It's the Economy, Stupid
Submitted by Hawkfish on Mon, 11/28/2016 - 9:34am
From a WaPo article a few days ago:
According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America's economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country's economic activity last year.
In addition to the usual "Duh!" reaction, it is worth remembering that the electoral college and other biases built into the Constitution were designed to make sure that all parts of the country had a voice. Politicians running for national office would do well to bear this in mind going forward...
Comments
I wonder...
How much of the nation's food do the 2,600 counties Trump won supply to the 500 counties Clinton won?
I suspect you already know,
at least in general terms
"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X
That's a good question, but...
Just because the food is grown there doesn't mean that it supports the local economy much. US agribusiness had already done a number on small domestic farms by the mid 90s (remember Farm Aid?), but NAFTA then put a lot of small Mexican farmers out of business. Who then came north looking for work.
It kind of sucked for everyone (pun intended...)
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
I commented somewhere on that . . .
Around me . . . thousands of acres of crops, but nothing to eat. Cotton, field corn, milo. The exception is winter wheat, and maybe sunflowers . . . but those crops don't feed anyone around here. The winter wheat crop failed here the past two years. Hopefully this year will be better.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
Maybe we should take another look at Farm subsidies. This is the
State I live in
Subtotal, Farming Subsidies in Nebraska, 1995-2014
Subsidy Recipients 1 to 20 of 134,980
Recipients of Subtotal, Farming Subsidies from farms in Nebraska totaled $11,284,000,000 in from 1995-2014.
https://farm.ewg.org/top_recips.php?fips=31000&progcode=totalfarm®ion...
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The largest subsidy recipient in Nebraska has received over $8.5 million in subsidies
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Kaliff Farms received payments totaling $8,549,830 from 1995 through 2014
https://farm.ewg.org/persondetail.php?custnumber=A06381475
***
Face it, we could feed the world. But we don't because it doesn't pay enough. Especially to corporate farmers.
But we will pay to not feeding the world.
I'm tired of this back-slapping "Isn't humanity neat?" bullshit. We're a virus with shoes, okay? That's all we are. - Bill Hicks
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. - Frank Zappa
It's an interesting way of looking at what
happened. GDP a contrived measure of activity ( fiat currency) and Food the only real wealth. Face it a lot of people don't like what is happening on all sides. Many like to argue about it. It's the economy, it's racism, It's whatever. In truth it's all of those, it's every idea you can think of. You could make a list a mile long from everyone's personal anecdote.
On the macro side several things are causing our problems. Has nothin to do with who got elected. Limits to growth... Learn it. Population overshoot , resource depletion, extraction, corruption, expensive energy (EROEI, bad net energy equation).
It is certainly all of the above
But I think the point is that the way the Constitution was constructed requires a certain level of broad-based appeal to win. Some issues are disproportionately favoured by this structure, most notably economics. And having lived in a few cold climates, I can assure you that food is not the only real wealth!
(BTW, I read the EROEI work at Cassandra's Legacy, and while the first part on net energy production was interesting, he later seemed to be making up numbers to support his argument about how we cannot fund the non-carbon energy transition and lost me.)
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
I know that the St Lawrence Seaway has many outbound shipments
of corn, wheat, salt and soybeans. A good crop year for export. I have no idea of the internal grain commodity markets. I assume they are selling surplus, but there may be more profit in short-selling. I am not an economist nor a farmer. But latter run numbers all the time to eke out profit.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
In good crop years, farmers just get paid less per unit
Only the big traders and Monsanto make money on farm exports; the farmers don't. They go bankrupt. And it doesn't feed the world, the speculators play with it, and people starve although there's plenty to eat, if only they could afford it.
It's all a big and very ugly scam.
We need to go very local and take out the middleman
True. Farming is so fucked up right now in this country. The farmers aren't making any money, but worse still . . . they are not feeding us.
Several years ago, the crops were poor so the price was high. For a few months, land prices became exorbitant. That all crashed after a good crop year.
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo
A very telling statistic
Nice find.
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage
It's hard to make declarative statements about food
with climate change working not only faster but more destructively than expected.
Rural urban divide
I think it is real and therefore another way for the one percent to keep us divided. I've been exposed to rural folks denigrating city folks for a long time with things like no common sense, can't take care of themselves, no morals, crime and pollution. What's kind of new for me is the backlash from the city folk like all the smart people left for the cities and only the dummies are left here in the boonies, or rural folks are backwards, Jesus loving and care not a jot about the people in the cities.
I contend that it wouldn't take much to bring most rural folks back in the fold. I live in a very rural part of Maine, yet am only 20 miles away from the capital and the I -95 corridor. Used to be that many could take good secure state jobs but less and less over the years of austerity culminating with our crack pot governor. There used to be plenty of paper making jobs, and one could usually do okay working in the woods, not so much anymore. There also used to be lots of small manufacturing places nearby, most are gone. The landscape is littered with storage unit places and dollar stores and flea markets. Farms that have sold off their road frontage to small lots with double or single wide homes. It's depressing and it appears like the area is dying. I suspect NAFTA had a lot to do with it and the systematic looting with all the tax breaks given to the rich with no means of replacing that lost money and therefore no funds for any public spending not only in rural areas. If anyone at least offered some plan that showed they cared, then a lot of rural voters would reward said person or party.
“The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us”
― Voltaire
I too believe rural folks would rally around a solution . . .
Grew up in a small town in Iowa, raped by NAFTA and Big Ag. Been in Texas for 25 years now. Very conscious of the fact that progressive and far right voters (my circle of friends) really have the core values (caring about each other and community) in common. It is muddied a lot by preachers here, but I think you are so right when you say . . .
Marilyn
"Make dirt, not war." eyo