Unfortunately, it sometimes takes me a while to get around to reading each new issue of Harper’s. Yesterday morning, I finally read the cover feature of the February 2016 issue, “The Trouble With Iowa: Corn, Corruption and the Presidential Caucuses.” Mostly, it’s about the destructive impact of agribusiness, particularly the corn industry and the hog and chicken production (I’m reluctant to call it “farming”) that it feeds. Despite the title, the article gives relatively little attention to the presidential caucuses, and it gives most of that attention to the Republican contest.
One of the nice things about long-form feature writing, as opposed to conventional wire-service deadline journalism, is that it allows you to place the distillation of your thesis (as journalists call it, the “nut graf”) at the end of your piece, where it can pack a mighty wallop. This article is an example of that structure. I’ll let its words speak for themselves (with just a little help from selective boldfacing):
There is no doubt that conservatives would like to win the presidency, but they don’t actually need to. We have a naïve sense that to correct wrongs in our country, we simply need to elect the right president, pass the right laws, and that’s that. Politics in a state such as Iowa, however, teaches us that laws are only the beginning of the process, the opening bell for litigation, lobbying, and defiance. Faced with a federal mandate to regulate hog manure, [Iowa Gov. Terry] Branstad simply cut the budget that paid for inspectors. . . .
Faced with regulation that will limit the carbon emissions that are killing the planet, Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, a fellow who has sworn to uphold the Constitution, urged states to violate the law. The tightly organized, cohesive network that is the American right wing has abrogated the social contract with wholesale, institutionalized civil disobedience. Want to regulate the manner in which farms pump liquid shit? Sure. Can you do it with the twenty-eight inspectors Iowa has to oversee 4,000 hog factories, the pumping on which occurs almost entirely during a few weeks in autumn, and often at night?
The standoff that results from all of this plays out across our continent. Those endeavors that produce food and energy need scale and landscape and are of necessity rural and are of necessity unspeakably destructive. The industries involved must be free to operate on their own terms in the landscape in the nation’s midsection, where the states are red and square. . . . To do that, they don’t need to play to checkmate; stalemate and gridlock are success enough. Iowa’s caucuses, and for that matter the whole presidential ritual, will do nothing to change this.
The entire article is worth reading, and many other parts of it are worth quoting, but I want to focus on this one point in particular. Winning the presidency from the Republicans is necessary, but it is not sufficient. In reality, the No. 1 political problem we face in this country is right-wing capture of our state governments, in particular our state legislatures. As we’ve seen in Flint, Mich., the American Legislative Exchange Council (better known by its acronym, ALEC), thanks to its stranglehold on statehouses across the nation, has more power to harm the health and well-being of Americans than the Environmental Protection Agency has to help them. Combined with our No. 2 problem, the corporate capture of our regulatory agencies, and our No. 3 problem, the defunding of those agencies that have not been captured, we face a situation that no Democratic president, however noble or determined, has the power to confront alone, no matter how great a “mandate” he or she is elected with.
Some will see this as an argument for nominating Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president. Actually, I see it as precisely the opposite, for a couple of different reasons. One is Clinton’s own ties to agribusiness, as the article briefly summarizes:
Hillary Clinton would be just a few miles south that week, but [free-range hog farmer Chris] Petersen showed no excitement, perhaps because the Clintons’ political fortunes were greatly aided in the early days by Tyson money; the two Arkansas dynasties arose in parallel. Bill Clinton was Tyson’s biggest political supporter, and he delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Don Tyson, the company’s former CEO. Hillary Clinton sat on the board of Walmart, the retail pipe for chickenization.
Another, with which the article immediately follows up the paragraph above, is the impotence that the Obama administration has displayed in confronting the industry’s defiance of regulation:
When Obama appointed [Tom] Vilsack as agriculture secretary soon after taking office, it was a way of making good on his campaign promise to reform industrial agriculture. As governor of Iowa, Vilsack had been a supporter of reform, and as agriculture secretary he used antitrust regulation to challenge the Tyson-engineered tournament system. Tyson responded by joining with Smithfield and other meat producers to mount a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign, complete with astroturf opposition and congressional arm-twisting. Big Ag outplayed Vilsack at nearly every turn, and he quickly backpedaled on the new rules. Finally, Congress killed the reform effort late in 2011. Two years later, with the fundamentals of its business plan intact, Smithfield sold itself to the Shuanghui Group, a Chinese company.
Are critics of Bernie Sanders correct to point out that however noble his intentions, he won’t be able to persuade a Republican-controlled Congress to pass them into law? Yes, they’re absolutely correct—but this is not an argument for electing Clinton. Not only would she face the exact same difficulty as Sanders would have, and as Obama has had, in bringing agribusiness to heel, based on her connections, it’s wholly unreasonable to expect that she’d even attempt to do such a thing.
This, then is one of the reasons why I believe nominating Sanders is necessary for the Democratic Party:
First, it’s better to be seen to try to take the just and benevolent course of action and fail than to be seen not to try. As Confucius said, to see what’s right and not do it is cowardice.
Second, Sanders is more likely than Clinton to speak publicly about the nature of this problem and the fact that it is a problem.
Third, and perhaps most important, if the nation can elect Sanders, it shows that a progressive approach to industry regulation is wanted and needed. What’s unthinkable today will be acceptable tomorrow; what’s radical today will be sensible tomorrow. And once regulation that puts people’s needs—not just abstract needs like rights and dignity, but concrete needs like clean, drinkable water—above the profit incentives of behemoth corporations is understood, not just among the public but among their elected representatives, to be acceptable and sensible, then and only then can it be converted into policy.
If there’s one hero on the national political stage whom every one of us can point to as an exemplar of the kind of common-sense compassion that underlies tough, sound and fair industry regulation, who can it be but Elizabeth Warren? Her courage in confronting the financial industry gave us the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the few federal regulatory agencies that’s making a tangible, positive difference in Americans’ lives. Her virtue, that moral power she possesses which commands attention and respect, which good people love and bad people fear, should be the model for every candidate we nominate. I believe Sanders possesses that kind of virtue. I don’t believe Clinton does.
Selflessness, righteousness and devotion to the rule of law have to start at the top. But then they have to continue down through every level of our government, and so it falls to us not only to install a president with the courage and virtue to declaim the importance of government regulation in the public interest but also to do everything in our power to elect other representatives who also are virtuous enough to recognize its importance and courageous enough to say so.
(N.B. In the interest of intellectual honesty, I do need to note that, according to “The Problem With Iowa,” both Clinton and Sanders have affirmed on the record their support for corn-derived ethanol fuel, a destructive and misguided idea. In fact, every candidate stumping through Iowa pledged his or her allegiance to ethanol, except one: Ted Cruz. We truly live in Topsy-Turvy Land.)