USDA Chief: Rural America Becoming Less Relevant

[libdem4life]

4. The WalMartization of what used to be small town Main St. through

economic "gutting" of local business, local jobs, and local revenue recirculation and local agriculture/produce has produced small Ghost Towns with a big, thriving WalMart monopoly outside each region. Prices are not significantly lower, especially in areas where there are no alternatives within a half hour drive.

This also ties back in through the corporate back door to the agriculture/local farms produce now being single-crop feed production for meat animals through agribusiness, while the US taxpayer subsidizes the actual food on the table of many WalMart/local employees in the form of Food Stamps.

The Chinese workers/cheap product angle supplants the Retail/Manufacturing sector.

Anyone who calls this Capitalism just isn't paying attention, IMHO. Even rural folk know what happens when the barn door is closed after the cows have gotten out.

And the politics...Red States/Rural States...are the dying breed of a proud, rural culture where families, the farm, the school, the church, the law enforcement, extended families, the trust (or not) of long-term relationships and the local politics was all about We Take Care of Our Own.

I see it as the evolution of the Industrial Revolution and population shift of youth-to-the-city-for-a-good-job demographics.

Living with one foot in each State Color, I do not have the answer or any logical way to assign blame after decades of watching both Red and Blue cultures evolve.

I just know I can't stand WalMart.