Baraboo, Wisconsin, is known as the former home of the Ringling Bros. Circus’ headquarters. But even that extravaganza of acrobats and clowns could not surpass the dazzling tent show playing out in Baraboo in September, starring the Sauk County Board of Supervisors. Only ... you couldn’t have seen it, because the tent was zipped tight to keep the public out.
The Baraboo spectacle is one of several now playing across the Badger State, produced by health care profiteers trying to privatize county-owned nursing homes. These locally controlled public entities get 5-star ratings and are treasured by families in rural Wisconsin — so people overwhelmingly oppose privatization. Thus, to somersault over local democracy, corporate tricksters have joined with right-wing county officials to impose autocratic control.
Back in Baraboo, for example, people lined up to speak against any move by supervisors to sell the Sauk County Health Care Center. But terms of the sale had already been negotiated in secret, supervisors had decreed that the buyer would not be revealed until after the sale was approved, and the board’s discussion about the sale was held in closed session.
Adding to the mayhem, Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate astonished people by declaring that old people in nursing homes should not even be allowed to vote, since they “only have five, six months life expectancy.”
Crazy, yet the right-wing’s Baraboo sellout succeeded, right? Not so fast. One, any maneuver affecting the county budget requires a two-thirds vote of supervisors — not the bare majority this clown trick got. And two, while devious supervisors arrogantly blocked the democratic will of the people, feisty locals are not surrendering to corporate greed and devious politicians. The Battle of Baraboo continues! Stay tuned!
If you name your $4 billion food conglomerate “The Wonderful Company,” you probably should strive extra hard not to let it become the horrible company.
This outfit spends a fortune painting itself as an environmentally sensitive purveyor of healthy products — like its “POM” brand of pomegranate juice and its bottled “Fiji Water.” Moreover, its billionaire owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, have marketed themselves as generous philanthropists and powerhouse donors to the Democratic Party.
Wonderful.
But the corporation’s rap sheet includes false advertising, hogging of the public’s scarce water supplies, massive fossil fuel pollution and — most abhorrent — exploitation of the low-paid farmworkers who produce the crops that enrich the Resnicks.
Stewart, hailed as “the wealthiest farmer in the US,” has been spending lavishly on high-dollar lawyers and lobbyists, furiously fighting the United Farm Workers, who’re seeking fair wages, decent treatment and simple respect from him. Worse, the politically connected land baron is going all out to bust the entire union by pushing activist judges to outlaw California’s “card check” system. This is a democratic process enabling widely dispersed farm laborers to vote in unionization elections.
By trying to kill it, Stewart is engaged in a massive voter suppression effort to deny a smidgeon of justice to poorly paid oppressed workers. It’s a raw power play by Stewart and his brotherhood of billionaire agribusiness barons to further enrich themselves by taking away hard-won fair labor laws — and re-subjugating workers to the autocratic whims of owners.
What’s wrong with the Resnicks? They’re fabulously rich and their company is enormously profitable. Yet they’re trying to nickel and dime one of the hardest-working and poorly treated groups of workers in America. Nothing wonderful about that ... or them.
A farmer was asked what he’d do if he won a million-dollar lottery. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d just keep farming ‘til the money runs out.”
Trying to make a living as a farmer is not for the fainthearted. You have to take out high-interest loans from cold-eyed bankers to put in a crop and buy supplies. Then you’re also at the mercy of everything from bugs to monopolistic middlemen. And here’s a cruel twist: If you defy the odds and produce a great crop, you lose money!
This is happening right now. With unusually good weather this year, corn and soybean harvests are expected to set records. But this abundance creates a market glut, allowing middlemen to knock down prices paid to farmers. A bushel of Illinois corn, for example, costs farmers $4.30 to produce, but they’re only getting $3.70 for it.
Meanwhile, the cost of such basics as seed, fertilizer and tractors is skyrocketing. High costs coupled with low crop prices means farmers’ income is expected to drop by 25% this year.
You might call this good-crop, bad-price phenomenon “ironic.” But it’s deliberate — an inevitable product of America’s perverse agricultural policy that pushes farmers to overproduce in order to keep commodity prices low for giant processors and retailers. Little known fact: Our national “farm policy” is not written by farmers but by corporate lobbyists, lawyers and economists — people who couldn’t run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the highway patrol flag down the customers for them.
That has got to change. To join an effort to demand a farm bill written by and for farmers, consumers, workers and our environment, go to: FarmAid.org/Take-Action.
It never ceases to amaze me that corporate, political, media, religious and other power elites routinely speak and act in the name of the masses — without ever consulting us hoi polloi.
This disconnect is the source of a lot of the arrogance, stupidity and inequality afflicting our society.
Consider the huge, very troubling takeover of U.S. Steel by the Japanese conglomerate Nippon. This buyout was being quietly hustled to conclusion by both giants. But — Boom! — suddenly the deal hit a steel wall, specifically the furious opposition of America’s United Steelworkers union. The corporate elites had smugly cut a backroom deal without ever mentioning it to the union! Thousands of workers had their livelihoods arrogantly treated as irrelevant. So, the union just said uh-uh, and the executive boneheads’ big buyout went from done to life support.
The stupidity gene has also embedded itself in the brains of Christian authoritarians. They are hellbent on forcing their holier-than-thou church dogma on all of us — without, of course, asking whether we want to be “saved” by them. So here comes one Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s hyper-Christian superintendent of public schools. In a Burning Bush moment, Ryan felt God ordained him to decree that every classroom must henceforth display a Bible, and all teachers must alter their lesson plans to teach from it — even math teachers!
But a funny thing happened to this unelected flaming theocrat: Local school boards and teachers simply ignored him. Ryan, brimming with ego, had not bothered to consult parents, school boards, teachers or legislators — so no Bibles have been purchased and no curriculums have been changed.
However, his dictatorial theatrics did get the attention of one major group: Oklahoma’s GOP lawmakers are now investigating his “rogue behavior.”
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2024
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