If The Dems Made A Concerted Effort To Appeal To Rural Voters What Would You Recommend They Do?....

[tama]

298. Yup

I've seen the US trade balance. Main "export" is immaterial intellectual property "rights". Connect the dots Aaron Swartz etc. made into warning examples for defying that abstract lunacy. Fossil fuel imports go down in volume, year by year since 2008, up in cost.

Thanks for informative post, I can understand the logic, but in larger context it doesn't make it wise. The NYT article was very enlightening, thanks for the link. Few point's I'd like to add to what you say:

* EU consumers don't want GMO, period. It's just waste of time and energy to keep on pushing, and creates just more bad feelings towards US.

* "Organic" is complex concept in legal and bureaucratic and commercial terms, but simple in nature: take care of land and land takes care of you. From point of view of cost effectiveness, it "loses" only in most narrow context, current consumer prices which have much more to do with structures of commerce, supply and demand, red tape, subsidies systems etc. Production costs or "organic" in narrow context of current producer point of view, where we can leave many of long term etc. structural costs "hidden", vary from product to product, but at large not higher than industrialized farming. And as energy costs (fertilizers, transport, etc.) are going up, the trend is clear and organic is becoming more and more competitive from producer point of view. On widest systemic level only organic makes any real sense and industrial farming is pure lunacy.

But people have to cope with present state of system and it's conditions, and the vicious cycle of self-destruction is not easy to brake and change in benign ways, before it brakes down more cruel way. What this means for political parties, it would be ideal if they started from holistic comprehension and worked detailed changes from there in process oriented and dynamic fashion. But bipartisan politics in US being ever really intelligent seems too much to hope for.

Capitalist land reform of making life difficult for small farms and killing them of continues as usual, but such control can never be absolute, and rural ways of life keep on resisting and reinventing themselves... by living. In US Amish rural way of life is the most notable great "Other" in partisan political discussions, as most of them don't vote or have nothing to do with parties and political offices. But they thrive and multiply with power of community and common sense organic farming. They don't only feed themselves, but also many others (which also allows them to acquire more and more land in capitalistic market). Where official agropolicies keep failing and creating just more problems and misery, the Amish success story creates a huge contrast. So huge that it is often easier to just shut out from thoughts and forget, than to really think and accept the implications.