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Today is National Dive Bar Day
Things we’ll tolerate for the pork slider special at Shooters…
Right-Wing Extremism Has Been Taking Root In Rural Kansas For Decades
An Op-Ed in today’s Denver Post explains another root cause of despair in the heartland
No truer words spoken.
I have spent a lot of time in West Kansas; in Garden, Leoti, Scott City, Tribune, etc. and there are very few successful farmers out there these days. Those that are work their asses off, because that is the only way to survive. Very bleak picture.
If they could only figure out the real cockroaches are the hedge funds and VC money that consolidated the meat packing industry, busted the unions and implemented their own model (one that puts the costs of the negative externalities on the shoulders of the local community and school districts). The book Methland takes a deep dive into this dynamic.
Colorado’s George Gillette, Jr. was steeped in this consolidation – and was mentioned specifically in the Methland book.
It has, Michael. I spent some time in Garden and Scott Cities in the early ’80s, with an ex-partner, who grew up there, and the place was lousy with those losers even then.
Don't know if you remember the late 1980s essay on The Buffalo Commons — the not really a plan, but a "metaphor" for what could happen in the high plains. I read it and a bit of the response when I was doing farm debt mediation in eastern South Dakota.
The Poppers looked at the boom and bust cycles and expected things in the dry prairie were "busting" again, so the nation would be better off if it did what was necessary to have owners "voluntarily" sell or agree to cooperate in the project over a huge swath (125,000 sq.mi.??) of land. Paying the existing population (and others) to abandon artificial aspects of agriculture, strip off the fences, and reintroduce native grasses and the buffalo. Helping those who stayed to adjust their operations for eco-tourism, hunting, and more "natural" agriculture.
Sounds like the "bust" of the cycle continues as they expected, complicated by vulture capitalism. Climate change will make conditions even worse. Large scale economic transition have never been this country's strong suit … so change will happen disaster by disaster.
I do remember that, JiD. At a macro level the Poppers weren’t wrong; consistent with so many things embedded in the remarks on this post we’ve managed to (literally) *iss away one of the most pristine underground aquifers on the planet and we’ll soon have nothing to show for billions in subsidies we’ve thrown at the region.
There’s still time to make a transition that makes sense – but as was also mentioned earlier, we aren’t really good on transitions that require scale. I try to remain optimistic but the Ogallala dynamic is pushing that condition to its limit. We could be so much more than we are.
The President of Haiti has been assassinated, and his wife critically injured.
https://edition.cnn.com/americas/live-news/haiti-president-assassinated-updates-intl/index.html
Have I mentioned lately that I think Lauren Q-bert is an idiot?
This is a really cool discovery – a new way to “mine” #Lithium: Geothermal from the Salton Sea. It generates clean electricity, while separating Li from brine for $EV batteries. No tailings! @CalEnergy says Salton Sea could produce 40% of world Li demand.
EV deal shows ‘Lithium Valley’ could be for real