Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future – Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio…
— Michael Huggins (@michaelhugg2591.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 11:59 AM
The Washington Post at its best [gift link]:
KIRK, COLORADO – There was a saying he’d heard, about how every farmer rooted for all the other farmers to do well, too, until one of those others started farming next door. So JJ Ficken didn’t talk much about the grant money with other farmers.
But his bills had mounted, and his ambitions had unraveled, and in Kirk, a town of 61, it was easy to feel alone. Now on that afternoon in mid-April, JJ, 37, unstrapped the bags of seed corn on his trailer for a customer…
The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money.
“Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.”…
Hurt was something JJ already understood. It had been part of the landscape long before Trump took office. JJ was an American farmer, perpetually subject to weather, labor, loans, overhead, markets, health, politics. None of it was predictable, and all of it was a threat. The industry’s survival has long depended on the deals made between millions of Americans willing to brave all that uncertainty and a federal government willing to sustain them, through grants, subsidies, insurance, financing, payouts and disaster relief.
But then Trump, in the earliest days of his second term, threatened to break tens of thousands of those deals, suspending billions in agricultural funding and decimating the staffs that managed it. Swept up in the freeze was JJ and the $50 million grant program he’d signed up for along with 140 other farmers across the country. All of them had agreed to hire and, in many cases, house domestic workers or lawful immigrants willing to take jobs that Americans would not, but with the reimbursements in doubt, farmers worried they’d miss payrolls, default on loans or face bankruptcy. Many feared the checks would never come.
“I tried to do things right,” JJ said, because he could have taken on an undocumented laborer at any time for $14 an hour, as many of his neighbors had, but he didn’t believe in supporting illegal immigration. Almost nothing mattered more to him than his word, and he’d kept it to the U.S. government: He’d committed to buy a plane ticket for a 24-year-old from Guatemala named Otto Vargas. He’d rented him a single-wide. He’d bought him an old pickup to use. He’d spent tens of thousands of dollars to do what the grant required, covering most of it with a line of credit at 8.5 percent interest.
Now, he didn’t know if Otto would ever get here, or if the government would ever pay him back…
===
Otto was the youngest candidate JJ interviewed, but he sounded eager. Through an interpreter, Otto told him he wanted to learn English, and JJ told Otto he wanted to learn Spanish. The language barrier didn’t concern JJ when he offered him the job. He already had another worker, a 21-year-old named Riggin Williams, who had grown up in the community. As long as he had Riggin, JJ wouldn’t have to ask Otto to deal with customers or operate the most technical equipment.
Then, one morning in mid-April, Riggin quit.
He had found a job with regular hours and didn’t want to spend another season baling hay. He gave JJ two weeks’ notice and told him he hoped the new guy worked out.
But the new guy was still in Guatemala, waiting for a visa. JJ couldn’t even apply for the first installment of his grant money until Otto arrived, which should have happened weeks earlier. He’d heard from a recruiter that the administration’s attempt to make the government more efficient had slowed the visa process throughout Central America…
===
In Guatemala, Otto was pleading with God.From his rural hometown of Aldea Chispán, he’d prayed that he’d get a job interview, and when he did, he prayed he’d do well, and when he did, he prayed he’d receive an offer, and when he did, he prayed the United States would let him come.
Otto had made the six-hour round-trip drive to interview for his visa on April 15 — the same day Riggin quit.
Now, he waited, worrying he would be denied or JJ would back out. The two men had spoken during their video interview for just 17 minutes.
Each week Otto missed because of the delay cost him at least $700 in lost wages, and all of it mattered to Otto. His family’s 40-acre farm, he said, had struggled in recent years. Bad winters killed crops. A lost onion harvest squandered five months of work.
His earliest memories were on the farm, fetching his dad’s tools. His father would dig a little hole, and Otto would press fertilizer into the soil by hand. In the flatlands east of the mountains, he’d learned to tolerate temperatures that topped 110 degrees. During planting season, he and his dad would rest in the shade of their lemon trees, sweating and laughing and sharing his mother’s empanadas.
Now his dad was 64, and Otto dreaded leaving him. He relied on Otto to manage the land, but Otto also leaned on his dad, who had tried to prepare him for the United States, a place he’d never visited. In the months since Trump took office, Otto said, he’d seen videos on Facebook of immigrants being harassed and arrested…
Raoul Paste
Societies that thrive are based on win-win relationships and decency. It’s so devastating to watch the cruelty , injustice, and stupidity recently.
And yet we must persevere
Edited for clarity
cain
If you voted for Trump, I don’t really have much sympathy. They had every evidence from the first term. If you voted again for chaos then I don’t know what to say. It was right in front of you. You voted to be part of the cult, part of the conservative narrative that has never supported farmers.
Jackie
When will farmers ever learn that FFOTUS, and republicans aren’t their friends? I’m guessing the twelfth of never, because they keep voting for their enemies.
hells littlest angel
Counterpoint: He voted for Trump.
TONYG
Nice remark by the farmer’s “friend” … ““Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.” Some “friend”. There are apparently millions of people in this country who would gladly sacrifice neighbors, “friends”, family members — maybe even themselves — for the greater glory of their cult leader, Donald Trump. Trump supporters have always been stupid people but, apparently, many of them (most of them?) are also just shit people, devoid of a sense of empathy or even of self-preservation. In any event — long before the advent of Trump as a political figure — my blue-state taxes have been subsidizing these rural assholes.
TONYG
@Jackie: They assume — probably correctly — that those black and brown people will suffer more. And that’s good enough for them. Assholes.
E.
Okay I will be the dick. Why is the federal government paying this guy $200k over two years to have one laborer on his 40-acre farm? Why should I support this? What am I missing?
WV Blondie
There are almost 3300 comments on this article already on the WaPo site. This is what the AI-generated summary says of them:
Doug R
@hells littlest angel:
Maybe when they start “eating the cats” “eating the dogs” they’ll finally learn?
Gloria DryGarden
@cain: I’d actually like to hear from folks in rural and red areas, who have less access to news beyond npr sane washing radio and fox: faux news and alternate subjective twisted reporting.
Did everyone have a way to know? Was it harder to access? I keep hearing that media in many areas has been pretty controlled by far right powers.
We knew. But, did everyone? Was there enough exposure to a different point of view, to start to see how much bullshit was unfolding?
Jackie
From the same article:
Americans don’t want these jobs – that FFOTUS claims Americans want. “They’re taking away your jobs.”
kindness
The unspoken shoe that needs dropping: Will that farmer continue to vote Republican? Yes, yes he will. Screw him. A taste of his own medicine.
mrmoshpotato
Even though Dump lost Colorado – vote for a conman, get conned!
Baud
@E.:
True, that seems excessive, and not clear what the benefit was.
Professor Bigfoot
@Jackie: I talk all the time about how white people do not question their own unconscious and subconscious choices.
I believe it’s just white men voting for the party of white men, without giving the least thought to the unintended(heh) consequences to their bank accounts, to their own children.
But of course, lots of white men here will tell me why I’m wrong.
Doug R
@Professor Bigfoot: Won’t get disagreement from me-hard not to share that LBJ quote.
oldgold
“Hurt was something JJ already understood. It had been part of the landscape long before Trump took office. JJ was an American farmer, perpetually subject to weather, labor, loans, overhead, markets, health, politics. None of it was predictable, and all of it was a threat.”
Hogwash! These pampered princes of the prairie have been living high on the hog for 40 years. They are at much less economic risk than your average suburbanite. And, for the most part, are far more indolent
We need to give up these Parson Weem’s myths about farmers.
Baud
Seasonal immigrant agricultural labor seems like a good place for actual socialism. The feds can act as an employment agency for them and farm them out as a service as needed. Better way to ensure that the workers are treated fairly, and no wasting money on excessive grants.
Baud
@Jackie:
At least he was smart enough to vote for the lesser of two evils.
He was just wrong about his math.
Lord Fartdaddy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Hey, if it fucks over a Guatemalan, that’s reason enough to cut the money. Too bad for the farmer, but, hey, eggs and omelets, am I right? Nothing’s more important than fucking over poor people from other countries.
different-church-lady
We’re ten years into this, and I feel it’s just blunt truth to say; at this stage anyone who “puts faith” in Donald Trump is a damn fool.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Counterpoint: the other choice wasn’t evil.
VFX Lurker
Without reading the article for details, it sounds like a way to support farmers who do what we want them to do (hire documented workers) and to lower the high demand for undocumented labor.
Some of the money goes to pay the documented worker; the rest goes to farm upgrades and repairs. All of it goes towards preserving our food security.
Between this and the FDA cuts, Trump’s threatening our food safety and food security.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
I’m with you, but evil is subjective, especially these days.
satby
I assuming that the grant program originally was under the previous administration. And was an attempt to provide decent pay and a legal route to get immigrant labor (@E.: it clearly states that housing, *probably healthcare*, and decent wages were parts of the conditions the farmer had to fulfill). Knowing that Trump promised repeatedly to undo everything Biden set up, it’s hard to feel sorry for the guy. We really need for people to start voting based on what politicians actually do vs. what they say they’ll do, but in this case it wasn’t confusing.
Baud
@VFX Lurker:
Ok. That part wasn’t clear from the article.
Bupalos
@E.: Food?
Our lives are probably easier and way better than this guy’s life. I get pretty squirmy at all the folks that grew up with better educational opportunities, incomes, support structures… you name it… Whose only reaction here seems to be “fuck this guy, if you’re stupid enough to vote for Trump, you deserve it.”
But cue the chorus of people who think they pulled themselves up to liberalism by their own bootstraps. There are developmental, cultural, educational, and macroeconomic realities that leave people stunted and struggling. Struggling with their own humanity in a lot of cases, sure. But as disappointed as I am in many of these sad sacks, I’m also incredibly disappointed in the fundamental illiberality that is spreading among us as well.
It’s just all so stupid. It’s a great and complicated piece of journalism that should make everyone think and maybe modify some of their preconceived notions.
Chris S. Sherbak
I don’t understand how this can’t be turned around (You listening Ken Martin?) I’m sure this is happening in Blue States – my state of IL has massive amounts of farming:
Baud
@Bupalos:
There’s nothing illiberal about opposing evil or about refusing to be taken advantage of.
Soprano2
I think it’s bad that they stopped this program. If Harris had won, he’d have his worker and his money. If more people would vote their logical self-interest rather than their anger and grievances we’d be a lot better off. I don’t feel sorry for him at all, even if he didn’t realize it he got what he voted for. I feel badly for the Guatemalan worker who probably won’t get to come here to work now.
Professor Bigfoot
@Chris S. Sherbak: Sure it could.
If the media-industrial-complex covered it.
But I think it pretty obvious that major media are completely in the tank for Trump and Trumpism.
Scout211
There are so many stories. Here’s another one that is heartbreaking. So many are heartbreaking.
Scrounger
If you do the math, it’s more like $350,000 per farmer, for 141 farmers. I imagine the rest vanishes into ‘overhead’ and ‘administration’, &c.
But what made me furious was the claim that they didn’t have health insurance – and then pointed out that their daughter’s care was through Medicaid.
Yes you flippin’ well do have health insurance. Maybe not great, but the government is very much paying for your daughter’s health care. Be thankful for that, and maybe whine a bit less about the government just giving you $200,000 to hire one guy.
Funny how he bet the farm (almost literally) on government money, then turned around and claimed he never expected government money.
The dissonance is very strong with these people.
Jackie
During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, my grandpa, dad and his brothers worked the fields and orchards from OK to CA, then worked their way north to WA. Then spent the next two years going up and down the coastline states working the crops in season. Doing exactly what migrant workers
dodid until now.Bupalos
@Soprano2: The article isn’t paywalled. You could read it.
Sure Lurkalot
@TONYG:
Yeah, subsidizing them because they won’t tax themselves for public goods and then brag about how the red states are low tax havens and blue states are high tax hellholes.
Redshift
@different-church-lady:
Lesser of two evils, as commonly used, means choosing between two things you don’t like, not that they’re actual evil. Which is probably a good argument for why it’s not an appropriate standard to use when one choice is actually evil.
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: He had no doubt already “suffered” through the Obama years.
Soprano2
@Gloria DryGarden: If you listened to FFOTUS for even 5 minutes you had to know he was going to shut down immigration. There’s no excuse for anyone to not know that, because all the right wing sites, tv programs and radio talkers were excited about it. Harder to predict the end of that program, but it helped bring in people from other countries, so it’s not too hard to predict they’d cut it. The truth is, too many of these voters thought only the “bad people” in the “bad places” would get hurt, which is what they wanted. They just didn’t believe FFOTUS would do things that would hurt “good people” like they believe themselves to be.
AM in NC
@Chris S. Sherbak: All of this. We need to take it directly to these locations – attack the Republicans for lying/breaking their word/harms they are causing; explain how Democrats are working to undo/reverse the harm; explain that voting the same way is going to continue the harm, but there is a better choice to be made next time. And repeat this over and over again. The town halls in GOP districts are a great way to keep the pressure up.
Baud
Let’s be clear, if this guy’s face hadn’t been eaten by leopards, he would be 100% behind what Trump is doing to other innocent people in the U.S.
Bupalos
@Scrounger: Where does the guy say he doesn’t have health insurance? Where does he “turn around and say he never expected government money?”
I really feel like this is hallucinated because people want a reason to hate this guy.
satby
@Bupalos: do you live in a rural area? Because if you don’t, you really don’t understand how resistant many rural people are to anything that will help them if it means voting for Democrats. Many of them “homeschool” their kids so the kids are available as unpaid farm hands, many subtly discourage their kids to seek higher education, many fight alternative energy installations like solar farms or windmills; hell, when I lived in SW MI the paved roads were being torn up because they had repeatedly voted against taxes to keep them drivable. And they’re constantly bitter about cities “taking their children” (the ones who escape) and “looking down on them” because “all those city people would starve without them”. Trump lied in his rallies, but he was crystal clear about undoing Biden programs right to their faces.
Karen
@E.: The immigrant’s family had a 40 acre farm. Row crop and beef farms (he mentioned hay) are much larger than 40 acres in US.
Soprano2
@Bupalos: I know these people aren’t evil, but it’s hard to feel sorry for people who got what they voted for. It’s what they said they wanted! There are no backsies on elections.
Soprano2
@Baud: Yep, just like his friend who was glad the program was cut.
Bupalos
@Baud: This shit is just weird. Lots of folks here have a NEED for simple falsified characters they can hate, just like the looneys on the right. Too much time online is what ties this together.
He has no social media and there is no reference to him engaging in any kind of political fluffery.
Baud
@Bupalos:
I’m not engaging him. I’m making comments about a post that AL put up and a story that Washington Post wrote.
Scout211
QFT
I live in a rural area in a red county in California, and I agree. Most of the residents don’t even pay attention to the actual news, even Fox News. They just “know” that Democrats are bad and they would never, ever vote for them. And Republicans will always be better for them in all areas of their lives, as crazy as that sounds.
It’s like a cult and and the cult now it has a name, MAGA.
Soprano2
@Bupalos: It’s the same story, over and over. “I voted for FFOTUS but didn’t think he’d do (bad thing FFOTUS repeatedly said he would do) to me. ” All you had to do was listen to the many, many, many interviews with these voters before the election to know this is true. Did he say he’s sorry he voted for the Felon?
Scrounger
@Scrounger: Replying to your own comment is poor style, but here I go anyhow:
Wanna bet that he didn’t just vote for Mr. Trump, but Republican all the way down the line? For Senator, House Representative, Governor, State chambers, even dogcatcher?
Bupalos
@satby: I do, and I’m quite aware of the retrograde attitudes around me. It’s also not everyone, and practically no one fits the entire stereotype everyone insists on. It just drives me a little nuts that you have this whole involved article with a guy that is a pretty regular guy who… yes, he’s politically stunted in completely predictable ways given his education and situation. You would be too. But people will beat him into the shape they need to be, and basically just make shit up until he fits the mold. I mean, literally just taking the various elements that they believe fit the character, and insisting that this is what the article says.
I think it’s gross. But I blame the internet. I’m going to try and exercise the same restraint towards the more privileged people here, because I think the secret sauce that is wrecking us all is simply the internet.
Steve LaBonne
@Scout211: This is the real problem- aside from wealthy people who know very well why they vote Republican, their voters are mostly people who don’t pay attention, don’t have the first fucking clue about anything, and are unreachable by any Democratic message whatsoever (something “centrists” continually pretend not to grasp). The one accurate bit of information they do have is that Republicans are the white supremacist party and Democrats not so much.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: J.S. Mill’s remark about stupid people and conservatism also applies to people who lack empathy.
Sure Lurkalot
@AM in NC:
I sincerely wish I could agree but not only did Trump campaign on ending immigration, replete with crowds behind him at rallies with “mass deportation now” signs, he also screwed farmers over the first time they foolishly helped to elect this pasty plutocrat whom they consider the salt of the earth. The Biden-Harris administration tried to end childhood hunger in the richest nation on earth, which bigly benefited farmers, and they pissed all that away.
Many of these folks do and will not learn, they will vote their tribe until they’re forced into bankruptcy and even after that.
Gloria DryGarden
@Scout211: that is so fucking weird. I believe you.
I wish any of us had loads of useful ideas to counter it. It’s troubling. Deeply troubling.
thou shalt hate, not only women, and non white people, but speakers of their languages, members of religions we choose to judge as outside our norm, and also thou shall gate democrats.
the whole religious justification for judging, separating, and hating seems like a kind of mental illness. It’s very unevolved, spiritual black and white stuff. I find black and white thinkers and the highly judgmental to be nearly impossible to reach.
they would fuck themselves over rather than let someone different than them be included?
do people not know who is working the fields where most of our food is grown? Surely people want to eat.
satby
@Scrounger: TBF, lots of those were probably uncontested races if it’s a deep red area.
Until I lived there, I had never regularly encountered people who didn’t want a better life for their children that they had achieved themselves. But it was practically a norm there, going away to college was the first step to never coming back and being a farmer and people really hated that. So they’ve raised scores of kids who can work on farms, or construction, or lawn services for vacation houses, or at Walmart. And safely keep them home, away from the evils of living among other fellow Americans.
Bupalos
@Soprano2: Sounds like he’s waiting to see what happens. Who knows what moral he’ll actually draw from this in the end. He feels now like if Trump doesn’t come through then he’ll hate him or “be done with him” or something. But who knows. There’s actually a lot more to this story than simply “Trump is fucking me over” and a lot of different good or bad lessons he could take.
Good thing he’s not online, or one of the morals he would probably take is that the left roots for his ruin.
Gloria DryGarden
@Sure Lurkalot: it’s weird to me that they missed the part where trump ie killed the useful immigration bill that was hammered out in congress during Bidens administration.
I don’t understand the stupidity or lack of logic, or failure to track facts and events, whichever it was. Mind boggling.
Scrounger
@Bupalos: In the linked article, not the post.
“How would the couple, who had no health insurance, pay for their daughter’s care if the administration and Congress gutted Medicaid?”
Because their daughter’s care is currently being paid by Medicaid?
“He expected the same of others, and that included the president, who he’d never believe in again if the grant didn’t come through.”
He bet the farm on a government grant. Also:
“He didn’t hire Otto to promote an agenda, and he didn’t think the government owed him a handout. “
Gloria DryGarden
@Steve LaBonne: I need to look up what mills said on this.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
David Collier-Brown
Hey, an actual migrant!
Usually when I see that word, it is one of Mr Trump trying to make his listeners think that immigrants and refugees are people who move to the US and then back home. That’s utterly not the case for refugees, and at least misleading for immigrants.
“Migrants are people who take the goats to the high pasture in summer, and bring them home in the winter.” My dad, when I was a little kid and asked what a migrant was.
satby
Well, no, I wouldn’t be, and a certain % of the kids do escape to college or the military. So there’s alternative news sources available as close as the smart phone and laptop. Even my young superfundie ex Mennonite family kids all were very internet savvy. Two out of the four are not following the mold, we don’t know about the youngest yet, but I suspect he will fly the coop when he can too. And that’s anecdata, of course. But in the end, people have agency and make choices, and suffer the consequences of those choices, just as this guy and others like him did.
Shalimar
@Professor Bigfoot: I haven’t counted, but my general impression in the past is that you get a lot more white men here apologizing because you’re right than telling you you’re wrong.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: I am sorry that we continue to to fail to live up to your standards.
Gloria DryGarden
@Omnes Omnibus: and what to make of the non stupid, highly educated conservatives, and all the stupid policies they back? Policies, that have been shown not to work, not to benefit people?
is it because of their me, only me values, profit before people? I just don’t get their values.
How do they not see the economic damage and power/ status damage being done, that will affect them too? Is the bigger picture that hard to grasp?
Soprano2
@Bupalos: Ok, I read it. Did you? It clearly says they don’t have health insurance, and mentions their worry about how they will be able to treat their daughter’s diabetes if Medicaid is cut. He says he won’t believe in FFOTUS if he doesn’t get the money, so I’ll give him that. He’ll vote for the next Republican, though, probably for “reasons”. He actually says he didn’t think FFOTUS would hurt people like him!!!!!!!!!
satby
@Bupalos: oh, and you’re clearly the soul of nuanced reasoning. “The left roots for his ruin”, bullshit. We note the consequences of his actions are not to his liking, and that there was other actions he and others could have taken.
Captain C
@Redshift: As always, if you vote for the lesser of two evils you get less evil. This can be the difference between a situation that is salvageable and one which is more or less permanently fucked.
Gloria DryGarden
@David Collier-Brown: I did the goats to pasture thing. I’m pretty happy about that episode of my life.
refugees: since many Americans don’t quite believe these other places and people exist, where really bad things have been happening, unimaginably bad things, it’s hard, I guess to grasp that refugees and asylum seekers had fled something real, and seriously difficult.
Steve LaBonne
@Shalimar: As a white dude who is very much on the good Professor’s wavelength, it’s not a question of apologizing, but of trying to do something about it. The first step is to understand that you can be racist or antiracist, but there is no such thing as being passively “non-racist”.
Soprano2
@Bupalos: I’m not “rooting for his ruin”, I voted for the candidate who didn’t want to destroy the government. I just can’t feel sorry for someone who’s getting what they voted for. Whose fault would it be if he didn’t know what FFOTUS said he would do? Democrats? I grew up with people just like him.
zhena gogolia
@satby: We’re all so upper-class (in his mind). He has no idea where I came from.
Professor Bigfoot
Accept that their greatest value is straight white Christian male supremacy, and what they do starts to make sense.
I sure as shit haven’t found another compelling throughline that explains their behavior!
David Collier-Brown
@Jackie: back when I was a kid, I joined a bunch of other high-schoolers in a casual-labour draft. I hoed most of a field, taking from early morning until after dinner, made slightly less than minimum wage, and never did that again. Voluntarily.
I was forced back into it a few times: the funniest was when I was on a moving crew, pushing a refrigerator on a dolly upstairs. The other workers were all afraid I would slip and be crushed (I was skinny and weighed 140 pounds in those days). That was one of my better casual jobs, even if I scared my colleagues.
IMHO, people will do some really shitty jobs when they must. If the US induces a big enough depression, we’ll all be back doing that again
Scrounger
Another thing I got from that article I very much agree with. Some years ago, long before the “Fight for $15” minimum wage battles, when minimum wage (and fast-food serving wages) were down well below $10/hr., some Northern California farmers tried advertising part-time (summer job for younger folks) farm work for $20-$25 an hour among the wealthier areas of Redding and Sacramento, &c., and they’d get a few applicants.
They’d show up, in the right place at the right time, and work until the lunch whistle blew. Then they’d get into their cars, tell the field boss they were going to get lunch, and they would never come back.
These are jobs that a significant fraction of the local workforce just won’t take.
satby
@Steve LaBonne: JB Pritzker said something quite similar.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Probably doesn’t realize I’m one of the very few here that owns a yacht.
Gloria DryGarden
@Soprano2: right up there with my desire for all the anti choice people to have multiple family members go through pregnancy complications that involve abortion care and related medical help, is my desire for the anti Medicaid people to have loved ones and people they know, whose diabetes is too expensive to care for. For people who matter to them , to be affected.
we lost an important member of my community here, because he couldn’t afford his diabetes meds, took it only on alternate days. He died. He was important, he helped a lot of people.
Professor Bigfoot
@zhena gogolia: He sure AF has no idea where I came from; but there’s a level of arrogance inherent.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: When do we get our invitation?
WTFGhost
@cain: Well, to take a bit from the story:
Most farmers are like JJ’s friend – they’re happy with some hurt, as long as it hurts other people. And that’s the wrong attitude to have. It’s extremely rare that anyone needs to hurt.
Economics teaches us that we all get along better when we think about how we can make each others lives better, for the right price. Note that hugs, gentle back scritches, a hand on the shoulder, full on backrubs, and compassionate caresses are all free, and extremely expressive and helpful to others, and, often times, the more you give, the more you get, econ 101.
When we get past “free,” even then, the more we can share, the better we all get. This is a strong argument for a minimum living wage, because that means each new worker is new spending, in whatever said worker enjoys, which helps create new businesses, etc..
I remember hearing tell of a village that did okay for its isolation, and “how do you all live?” was answered with “by taking in each other’s washing.” Of course, paying someone to do your laundry, alone, can’t be enough money-movement to run a town, but, when you think of all the small things each resident might be able to do to help the rest of the village get by, you realize there’s a fair bit more wealth in even an isolated village than one might think.
One problem, of course, is that there’s less locality to dollars these days. Time was, you paid the butcher, and the baker, the candlestick maker, and they might pay you for your goods or services, or, pay your employer. Now, a lot of that money has no locality.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: stupid assed supremacy of dickheads. Key word, Supremacy. The right to lord it over others.
I’ve been around men who want to dominate a woman. It sticks in my craw, the shit they try to pull. I mostly try to avoid them. But one has had run ins. Stirs up my rage, them trying to put me down and silence me.
How dare I be smarter than them? Oh! How dare I not turn submissive? I do not consent to their values, or their de-valuation of others.
grrr
TONYG
@Scout211: “you really don’t understand how resistant many rural people are to anything that will help them if it means voting for Democrats.” To the degree that that is true … these assholes deserve what happens to them (although I sympathize with their young children). At a certain point, when people have demonstrated that they are this fucking stupid and this much full of hate — fuck them. There are plenty of good decent people who deserve my sympathy more than these assholes do. (And, yes, as a “blue state” taxpayer I’ve been supporting their sorry asses for decades.)
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: Gutted. I am so sorry to hear this, Gloria.
I am reminded that millions of us are going to suffer and possibly die, because so many of our fellow citizens voted for it.
Captain C
@Professor Bigfoot: To add to this:
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
I don’t rub elbows with the great unwashed. I have a reputation to uphold among my peers.
Steve LaBonne
@Professor Bigfoot: I truly don’t know why people keep feeding the especially predictable and dreary Bupalos troll. It was on my block list at LGM and quickly found its way into my pie filter here.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: And out in the ocean you can go without pants as much as you like.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: If your trust bought it, do you really own it?
NeenerNeener
Can TACO do this if his boss Vlad says no?
https://www.latintimes.com/trump-contemplating-axing-tulsi-gabbards-office-saying-she-doesnt-add-anything-his-admin-585231
oldgold
Joseph Heller’s satirical depiction of farmers in Catch 22 is too close to reality.
Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.
His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make sure the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the country…Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they had produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all.
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: thank you. They were friends, I used to have a meal with he and his wife, once in awhile.
They handled pagan prison ministry here in Colorado. It’s a nationally recognized religion, the prisons have to allow it. The military , too. It’s recognized. ( see how long that lasts) So they brought a way to learn and participate in a spiritual practice for people who are pagans. Much needed. They were in all the prisons in Colorado, trained a few to help out and carry it on. Mostly funded by local donations. They’re both gone now. It hurts.
Professor Bigfoot
@satby: THANK YOU.
The Great Khan absolutely has it going on.
The steppe will tremble under the thundering hooves of his Nomadic Warriors!
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: you’d think arrogance would be a sub set of pride, and at least the Catholics would be discussing it as a sin.
different-church-lady
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not.
WTFGhost
The thing that is very worrying about this society is, he could have been a lonely, cranky, recluse, like me, and he still should have been able to afford his diabetes meds, without having to make difficult choices.
Also: although a lot of people who have diabetes are fat, weight gain is the first thing that happens when you lose sugar control. When you have excess sugar in your blood, it turns to fat – that’s what it’s supposed to do, so you can load up on sugar in the spring and summer, and fall, and then lose weight over the winter, when you’re more likely to be eating meat. My whole family has diabetes, and I struggled with weight all my life, sometimes weighing in at 290, but I wasn’t “diabetic” for most of that time, because I was exercising enough that I was keeping my body healthy, sugar-wise. (Yes, I was 290, and exercising 3-5 days a week. )
If you are a twin, and your twin is diabetic, there’s like an 80% chance you’ll have it too. It’s therefore mostly genetic.
So: no, being a “tub o lard” doesn’t make you diabetic; being diabetic makes you more likely to be fat, due to genetics.
Meaning: yes, even DIABETES which everyone equates with being a fat old fattie, is genetic, like sickle cell, and denying treatment for diabetes is precisely as evil as refusing treatment for sickle cell.
(Not that diabetes drugs are in the same price class as new treatments for sickle cell anemia – but, both conditions are genetic (or mostly so), and, if there are treatments, people expect “health insurance” will help, even for genetic conditions.)
Raoul Paste
@Baud: Oh, no more scones for me, mater, I’m off to play the grand piano. I’m off to sail on my yacht.
NutmegAgain
Sure, but before Otto got there, this farmer dude could only talk with his neighbor about how there was so much waste in the Federal Gov. But not his grant!! He deserves that. It’s those other people, not like him (kids, elders, struggling families), they don’t deserve any government money. I think his story belongs on the reddit group about Leopards Eating Faces. A classic case of FAFO.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: It’s the height of irony that Republicans fly the Pine Tree flag symbolizing an Appeal to Heaven to overthrow a tyrannical government when the GOP controls the federal government at all levels and most state governments.
What is the tyranny that they are enduring now?
Is it that you exist and demand justice?
different-church-lady
@Redshift: I think “I faced a choice between a rhetorical evil and a literal evil and I chose poorly” is a quote that probably wouldn’t have made it into the article.
RevRick
@Raoul Paste: That’s the ideal, but imperialist ideology divides us on the basis of race, class and gender and relies on violence to maintain its fucked up structures.
different-church-lady
I’ll repeat: dude had ten years to figure it out.
Barry
This article is heartbreaking for Otto; JJ voted for immense harm to other people.
He assumed that his @ss would not be on the line to any really degree.
He can’t tell the truth to save his soul, and is content to be that way.
Raoul Paste
@RevRick: “ relies on violence….”
Increasingly so.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: I “retired” early because I decided I’d rather be poor than ever have to deal with another of the sonsabitches ever again.
As can be told by my presence here, I don’t know how to keep my mouth shut anymore, and if you can’t do that it’s REALLY hard to work with stupid motherfuckers. 😉
NeenerNeener
@NutmegAgain: It’s on leopardseatingfaces right now.
Steve LaBonne
@Professor Bigfoot: I can definitely identify. It’s pretty much why I retired less than voluntarily at 62 1/2. Luckily my wife and I both have public employee pensions plus a worthwhile amount of Social Security (thank you Joe Biden for signing the Social Security Fairness Act) so we’re modestly but solidly solvent. Eating without having to kiss anybody’s ass is glorious.
Moondoggus
@Bupalos: the real underlying issue is Republican farm policy which aims to increase yields and drive down prices. This came in under Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Butz.
Farmers have been pushed out of business because they can’t get a decent price for their product. Then big Ag comes in and buys the land. Nowadays if you want to farm you’re likely renting acreage and taking all the risk.
instead of fixing the Ag policy, the government turns to subsidies instead of price support.
Professor Bigfoot
@Steve LaBonne: I’m a cat and curiosity too often gets the best of me.
That one’s comments I can skip, but I am so tempted to see what’s said by its interlocutors.
Thus spiking my blood pressure yet again… <breathe… in through the nose, out through the mouth… ;) >
Timill
@NutmegAgain:
To him, that’s not a freebie, it’s a Contract. He does stuff, they’ll pay for stuff.
But those are freebies, given to the obviously undeserving…
RevRick
@oldgold: I don’t know how true that is. Farming is a shitty business. Especially if it’s a family farmer of less than a thousand acres. I had a farm family as members of my past congregation and they went through several bankruptcies and save for a flat screen TV were the epitome of rural poverty.
And even huge farms in Iowa are one step ahead of financial catastrophe. They are literally in hock up to their eyeballs with loans for seeds, fertilizer, irrigation, and equipment.
There’s a reason why we have gone from a nation of farmers to one where less than 2% of the population is engaged in farming. It’s the economics, and it’s the miserable life.
Professor Bigfoot
@oldgold: Thank you, and I need to go back and read Catch-22 again; I’d almost forgotten that part!
Ruckus
@cain:
that has never supported farmers.
Who has it ever actually supported? I’d say it supports money. More than anything else. And it supported shitforbrains – again!
jonas
Yeah, but then he’d have to see a smart woman of color every night on the teevee going around acting she ran the country or something. Having your livelihood destroyed is surely a small price to pay to spare yourself that trauma.
It was the same 8 years ago. Trumps tariffs destroyed a bunch of farm businesses (most didn’t receive those sweet bailout subsidies) and they absolutely didn’t give a shit.
Harrison Wesley
Does it say in the original article that he voted for Trump? I didn’t see that in the exerpts. Doesn’t come across as super-Trumpy to me.
RevRick
@Bupalos: The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps “ has got to be the most ridiculous notion imaginable. And originally it was intended to be a ridiculous claim. After all, it literally means lifting yourself off the ground by grabbing your shoes.
Professor Bigfoot
Ain’t that the truth. I have learned to my horror that atherosclerosis has a large genetic component— when your cholesterol and triglycerides and such are all WELL within norms and you get clogged arteries any damn way, yeah. All of that.
Our country is run by evil people.
Ruckus
@Professor Bigfoot:
This one doesn’t.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: It’s that we exist and insist that we are citizens of this country our ancestors built, with ALL the rights, privileges and responsibilities citizenship gives and demands.
To them we’re not quite fully human, and we’re certainly not qualified to be American citizens.
Steve LaBonne
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m sorry, but our esteemed Secretary of Health and Human Services has informed me that people have the health they deserve, and who am I to question this
distinguished scientistlawyer and conspiracy grifter?Professor Bigfoot
@Steve LaBonne: I was so pleasantly surprised to discover that since I’d been paying into it since I was 14 and had multiple years where I paid in up to the limit, the missus and I get enough to be comfortable. Indeed, being able to live without kissing ANY ass (and I was in sales, it was my job!) is marvelous. 😁
jonas
@RevRick: Sarah Taber, who I believe we supported here on BJ for NC Ag Commissioner, has a great series of YouTubes and podcasts on farming economics in which she talks about why some farmers are perpetually barely keeping their head above water while others seem to do pretty well. Spoiler alert: it turns out subsidies and stuff don’t have a lot to do with it. Anyway, I think they’re really interesting and educative about what’s going on in the rural economy these days, the ways government policy helps and sometimes hurts farmers, and how farm businesses can be successful.
WTFGhost
@E.: Why should you support a particular grant that doesn’t make sense to you? I don’t know. I’m a bugger about “the President is supposed to see that the law is faithfully executed, not to change the laws on his own, because he prefers it that way,” and that seems (to me) to be more important than “OMG, there’s this grant that sounds wasteful!”
Chetan Murthy
Gloria, I found this interview with Melinda Cooper in The Baffler to be very informative, and went some way towards answering your question: https://thebaffler.com/latest/extravagances-of-neoliberalism-kunkel
it’s based on her recent book: _Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance_
I originally read that interview months ago, and my mind kept on going back to it, over and over. Eventually I reread it, and it continued to excite ferment. So I started reading the book, and boy howdy, she really delivers.
TL;DR Starting with RaYgUn, the rich-guy conservatives engineered a tax regime that privileges asset appreciation, both financial and real-estate, and it has made them fabulously wealthy. They don’t care what happens to the real economy, as long as tax expenditures ensure their assets keep appreciating.
She has all the deets: the first part of the book (I’m 20% in) is a sort-of tick-tock of the changes in tax regimes, and what impact that had on asset markets, on manufacturing, on industry, etc, etc. The way I’d put it, she’s bringing all the receipts, so that her conclusions are hard-to-dispute. I don’t know what her policy prescription will be, but reading the book, I can see why WAS(o)S(o)S(o)F.
Anyway, that’s a long answer, but you might find the interview illuminating.
Chetan Murthy
Do you have pointers (to vids) to share? Or maybe a quick synopsis what she thinks sets apart the successful farmers from the unsuccessful ones? I’d be interested to learn more *grin*.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: This seems to be her channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@FarmToTaber
Looks interesting.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ruckus
@satby:
We really need for people to start voting based on what politicians actually do vs. what they say they’ll do, but in this case it wasn’t confusing.
For some people bullshit seems/is a part of their concept of life.
I actually have some concept of business owning/being responsible for not only your own income but responsible to providing work and money for the work that others do for you. I’ve owned 2 different businesses. One manufacturing and one retail. That manufacturing business required workers with very specific knowledge and skills. The retailing not as much but still, it had a need of more than how to operate a cash register. But then most jobs do, even many/most in retail.
oldgold
@RevRick: Reverend you are a wonderful commenter. I really enjoy your insights.
But, on this you are wrong.
Big Iowa farms are not one step ahead of financial catastrophe. And, it is most definitely not a miserable life.
The scores of family farmers I know are almost all multi-millionaires and have work hours and life styles most city folk can only dream of.
This has not always been the case. But since the mid-90s, farming has been very good
Timill
@Harrison Wesley:
Yes, it’s in comment #11 by Jackie:
The Republic of Stupidity
@VFX Lurker:
This, right here:
‘Trump’s threatening our food safety and FOOD SECURITY’
IMHO, this point cannot be stressed enough…
If the Orange Monstrosity keeps screwing with the labor that harvests so much of the country’s fruits and vegetables, we could well end up with food shortages and insane inflation in basic food stuffs down the road.
I, for one, am looking forward to pictures of vegetables rotting in the fields due to a lack of labor to harvest them.
(Yes, I have done that work in the past, and yes, it is HARD to do.)
And at this point, I think we, as a country, are pretty much assured of a crash landing at some point. the only questions I have at this point are 1) when, and 2) how bad will it be?
I definitely intend to beat Republicans over the head with this for years to come.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jackie: when we finally get inexpensive internet into rural America?
Parfigliano
I feel sorry for Otto. JJ can die in a fire.
Chetan Murthy
@Parfigliano: A-effin-men. To both.
ExPatExDem
To the farmer I say: Have the day you voted for.
jefft452
“The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America.”
Why couldnt JJ pull himself up by his own bootstraps?
The safety net is JJ’s hammock
No more handouts for lazy….
What?
He’s white?
OK never mind
satby
@Gloria DryGarden: it is, and it has been discussed in that way, at least when I was in Catholic school.
Chetan Murthy
When I was a kid, roofing was a job my uneducated peers aspired to: it paid -well-. Ditto working in the local butchery. I don’t know what being a farmhand paid. I know that in all these jobs, there are the overseers, and the line workers. I wonder what percentage of line workers are native-born ? I remember reading during the pandemic that in butcheries, it was almost all immigrants. We read about how construction employs a ton of immigrants. I wonder what it’s like in farm work.
One suspects that most native-born (and all farmers) on farms aren’t working the hard jobs. After all, that’s what immigrants are for.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@TONYG: Nearly every society subsidizes farmers. Abundant and inexpensive food is a necessity of life.
Famine is a necessity of disease and death.
The bigger and less biodiverse the farms, the greater the danger of famine since a monoculture can die off fast before anyone can think how to save it.
The bananas we eat are not the bananas we used to eat. Those old bananas died off. The once predominant chestnut is nearly gone in America. The elm looks to be close behind. This president just told salmon (critical to health in forests among other things) to hurry up and go extinct already.
Grain used to be kept in temples.
We need to reach farmers like JJ who view their words as their bond. They are supporting a party of nihilists because of propaganda that turns some of them into vultures.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
Dollars to doughnuts the friend who sees “a little hurt” as an OK thing is one of the ones hiring undocumented labor and thinking it’s OK because his situation makes it different somehow.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@kindness: I wager if you met him you would find yourself pleasantly surprised. He likely would be surprised by how much he liked you, too. Just my opinion.
Chetan Murthy
This is true, but it sure seems that the way subsidies are arranged, they really do encourage monoculture, and growing the sort of staples that are easily exported. At which point, it isn’t actually clear to me that we should be subsidizing it: why subsidize wheat, corn, soy, rice (basically, all grains, beans), when we can import it ? I understand the long-term argument, but ….. we routinely push Japan to open up their markets to American rice, why should we not do the same ourselves (these subsidies and tax abatements (per Sarah Tauber) are non-tariff barriers after all).
And honestly, given the way these farmers vote, I’d -rather- buy my grain from Brazil.
Jay
It’s funny, but the only Group not suing DJTdiot’s illegal impoundment of funds and contracts, are the Farmers.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Baud: a more productive farm, employing a legal immigrant in a more efficient manner. The second hay machine alone is telling. In the early 2010, there was a drought that lead to a critical hay shortage which resulted in tons of cows headed to slaughter which led to fewer ranchers and a higher beef price. Fescue, America needed (& needs) more of it.
You cannot buy all of that farm equipment for couch change, either. It is wickedly expensive equipment. John Deere leases that equipment now, too. So, now, a farmer cannot even repair his own equipment.
Timill
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Cake and circuses! Or, in pre-Columbian California, quake and quercuses…
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Professor Bigfoot: you might be right. It feels like ruts in the road to me. They are stuck in ruts so deep they cannot even see the other way (the straight and narrow path) anymore. That is how i tend to visualize it anyway.
Chetan Murthy
@E.: I haven’t read the article (not gonna make an account at FTFWaPo), but from the excerpts, the 40 acre farm is Otto’s family farm in Guatemala. I don’t know how big JJ’s farm is, but I’m guessing way, way bigger.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@oldgold: I found farm work nearly impossible myself. Broke my hands and made my back ache when I was supposedly young enough to take any old thing. Yet, I have never worked iron or steel. That is likely harder. I don’t know.
chemiclord
@TONYG: They’ve always been shit people. As an example, I’m going to quote a farm hand from my earlier days, and I’m gonna let you guess when it was said.
“If he wins the presidency, he’s gonna take all our tax money and give it to the blacks.”
Talking about Obama, right? Because Obama broke all their brains, right?
You’d be wrong. He was talking about Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1984. The people we’re talking about have always been mean, they’ve always been spiteful, and they’ve always been shit human beings.
The only thing right wing media and Trump have done is give them permission to be their worst selves.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Scout211: just wanton destruction everywhere
TONYG
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Yes. I know several people (former I.T. co-workers) who, in the workplace, were both intelligent and “nice”. But now they’re part of the Trump cult and, at this point, I have no desire to keep in touch with them. (One of them actually is married to a Latino guy who is also a Trumpist.). Why do they support Trump? I really don’t know. From 1932 through 1945 there were plenty of “intelligent, nice” Germans who supported Hitler.
TONYG
@Chetan Murthy: The agricultural subsidies exist at the levels at which they exist because of the anti-democratic nature of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate (and state senates). It’s a feature not a bug.
Baud
@chemiclord:
Sounds economically anxious.
Ruckus
@Scrounger:
Part of the problem is that many people can see that monetary success does most often not come from being a laborer but from making the most out of what one pays someone else. And of course the less one pays for labor the more one has for one’s pocket. And if the job is dirty or hard labor it can get worse. In my comment at 129 I say that I owned a manufacturing business. My father started it and I ended up owning it longer than he did. We made tools for other companies to make plastic and aluminum die cast products. Many/most of you would know at least some of the products our tools made, from toys for Mattel to milk bottles to 5 gallon water bottles to industrial products. My point is that I’ve seen this world change a lot in my lifetime, as is possible for anyone that’s lived most of a normal lifetime. And it will continue to change. But. Us older folks have seen a lot of change from the world we were born into to. Industrialization started well before this old man was born but it had to grow a lot to get to where we are today. The first car I rode in was a WWII surplus army staff car that I think my parents bought at auction. Three speed manual on the column shift, olive drab paint. Look at cars of today and really other than the number of wheels there is no comparison. And one can say that about most aspects of life – that today is a hell of a lot different than in the lifetime of old farts alive today. Healthcare different? More than most could even imagine. Travel? Ever flown long distance? I have, Los Angeles to New Zealand, over 13 hours in the air. It goes on and on. And yet we have humans (?) like shitforbrains – and those that voted for him (TWICE).
Timill
@Chetan Murthy: Sorta yes, sorta not at all:
No land of his own, but partners with his divorced parents.
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
In Canada, on crops, milk, eggs, meats, we have a managed supply system. By limiting supply, it ensures that there can be no monopoly, that Farmers get a “fair price”, that consumers are protected, but it does make entry into farming, other than market gardens, expensive and limited. When a Farm is sold, the quota’s attached to that farmland are part of the sale.
Every chance they get, the majority of Canadian Farmers, vote against this system or to undermine it. They want to go back to the boom and bust system of the 1950’s where a few farmers made out like bandits, but most went bankrupt. They all believe they will be the one who makes out like a bandit and not the many that went bankrupt.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@satby: exactly what their radio, Fox and sometimes even their local tv stations (Sinclair) tell them all of the time.
I watched a freaking car commercial one day that called President Obama a liar. The “news” was not quite qanon but I could already see where it was headed.
TONYG
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I actually don’t mind subsidizing farmers per se. What pisses me off is when they turn around and support fascists like Trump (and when they believe — or pretend to believe — that they’re the ones subsidizing me). I understand that they’re marinating in Fox News, NewsMax, Stormfront propaganda — but that’s a choice that they’re making. They can read or listen to something else, and they can choose to think for themselves. It just pisses me off in a visceral way. My father grew up in poverty as an immigrant and was working class at best. But he had the brains to be pro-union, anti-wealthy, non-racist his whole life. These people make a conscious choice to be stupid and hateful.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: What idiots. Hockey players aren’t that stupid: http://www.econport.org/content/teaching/modules/NFG/Hockey.html
Why do hockey players support helmet rules, even though they choose not to wear helmets when there is no rule?
One player summed up the feelings of many: ‘It’s foolish not to wear a helmet. But I don’t because the other guys don’t. I know that’s silly, but most of the players feel the same way. If the league made us do it, though, we’d all wear them and nobody would mind.’ “
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Scout211: a rut
they are in a rut
Once they could tell you, FDR (whom the loved anyway) paid them not to grow things. How silly are democrats, old farmers would say. Now, they just tell me cities are evil and democrats are too, or some such rot. So, you ask straight up “am I evil then?” Some will actually say “probably” or “tainted” with zero notion as to why. It is a rut I think.
they are like blinkered horses.
Bupalos
@Scrounger: Right. So you’re 0/3 on the stuff you made up there.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Scrounger: JJ, the farmer, relied on the government of the United States to keep its full, faith and credit
FTFY
@Scrounger:
Timill
Finally got to the end of the article: Otto got his visa, and JJ is learning about hard work:
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Professor Bigfoot: I don’t think that fits this family.
His wife, Kassidee, wants to get her masters so she can provide more complicated dental procedures to people on Medicaid. He wants her to achieve that.
Chetan Murthy
I grew up around people like that. A school friend lived on a rural delivery route. Lots of kids lived on farms. Today those kids are 60yr old, and the county in which they live (Parker County TX) voted 81% for Trump. You can say they’re blinkered. But they all had a chance to learn and grow up different. And they didn’t choose it; instead they chose to grow up bigoted and xenophobic.
Why should -anybody- have any sympathy for people who refuse to adapt to the changing world? They all want cellphones, modern medicine, modern farming equipment, and on and on. But somehow, they don’t want the rest of the modern world? Fuck that.
I remember in 1980s, people used to say “we don’t want all these foreigners” and I remember thinking “then you need to stop buying Nissan and Toyota cars, you doofuses; you can’t want imports without also taking foreigners”.
It’s like how every time Black people want their rights, or even -progress- toward their rights (howsoever small), up pipe the people who say “oh NOES, this is too much, too fast, you need to slow it down, ask for these things -later-, not right now! People can’t deal with all this CHANGE!”
Enough already. Enough already with that bullshit.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@E.: In case nobody else has responded:
Front-end expenses would be airfare, housing, whatever tools and other initial expenses are incurred. Back-end expenses include airfare home and sundry incidentals. In between there’s enough for $30-35k/yr in salary plus overhead and intangible benefits, room and board and allowance for 90% utilization (sick days &c). Employing a worker includes many more line items than mere salary unless you hire on 1099 contract, which this program probably does not permit.
All this assumes that farm equipment improvements, supplies or other non-payroll items are not included. If so, the salary drops proportionally
Jay
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
President Joe Biden and his Administration got the farmers the right to repair or modify any equipment they own. It was a huge deal at the time, because 3rd party’s had better software than John Deere.
Professor Bigfoot
@HopefullyNotcassandra: So they didn’t vote for Trump?
My mistake, then.
jonas
@Chetan Murthy: As Taber explains — and of course there may be other ag econ experts out there with different views; she’s speaking as a farmer herself — what really drives the overproduction of commodity crops like corn and soybeans isn’t just subsidies. It’s a combination of inertia (“my daddy grew corn on this land; my daddy’s daddy grew corn on this land, *his* daddy’s daddy….” You get the idea) and tax shelters. Most farmers these days are pretty comfortable. They earn money from other sources and farming tends to be a side-hussle. An added bonus is that farming is also hugely tax-advantaged, such that if you just grow whatever and write off the expenses/losses, you can put a huge dent in your tax liabilities elsewhere. What’s something you can plant real easily that pretty much grows itself and that most years produces a write-off-able loss? Stuff like corn, alfalfa and soybeans. Growing high-input/high-value crops like cherries or asparagus or raising livestock is a lot more lucrative, but requires time, labor, and lots of experience.
This just addresses the question of whether gov’t subsidies are responsible for why so much agriculture in the US is dedicated to commodity crops. Not so much, in Taber’s opinion. This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of struggling farms out there, but her point is that there are a lot of struggling businesses everywhere.
RevRick
@Chetan Murthy: Capitalist economics has been pushing farming into the direction of mono agriculture since the early 1800s. Subsistence farming is a thing of the past. Crops are commodities sold on the market.
In the South it was tobacco, cotton, sugar and rice. In the North it was corn and wheat, and much of the former went to feeding livestock. The Erie Canal was the big deal it was, because it provided a cheap way to move Midwest grain to the Northeast.
Chetan Murthy
@jonas: Yep, I just watched the video where she explained about the tax breaks, and how they really didn’t help the small veggie farmers, but mostly the big farmers growing hay, grains, etc.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Chetan Murthy: Joe Biden’s grants were attempting to support biodiverse agriculture. This is why, according to this article, they got caught up in this ugly president’s anti DEI purge
which is almost cosmically horrible humor.
Alice
@oldgold: my husband’s family have been family farmers in Ohio since the 1880s. They are not now and have never been millionaires. They’ve all had to work second jobs to make ends meet.
different-church-lady
@HopefullyNotcassandra: You’re kidding, right? The internet is the reason we got Trump in the first place.
Chetan Murthy
@RevRick: I wasn’t contrasting monoculture grain farms with subsistence farms, but rather with veggie farms. Grains and beans can be shipped long distances easily; not so much with veg. So the market for wheat is global, and just as we demand of the Japanese that they open up their markets to American rice, I don’t see why we should be bent-out-of-shape if Brazil and Canada send us their soya and wheat.
If the alternative is subsidizing a buncha fascists with my tax dollars, frankly, I’d much prefer buying foreign.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@TONYG: I think we all would like JJ. I don’t know about anybody else
Timill
@Professor Bigfoot: They voted Trump all right: see comment #11 by Jackie:
Ruckus
@oldgold:
Proper modern farming machinery is expensive but it does a lot of work for that money and uses far less labor for most farmed products than decades ago that the price is well worth it. And I’d bet in some places that there might be a concept of machinery rental or cost sharing that makes it even less expensive. Then look at the cost of food compared to 40-50 years ago and if a farmer isn’t making money it likely isn’t the rest of us causing problems. With the population of today food is a very big business even if it comes down to individual land owners/farmers/ranchers. Not being profitable is unlikely for normal farmers/ranchers. There is just a lot of us to feed and machinery that makes a huge difference in getting the job done.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jay: yes. Used to be farmers complained about FDR for instituting a similar system; nonetheless, most of those same farmers had his picture on the wall.
Ruckus
@Professor Bigfoot:
Not wrong in this one’s opinion.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Chetan Murthy: I agree with some of that. Yet, I think but for the grace of God …
HopefullyNotcassandra
@different-church-lady: no. I am not kidding. I know kids in rural America who have to sit on the roof to get an internet connection and then it is intermittent.
The most hateful wingnuts I have encountered have strolled next to me on city streets.
Timill
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq):
And then Otto didn’t arrive for ages and the other farmhand quit…
Jay
@Ruckus:
In the mono crop industries, much of the “work” is done by Contractors. Guy buys a Harvester, contracts it out, guy buys 1500 hives, contracts them out for pollination, guy buys an airplane or a helicopter, sprays crops, guy buys an old school bus, sets up and office, becomes a day labour contractor. It is possible in many areas, to be a farmer with out ever setting foot on the farm.
Bupalos
@satby: we’ll good for you and your bootstraps, I guess. My philosophy is that the way babies turns out isn’t really on them so much. Lots of people agree with you, to me It’s the definition of illiberal and exactly the same kind of thing you heard in the 80’s about the dysfunctions of the inner city being about personal choices.
Chetan Murthy
Surely you jest. Surely. I had a friend once — knew him since 1994. He was a very, very close friend: we’d visit each other, he’d call me up and I’d help him debug his hardware when he was building his startup. in 2000 I learned that he was a RWNJ (NRO’s The Corner) but I stayed friends with him — I loved him that much. We used to get into arguments about politics, and so I made a rule that we would never discuss politics (he broke it from time-to-time, but I tried -hard- to keep to it), again, b/c I loved him that much.
In November 2016 I sent him a letter, letting him know that IF he’d voted for Trump, I could no longer be his friend: that I had no white supremacist, racist, misogynist, fascist friends. He responded with a long screed of butthurt. Didn’t change anything; I blocked him, and have never spoken to him again.
It doesn’t matter how “nice” someone is: if they vote to put me and mine in camps, to dispossess us of our American rights (and my American-born relatives of their -birthright-), then I honestly don’t care if they Die. In. A. Fire.
Timill
@Chetan Murthy: That doesn’t entirely square with the wife quitting her job so she could set up a dental practice to take Medicaid patients, which her previous place wouldn’t. And him wanting her to get a Masters so she could offer more complex procedures.
There’s degree in all these things.
RevRick
@oldgold: I watch a Reels on Facebook called Laura Farms about a young couple farming several thousand acres in Iowa. They grow corn. On paper, they’re multimillionaires what with the vast acreage they own and the six-figure equipment they have to operate it. But it’s all floating on a sea of equally enormous debt.
Laura did a segment of their income and outgo. It was scary. And then they work on tight schedules for every step of the way. And when equipment breaks down, it’s panic time.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Chetan Murthy: it was not a jest. This guy might even serve you home-made strawberry lemonade laced with honey (home hived?) to take the summer heat off. Oh, so very good!
If he supported putting you or anyone else in a camp, well, I am entirely wrong about his character. I doubt very much that he would though.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Jay: I did not know that
Another excellent thing Joe Biden achieved. The list just keeps on growing
Chetan Murthy
There is a story (widely reported; I read it in Gellately’s _Backing HItler_): Himmler got so tired of getting importuning letters from high-ranking Nazis begging him to spare some “righteous Jew” that he wrote their equivalent of an interoffice memo thundering “THERE ARE NO RIGHTEOUS JEWS!” What he meant was: “you voted Nazi, you joined the party, you’re along for the ride, buddy, now shaddup and siddown, we got killin’ to do”.
JJ voted Trump. You can tell yourself that he didn’t know what he was voting for. But we ALL FUCKING SAW IT. We saw that he was a rapist. We saw him and his racist shit on the campaign trail for months and months. AND THEN we saw him in office. If JJ didn’t know about the family separations, about ripping LITERAL TODDLERS from their mothers, so they’d have to be cared for by other prisoners, themselves children ripped from their families, then that’s on him.
There’s a term I learned recently: “vincible ignorance”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignorance
Vincible ignorance is, in Catholic moral theology, ignorance that a person could remove by applying reasonable diligence in the given set of circumstances. It contrasts with invincible ignorance, which a person is either entirely incapable of removing, or could only do so by supererogatory efforts (i.e., efforts above and beyond normal duty).
If JJ was ignorant, it was -vincible- ignorance.
Chetan Murthy
@Timill: This guy JJ voted Trump. ’nuff said, case closed. I mean, at the -limit- one might pardon having voted Trump in 2016. But in 2020? in 2024? No, that’s not pardonable.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Chetan Murthy: maybe.
Maybe we need people whose word is their bond to save our democracy too.
I want to get back to perfecting our union before I die if remotely possible. Imho
Chetan Murthy
Today in the Financial Times I read an article about Americans setting up their “Plan B”. One couple profiled were lesbians, and they had hesitated b/c they had aged parents in the US. Eventually the father dies, and the only one left is the mother. She tells them the time has come, and they need to get moving on that Plan B. So they do — they buy a house in Portugal with room for Mom and extra space for friends to visit (e.g. other LGBTQ friends on their way out of the US). The article relates that the mom’s cousin was surprised, and even moreso that the mom supported her daughter’s decision. The mom responded with something like “if you have a gay child, it’s an obvious call.”
JJ voted for that.
Chetan Murthy
@HopefullyNotcassandra: There’s a thing where I grew up: “southern hospitality”. It turns out, that’s only extended to white people. It doesn’t extend to Black people and it sure doesn’t extend to immigrant Brown people.
You talk about “his word is his bond”. What does that even mean, when the guy giving his word is a white supremacist?
Professor Bigfoot
@Timill: Ah, but they’re white so we should extend every benefit of the doubt and all sympathy.
Ruckus
@Jay:
Agreed.
And I’d bet that even in multiple crop farms things really aren’t a lot different. The equipment is a hell of a lot better. Like the business my father started that I’ve written about here before, we made tooling for other businesses to make plastic or aluminum products. I could write up a list of some of things and most people would have at least seen them or likely used the products our tools made. The changes in the machining industry between when that business opened in the 1960s and today is like most every other business. It ain’t the same as 50-75 years ago. Not in any way shape or form. Every machine when dad opened required manual input to do anything. By the time I closed the business just over 2 decades ago, the machinery was mostly operated by computer. My first computer to do that work was an Apple II. Not a IIe a II, back in the 70s. Before that we used a teletype machine because it punched 1 inch paper tape and everything was 8 bit, unlike today, when I don’t think anything is. When we started there were no communication standards for everything to work together, or much of a computer business, hence punched paper tape. Look at your phone, I haven’t had a landline in 30 years. Now most of us carry one with us everywhere. And it can do a lot more than just make phone calls.
The world has changed significantly in the lifetimes of a lot of us, how and what we do. My car is 9 yrs old and it is the best car I’ve ever owned and compared to today’s cars it’s not bad but the technology available is better. Today we can manufacture things a hell of a lot better than when I started working over 60 years ago. A modern/current car is a massive improvement over what passed for a good car even 25 years ago. Look at your phone, look at your computer, mine is 4 years old and has already been replace with a faster one. Not that this one isn’t good it’s just that much of the technology world changes faster than it ever used to.
scav
@HopefullyNotcassandra: That’s a low bar for nice, potentially serving someone lemonade (all other actions and behaviors being ignored). Especially as there’s an assumption that anyone, not just the right sort of anyone, would be offered said glass.
Small rural towns can be utterly a mixed bag. One I’m most familiar with ran a daughter of the place out after she’d arranged a federal grant to help them build a sewer system in the town. How dare she! Later, they got up into a grand whispering and harassment campaign against the Amish moving in: their buggies would tear up the roads. Friendly enough to me whenever I’d show up and I’m at least a generation removed. And these are largely still small farms, landforms not right for the massive corporate style (hence the Amish moving in.) Hard life. Still, hard not to chortle a teeny bit though when they hard to pay full-price for that sewer system in order to not lose the post-office and over the Amish running the only grocery store within (country) miles.
ascap_scab
It’s our war now.
Trump announces strikes on three Iranian sites.
Chetan Murthy
When I was a kid, we moved to Mineral Wells TX, then east 30mi to Weatherford. My father was a doctor, had offices in Mineral Wells, Weatherford, and Fort Worth. He had a number of med school friends who’d set up their practices in the area too. My mother told me that uniformly, the local white gentry would not patronize Indian doctors, b/c they weren’t white. So all the Indian doctors’ patients came mostly from the poorer part of the population.
The racism ran deep. Really deep.
Chetan Murthy
@ascap_scab: Look on the bright side: Bibi can sleep easy tonight. Israelis, not so much. Jewish people around the world, not so much. But Bibi? He’s gonna sleep like a baby.
ETA: And Iranians? Who even cares about them. I’ve noticed that the number of stories about Israeli casualties far outstrip stories of what the Iranians are suffering.
TONYG
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I know people who are superficially “nice”, but under the surface they’re racists and fascists. “JJ” might be an example of that.
Timill
@TONYG: Maybe. But he spent serious money to hire a legal brown immigrant rather than pick up one of the cheap local “illegals”.
Chetan Murthy
@Timill: That isn’t the exoneration one might wish for. He hired a worker who was almost certainly on a short-term work visa, right? So he’s completely bought into the story that undocumented workers are “illegal”, yes? And furthermore, again, -he voted for Trump-.
Heck, let’s suppose that we believe undocumented immigrants are -flooding- into America. What’s the solution? I mean, there’s a -trivial- one: make it a felony (with hard prison time) to employ an undocumented immigrant, put the needed money into e-Verify so that they can process the increased verification load, and make it an instant green card for any undocumented immigrant who turns in their employer.
Overnight, you will have -zero- undocumented immigrants working in the USA. Overnight.
But that’s not what Trump supports, and I think I can assure you with ironclad certainty that none of these Trumpists would support such a thing. Why? Not even JJ. Why? Because they want to kick -down-, not -up-.
But really, none of that matters. JJ voted for Trump. During Trump’s first term, he committed what are arguably crimes against humanity — violations of the Genocide Convention — by separating children from their parents. JJ voted for that.
Betty
My favorite line in the article is “the administration’s attempt to make the government more efficient had slowed the visa process.” Oh, he was DOGED. The author wrote that with a straight face.
Bupalos
@oldgold: They’re big strapping bucks eating T-bone steaks getting free medicaid. The reason they have the highest suicide rate is not because they have it too hard, it’s because they have it too easy.
Chetan Murthy
@TONYG: Has there ever been a case of a Trump voter where, when you dig down deep, you -don’t- find bigotry, racism, misogyny, homophobia of some kind? I mean setting aside the ones who have actual and serious cognitive issues ?
I can’t think of a single case. Even the nonwhite Trump voters, systematically when interviewed we find out that they were bigoted against other nonwhites (or gay people or *ding ding ding ding* women), sometimes (in the case of immigrants) even people from their own origin country.
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: This is such algorithmic trash. I’m guessing you didn’t even bother to read it. Why would you. You know it all, the whole REAL story. That journalist could have saved time and just let you tell the story of the drooling Nazi who wants to import brown people to torture while he sucks at your hard earned blue money.
Why is he trying to get his kids to learn Spanish and interact with the guy? Why did he specifically say in the context of them trying to communicate with him and learn the Spanish names for colors “This is going to be good for us?”
Your privileged attitude is as much a block to there being political and social progress in these deprived places as their own benighted deprivations.
Chetan Murthy
@Bupalos: My dude, HE VOTED FOR TRUMP.
You think there were no Nazis who tried to protect individual Jews ?
Bupalos
@Chetan Murthy: I’m well aware of that. It’s a ridiculous binary. Yes he’s politically naive, a fool if you like. Of course he is, did you not read that he had 5 people in his graduating class, and married a girl a class down who had 8 in her graduating class?
If you really need to do this, why don’t you line up some Amish people and flame them up and down. On the whole they’re WAY more fundamentally racist and core Trumpy than a guy like this. The story is entirely about how far outside politics this guy actually sits. Maybe that’s what’s so offensive to the Judgey McJudgersteins here. Maybe it’s that he doesn’t know how to use WhatsApp.
People are people. They turn out how the inputs make them turn out. You don’t have to confuse that with being “good,” you don’t have to drop the idea of “good” and “bad” and sure, if you really need it, “evil” is fine too in those special cases. No one is “asking” you to have more complicated emotions than you are capable of. If you can’t stretch your empathy that far then you can’t. But the way people here grind their heel on this class (and honestly just make shit up out of whole cloth and lie) is Trump-style gross. They want to be applauded for their limit on empathy. No thank you. I’ll stay human.
Kayla Rudbek
@Chris S. Sherbak: from your mouth to God’s ears
HopefullyNotcassandra
@scav: no doubt, horrible people inhabit places everywhere.
Still, the only person who ever told me to my face that immigrants should be “put on trains and shipped wherever!” was born and raised in the big city. The only person who told me homosexuals were evil incarnate to my face was similarly city born and raised.
To be complete, the only person to call me a blood traitor was (allegedly) from rural North Dakota.
I don’t profess to know everyplace. I just read this piece. JJ worries about his new employee. His word is his bond he never thinks of shafting the guy. His wife is helping people on Medicaid get the dental services they need.
The only thing wrong about them spoken in the entire piece is he voted for this president. We never learn how his wife voted. He wants to fulfill his commitments to family, land and country. He expresses no hate of anyone. He believes his daughter will one day live in the city. He tells us his daughter “loves light”.
I don’t want to see harm come to him anymore than I want to see the harm this ugly president and his ugliest acolytes are inflicting on their chosen scapegoats. I certainly mean you no harm.
I do want to live to see this country thriving under the brilliance of our wonderful (bio) diversity again! I think we get there faster with people like this farmer. I think if we embrace the wingnut hate fest, to which you and others rightly refer, the end of all of America’s righteous difference, variety, loveliness and grace will happen fast and be absent for longer than I care to consider.
I also imagine this man’s hands are as beaten up and swollen as my grandfather’s hands were. No doubt, that tenuous connection encourages my empathy.
I am trying to grow my empathy in a country whose leadership acts psychopathically routinely. I hope I am not being too trying going about it.
Soprano2
@Harrison Wesley: Yes it does.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Chetan Murthy: there is a boatload of anxieties compressed by wingnut propaganda into galloping uncontrolled fear too.
Please have a lovely weekend just to spite this ugly, hateful regime!
HopefullyNotcassandra
@oldgold: every farmer conversation I heard on this topic was a complaint about being told they could not grow a thing. The farmers did not want subsidies for fallowing fields. They used to debate the best way to farm and how often fields should be fallowed. Being paid to fallow fields though, they found that wrong just like you do
The farmers did want auctions with lots of bidders, not the one bid shops that happen these days.
Truly this was the complaint most mentioned years ago before the walmartification of rural America happened. This is back in the days when you could go to a small town in the Midwest and get shoes made specifically for your feet. Those shoes lasted too and could be resoled. We lived a lot less long though then. So, best not to forget that part when I wax nostalgic remembering.