Awaken, and hear

I grew up in the rural midwest, where pretty much everything is dominated by Agro (with a capital A), specifically ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and Monsanto in this case. I grew up around factory farms, I know what they look like and how they smell. The swine flu thing does not surprise me - I've seen the conditions on the farm near where I grew up. The terrible conditions of the animals and the high potential for disease is not the only problem with factory farming, either - the agribusinesses are destroying small towns. Now, I'm not terribly a fan of small towns or their nosy intolerance of difference and uptight insularity, but at the same time, I recognize that it is a valid way of living that should not be insulted and attacked. Agribusiness, by buying up huge tracts of land, is displacing families that have lived and farmed the land for generations, dropping the bottom out of the local income tax rates, and basically being one of the primary causes of the big-boxitization and impoverishment of rural America. Amanda Marcotte has a rather excellent post on many of the causes of the swine flu outbreak over at her place, Pandagon, here. During the eighteen and a half years I lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, I saw the town I lived in slide into a sharp divide between rich and poor. The former was the normal doctor/lawyer mix, plus the farmers who were partners of ADM and/or Monsanto and thus now had money while the latter was largely consisting of the people who had sold their land to ADM or someone else and were now trying to live off of minimum wage at Wal-Mart (or by working land they had once owned). While that was happening to my hometown, nearby towns were essentially wiped out as people in them realized that there were no jobs, there weren't likely to be any jobs, and moved away. Some towns died, mine became a stratified place with people living on welfare and people with McMansions. This is happening all over the country, because of the desire of Big Agro to buy, consolidate, and work the shit out of the land for a few more pennies. Big Agro is not only killing the land through bad farming practices and producing antibiotic-resistant illnesses that are killing people, they're perpetrating human rights abuses in the treatment of many of their workers (many migrant, many undocumented immigrants, many poor people of color) and in the terrible beating they're meting out to rural America's way of life. It isn't pretty, and it pisses me off.