Young farmers sitting in a hay field near a tractor

Coalitions of AgriCULTURE Outsiders Tackle Powerful AgriBIZ Insiders

In the 1980s, when I was Texas Ag commissioner, my staff and I proposed a comprehensive set of state rules to protect farmworkers, public health, our water supplies, and farmers themselves from the life-threatening consequences of toxic pesticides. But trying to enact these policies in Texas, a state that back then made and sprayed more agricultural poisons than any other, meant taking on the enormous money and power of the chemical lobby, as well as a hostile Republican governor and a legislature largely made up of corporate lapdogs. 

November 20, 2017 | Source: The Hightower Lowdown | by Jim Hightower

In the 1980s, when I was Texas Ag commissioner, my staff and I proposed a comprehensive set of state rules to protect farmworkers, public health, our water supplies, and farmers themselves from the life-threatening consequences of toxic pesticides. But trying to enact these policies in Texas, a state that back then made and sprayed more agricultural poisons than any other, meant taking on the enormous money and power of the chemical lobby, as well as a hostile Republican governor and a legislature largely made up of corporate lapdogs. All of the above were howling furiously at us, snarling that the new protections we’d laid out were dead meat. When I told my legislative director that it seemed like the political odds were against us, his response was not a confidence booster: “Some of the evens are against us, too.”

Yet–by rallying a big coalition of family farmers, consumers, environmentalists, labor groups, church leaders, and others and then bringing these “outsiders” inside the usually closed legislative lair to confront the cozy club of lawmakers and lobbyists–we won!

As in that firefight, today’s Good Food forces (i.e., the grassroots people and groups across the country striving to build a sustainable, equitable agriCultural system) are under constant attack by the moneyed forces of agriBusiness that view food as nothing but another assembly line product to be fabricated by any means that fatten the corporate bottom line. We’re in an ongoing, momentous struggle (cultural, economic, political, and moral) over the very nature and future of food, and our best path to victory is to do as we did in Texas three decades ago: to forge coalitions of outsiders to confront and expose the self-enriching cabal of insiders. As a measure of how we’re faring, here’s The Lowdown’s latest State of the Plate issue.

Why fast-food wages stay so slow

Inequality doesn’t just come out of the blue; it’s created by decisions that elites make–usually behind closed doors, so those knocked down don’t know what (or who) hit them.

Take America’s 4 million fast-food workers, whose average pay hovers around a miserly $300 a week, before taxes.