The Meatrix to anyone who wants to learn about this stuff in a very enjoyable way. I was talking with West Texas native Amanda Marcotte last week, and she explained that there's still ranchers out there who take care of their land and do things very differently from the big agribusiness corporations. The yuppie/hippie types whom ranchers might regard as their cultural opposites are buying their organic produce and helping them make a living. I'm pretty much the last person to go to on the demographics of rural America, so I don't know if there are enough of these people to constitute a serious voting bloc, but I'm excited at the prospect of going after the family farmer / rancher vote by offering to change the criteria for farm subsidy payments.
