Sure you have, it was called Trump’s first term.
Well the Trump cronies are investing in their failure. I’m sure there will be ample debt based sharecropping opportunities working for the shareholders like Vance and theil in their future.
A really good piece on the realities of this topic is here: https://youtu.be/badGHJLDpP8
TL;DW: Farmers thought they were voting for cheap labor and a bailout, like they got last time. They also thought that, as wealthy landowners1, they were on the “right side” of these disastrous trade policies and were going to be carried through this mess.
1. I struggled with this concept at first. Things have changed a lot since the pre-WWII era that conjures up images of Ma & Pa Kent in a weathered century-home, on a lonely corn farm in Kansas. It’s big business now. Good farm land isn’t cheap, equipment is expensive, (legitimate) labor is expensive, fertilizer & irrigation costs a lot, pest control costs, crops are risky in general, and so on. When you work out how much money is moving around and what a farm’s net worth is, these people are millionaires even if they’re not in the black all the time.
What’s really funny to people outside of the US is that cheap labour and a bailout is exactly what they would hve received from Harris.
Agreed. Considering that the alternative to that is always higher food prices, it’s political suicide to not do this.
Unless you are planning on not having elections.
What about the last time he was president?
are the farmers in dire straits, or are independent farmers in dire straights?
i make the distinction because of the purpose is to make the rich, richer, then this is a feature, not a bug for republicans
People like to use the example of Crassus’ fire brigade as an analogy for how corporate interests extract value from regular people in society. Crassus and his fire brigade would go around buying burning houses on the cheap, and then put out the fire for the benefit of Crassus, the new owner. There were some who believed that Crassus was setting the fires himself, but the extractive playbook here works whether he was setting them himself or not.
Are agricultural megacorps buying up farms with depressed values and then fixing them so that the values increase? Probably not. They’re in basically the same boat with the price of commodities, in terms of the inputs (water, fertilizer, labor, equipment and machinery, fuel, energy) and the outputs (wheat, corn, soybeans, etc.). It’s a problem for them, too.
Maybe they have deep enough pockets to ride out the current crisis and will have more to show for it in the end, but for now, they’re in the same boat.
The goal is the collapse and consolidation of farms for private equity. JD is being loud about supporting one venture group buying up farms but it wouldn’t surprise me if that was a proxy group and the one he is parading is supposed to take on liabilities and shed its assets, typical venture cap behavior.
Yeah it’s just the independent farmers. Here in Arkansas they’re either losing their farms or straight up killing themselves, at a brisk pace too.
Happens here too. And who scoops up the land when it gets liquidated? JD goddamn Vance and his vultures.
All part of the plan :(
We’re well on our way towards famine.
Well, you folks are just speed running the apocalypse, aren’t you.
Pestilence, War and now potentially Famine.
I think it’s more of the old republic Roman issue, the small farmers are being eaten up by giant corporate mega farms. Food production will continue but as a monopoly, where they can charge you $100 for a head of lettuce if they feel like it.
No, you’re not. The average US consumer, even those who are desperately poor, still has significantly more buying power than the vast majority of the planet. A collapse in American agriculture will just mean a vast upswing in food imports, because for most of the world it will always be more profitable to sell that food to a US grocery chain than it will be to sell it locally. This will increase costs for US consumers, and push more Americans into poverty, but it won’t cause a famine in the USA.
What you are well on your way towards is causing famines across vast portions of the world that aren’t you. Famines that Americans will barely even notice, much less care about.
IDK, there are already a lot of people hanging on by a thread in the US. A collapse in domestic production that leads to higher prices will push more people under the “secure” line. I think it’ll also cause food shortages worldwide but I think you’re overestimating how many Americans will be insulated.
Yes, I believe I covered that when I said “and push more Americans into poverty”.
I’m not ignoring the plight of those people for whom starvation would be a very real threat in this scenario. But that’s not the same thing as famine, and thinking that it is reflects a uniquely American level of isolation from the realities of the world. Poverty is terrifying - I’ve experienced it myself - but it is an entirely different order of magnitude from famine.
I know people who’ve experienced famine. I know people who’ve told me stories about taking a shit, and then immediately scooping it up and eating it just to sate the desparate, unbearable need to have some kind of food in their stomach. That’s the level of insanity famine drives you to. It’s a scale of hunger you and I can’t even comprehend.
Nowhere in my previous comment did I say “It will be OK if American agriculture collapses.” It would be awful. Many people would die, many more would suffer. But the absolute worst of that suffering wouldn’t happen in the US, it would happen in other parts of the world that most Americans can’t even name.
I don’t know what the odds are on the US or a part of the US reaching the technical definition of famine, I’m just saying I wouldn’t put it in the “definitely not happening” category. And it wouldn’t be because there’s not enough food available, more like the government is actively aggravating domestic food production and international trade and they’re bumbling morons, which is a combination that could easily get us into shortages where a large chunk of the population is starving. And depending on which Americans it affects (or affects the most), the government may not care. Not saying it’s definitely going to happen, but I think it’s naive to say it definitely won’t just based on America’s buying power.
FWIW I agree that the current situation, whatever it’s impact on America’s food security, will impact other parts of the world more severely. I’m sure America’s shit will still roll downhill.
But at least the leopards are still well-fed
This was all a calculated strategy to make independent farmers go bankrupt and into foreclosure, so that the big agritech companies could snag prime agricultural land for pennies on the dollar.
At some point, most food will be grown by corporations that can set whatever price they want for that food, and people will have to pay that price or starve to death. It’s the definition of “captured audience” that makes the Parasite Class extract so much wealth from the working class and become so fantastically wealthy.
I sincerely doubt it was calculated. This regime can’t think past its next Big Mac. The toddler in chief is far too reactionary to actually have a strategy beyond tomorrow’s unconstitutional removal of a public figure speaking out against republicans. It is highly convenient and will be taken advantage of by Big Ag to the fullest - and expect there to be clear favorites among Agribusiness just like when the media bent a knee to Trump and showered him with money.
This has absolutely been planned, JD Vance is invested in AcreTrader and what’s a better way to buy thousand’s of acres for pennies on the dollar than to bankrupt farmers? And at the end of the day, I really don’t think they deserve a bailout.
The regime struggles to operate coherently, but certain elements of the regime are certainly capable of this sort of thing.
For instance, Vance has invested in the “AcreTrader” app, which is designed to take advantage of exactly this situation.
They’re stupid in every way except to grift to enrich themselves for the short term.
Has this not already happened? The mythos of the independent farmer has existed since the great depression. I’m not convinced independent farmers actually exist anymore. Farmers are serfs who buy their seeds and their herbicides/fertilizers from Monsanto, and their tractors from John Deere. They lease the land from generational trusts and wall-street speculators.
Why would a corporation want to assume the risk of actually producing anything?It’s been happening steadily for a while, Trump just opened up a lot of avenues to accelerate it. There are still a lot of small and medium family farms that own their land and equipment.
Durrrrrr I’m gonna crack down on immigrant farm labor while I add lots of tariffs to foreign food durrrrrrrrrr
Fuckers trying to make America North Korea again
You got exactly what you voted for you jackasses.
Go protest, cause I’d love the farmers to be antifa.
They might even already have pitchforks
Well, at least they don’t have to worry about “liberals” inflicting horrible thoughts on them via Colbert or Kimmel.
Are they tired of all the winning yet?
Are they tired of all the winning yet?
They are fucking celebrating in the streets. I am getting so sick of leftists feeling smug about any of this. There is no justice, we are not uniting for any actual resistance movement, we can’t even agree on what issues are important to fight and the average liberal is too comfortable still to do anything.
The farmers will get yet another bailout/bribe to keep quiet, it won’t impact people broadly, it will fall off the news cycle as they go on to strip away more rights from people and continue to build a fascist empire before leaving the nation a dying husk after all wealth is extracted.
By then, most people will have grown up in that world or forgotten what our country could have been and it will be normal life, as the handful of other nations who resisted fascism soar ahead. The experiment is over, it had a good run.
According to the bots in r/Conservative, they are not.
Because conservative ideology requires an other to rally hate against so the base and core voters don’t realize its the elites and party leaders adding suffering to common folk lives for the elites short term benefit.
Despite his troubles, Maxwell remains supportive of Trump, saying that he is “going to be patient,” adding, “I believe in our president.”
However, there is a limit to Maxwell’s patience with Trump. “We’re giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results,” he said. “I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off.”
They’re giving him 18 MONTHS?? For fuck sake, these people Do. Not. Learn.
They didn’t learn in his first term. No way they’ll learn anything here either. These people are completely fucking stupid and never voted for him based on any kind of intelligence.
It’s only 24 months. I bet it won’t even take the whole 36 months. Just a quick and easy definitely less than 48 months.
“He needs a third term…”
They didn’t recover a large part of their soy bean market during Biden’s administration where China picked back up some of the ag products and now they lost all of the market. They’re idiots if they think that this will recover any of their markets at any significant part this time around.
Hopefully they are thinking of the midterms…if we have elections and the GOP gets whiplashed we just might be able to stop the worst of Trump. Imagine we get say 51 democrats in the sesnate along with a majority in the house that’s healthly.
MARC ANDEREESON wanted to buy up farm land in Solarno CA, for his “California Forever” private owned town.
Thiel has expressed similar.
Musk has his own corporate town (Starbase, Texas).
Bezos has an area of Malaysia.
Zuck has parts of Hawaii.
Sam Altman invests in a private town in Honduras.
…they ALL want private towns, fifedoms to rule over in America. And by rule over, I mean SETTING THEIR OWN LAWS.
This is happening.
Anyways, I’m sure this story on Trump bankrupting farmers is completely unrelated. I certainly have no evidence it’s related. But I think it’s concerning (farmers refusing to sell large tracts of America is what held up the “California Forever” project).
MARC ANDEREESON wanted to buy up farm land in Solarno CA, for his “California Forever” private owned town.
what i hear from locals (mom moved there) is he wanted to buy the dump outside town on which to build his little billionaireburg.
The consequences don’t just effect one side. Musk now has his own town, Starbase, Texas. Marc Andreeson isn’t far behind.
There is no being smug, the precedents will have far reaching effects.
We can set our own precedents just like we had to with company towns in the 1800s. I heard about a man named Luigi who supposedly created a similar precedent in the modern era.
