Introduction
Democrats have fallen sharply downwards, backwards, on the farm bill, similar to, and related to, their increasing failures on the rural vote. It’s become so bad that there’s really nothing Democrats can do. They must support another of the worst farm bills in history, because it’s better than no farm bill at all.
What Democrats can do is to take a stand against these bi-partisan farm bills, and then vote for them. In that case, it’s easy to win the debate, but not the vote. Republicans are sitting ducks on these issues. Democrats have a great narrative advantage, if they’ll just use it. The problem, however, is that few Democrats know this today.
This all relates to my recent post, “The Harkin Compromise on the Farm Bill.” https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/27/2149576/-The-Harkin-Compromise-on-the-Farm-Bill#comment_85473711 In the 2002 farm bill Harkin, while abandoning the Democratic Party approach of his earlier years, won a number of small subsidy programs. These small gains were then generally reduced in the 2008, 2014 and 2018 farm bills, and Harkin dropped out of the Senate.
It takes a fairly major social movement push to make this happen, especially from all of the groups of farm bill activists who lack knowledge of it, and who oppose it based upon the farm subsidy myths, (which are basically agribusiness myths, but they don’t know that). I refer here to the Good/Sustainable Food/Enviro./Local-Food/Progressive/Democratic/Etc. Movement. We need this kind of urban-side hope to restore the Family Farm (Farm Justice) Movement, and take back the rural vote. To a significant degree, farmers seem to have moved from trauma to despair to nihilism, as seen in support for Trump. (See: “The Rural Trump Vote: Who’s Behind the Trauma,”https://www.slideshare.net/bradwilson581525/the-rural-trump-vote-whos-behind-the-trauma.) That’s a major change from past decades. (https://familyfarmjustice.me/2016/11/12/election-rural-vote-donald-trump-why-and-what-we-need-to-do/) Destroy nature and you’re not going to like the consequences! Destroy rural America and you’re not going to like those consequences either! So don’t compromise away the core issues.
The Case Against A Bi-Partisan Farm Bill
I’ve created a large slide show with data to show the history of farm bill politics, and this essay is designed to introduce it to Daily Kos. It shows key points in the history of what various Democratic and Republican administrations have done over the past 70 years. Democrats invented the farm bill during the Great Depression, and then turned it into a “living wage” farm bill as a private sector, government managed economic stimulus under the crisis of World War II. (Cf. my earlier Daily Kos diaries. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2009/2/6/693903/-Farm-Bill-was-Steagall-New-Deal-Stimulus and https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2011/4/6/963673/-Republican-Strategy-Opposes-Farm-Bill-Stimulus) Two crises. That’s what it took to achieve economic distributive justice for farmers.
During the Eisenhower years, things started moving downhill, as the administration mismanaged the programs, causing oversupply and making them expensive failures. Out of this growing crisis, Frank LeRoux developed a series of books on “The Farmers Worst Five Years,” then Seven, then Nine, and one more for the 1970s. During the 1960s Democratic administrations did better at managing the programs, but farm income continued to decline. Under Nixon we had the huge Soviet grain sale, which made things better for a while, especially for the grain corporations. Farm income briefly rose, but then sank down to continue downward trends. Reagan again mismanaged the programs, with major rises in oversupply. He signed the 1985 Farm Bill, which made the 1980s farm crisis worse, with lower farm income, even as it greatly increased government costs. It was the worst farm bill in history up to that point. This was continued in the 1990 Farm Bill, then in 1996, the Republicans ended the core farm programs. This approach quickly failed, and they enacted emergency farm bills in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001, pouring in subsidies, but doing nothing to fix the core problem, where we had been losing money on farm exports for decades. So this was the worst farm bill in history up to that point. It was a Farm Bill without being a real Farm Bill. The emergency subsidies were included in the 2002 farm bill, and then they were generally reduced in each subsequent Farm Bill, in a series of “worst ever” farm bills.
This is what I document, much more specifically, with numerous data pictures, in this slide show.
Slideshow (56 slides): Brad Wilson, “The Case Against Bi-Partisan Farm Bills,” SlideShare: Brad Wilson, 11/26/22,https://www.slideshare.net/bradwilson581525/the-case-against-bipartisan-farm-bills.