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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-please read about how the "Red state" phenomenon was engineered by CorpoRAT elites in the blue states. The same elitists, BTW, that the coastal left is against, and the Liberals are mildly against. And these now Red states were once the real heartland of anti-capitalist and green leftism. Brainwash works on us all. We're all
susceptible, particularly when it's not an isolated campaign, but thru concerted broad social engineering projects. Here's an excerpt of Thomas Frank's, "Lie down for America" followed by a review. This is great reading. Enjoy, then come together and act against the big business elites who're ultimately oppressing us all:Rural Womyn Zone Home
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From
Lie Down for America:
How the Republican Party Sows Ruin on the Great Plains
By Thomas Frank
Harper��s Magazine April 2004..........There's a reason you probably haven't heard much about this aspect of the heartland [the blight of Emporia, Kansas]. This kind of blight can't be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn't the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives' beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at it's most unrestrained, has little use for small town merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place. Deregulated capitalism is what has allowed Wal-Marts to crush local businesses across the Midwest and, even more importantly, what has driven agriculture, the region��s raison d��etre, to a state of near-collapse.
People who have never lived in a farm state often think of all agricultural interests as essentially identical: farmers and huge agribusiness conglomerates want the same things, they believe. But in reality the interests of the two are more like those of the chicken and Colonel Sanders of backlash lore. And Colonel Sanders has been on an unbroken winning streak now for twenty-some years, with farm legislation, trade policy, and a regulatory climate all crafted to strengthen the conglomerates while weakening farmers. For shareholders and upper management of companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson the result has been miraculous; for town like Emporia it has been ruinous.
Whereas farmers are naturally disorganized, agribusiness seeks always to merge and acquire and choke off competition. And so, like other industries, it was finally permitted to do these things in the deregulatory climate of the Reagan-Clinton era. In the eighties, according to William Heffernan, a sociologist at the University of Missouri, agriculture experts generally agreed that if four companies controlled more than 40 percent of market share in a given field, it was no longer competitive. Today, Heffernan estimates, the four largest players process 81 percent of the beef, 59 percent of the pork, and 50 percent of the chicken produced in the United States. The same phenomenon is at work in grain: The largest four process 61 percent of American wheat, 80 percent of American soybeans, and either 57 percent or 74 percent of American corn, depending on the method. It is no coincidence that the internal motto of Archer Daniels Midland, the grain processing giant notorious for its political clout and its price-fixing, is reported to be, ��The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy.��
The admirers of farm deregulation �V and there are plenty of them, in economics departments as well as in the Bush Administration Department of Agriculture �V see in it not some hideous power grab but a heroic ��restructuring�� of the food industry. Cargill, ADM, and the rest of the giants are bringing order out of chaos; if we finally have to say goodbye to the Jeffersonian fantasy of the family farm �V if we have to transform the prosperous farmer into a sharecropper and turn the countryside into an industrialized wasteland and destroy the small towns �V maybe it��s all for the best.
One thing unites all these different groups of Kansans, these millionaires and trailer park dwellers, the farmers and thrift-store managers and slaughterhouse workers and utility executives: they are almost all Republicans. Meatpacking Garden City voted for George W. Bush in even greater numbers that did affluent Johnson County.
Not too long ago, Kansans would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers - when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists�� worst imaginings, when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work �V you could be damned sure about what would follow.
Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today��s Kansans of their job security and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land and the next thing you know they��re protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO and there��s a good chance they��ll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed �V unions, antitrust laws, public ownership �V and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower.
Let us pause for a moment and gaze across this landscape of dysfunction. A state is spectacularly ill served by the Reagan-Bush stampede of deregulation, privatization, and laissez-faire. It sees its countryside depopulated, its towns disintegrate, its cities stagnate �V and its wealthy enclaves sparkle, behind their remote-controlled security gates. The state erupts in revolt, making headlines around the world with its bold defiance of convention. But what do its revolutionaries demand? More of the very measures that have brought ruination on them and their neighbors in the first place.
This is not just the mystery of Kansas: this is the mystery of America, the historical shift that has made it all possible.
In Kansas the shift is more staggering than elsewhere, simply because it has been so decisive, so extreme. The people who were once radical are now reactionary. Although they speak today in the same aggrieved language of victimization and although they face the same array of economic forces as their hard-bitten ancestors, today��s rebels make demands that are precisely the opposite. Tear down the federal farm programs, they cry. Privatize the utilities. Repeal the progressive taxes. All that Kansas asks today is a little help nailing itself to that cross of gold. �K�K�K
What's the matter with Kansas?
Corporate conservatism has consumed state's proud populist past, writer argues
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Lawrence newsstands have sold out of the April issue of Harper's Magazine.
"It flew out of here so fast, I didn't even get to see it," said John Fackler, manager at Borders, 700 N.H.
The magazine's cover story recast the question first asked famously in 1896 by Emporia Gazette editor William Allen White: "What's the matter with Kansas?"
This time, the question was posed by Thomas Frank, a former Kansas University student who is now a contributing editor at Harper's.
"I'm a big fan of William Allen White," Frank said during a telephone interview from his home in Washington, D.C.
In the 1896 editorial, White answered his own question by pinning the state's lack of growth on moss-backed populism.
Frank answers the question by blaming the "Great Backlash," a post-1980s form of conservatism that uses hot-button issues such as abortion, gun control and un-Christian art to elect candidates who, once they're in office, blindly serve the interests of big business. And big business, Frank argues, is no friend of the family farmer, the Garden City meatpacker or the Wichita aircraft worker.
Reliable old trick
"The leaders of the backlash movement may talk Christ, but they walk Corporate," Frank wrote in "Lie Down for America/How the Republican Party Sows Ruin on the Great Plains," the lead essay in the April issue of Harper's.
The essay is a condensation of the first three chapters in Frank's forthcoming book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" due in stores late next month.
"It's a study of the conservative mindset, using Kansas as a microcosm of the rest of the nation," said Frank, who has a doctorate in history from the University of Chicago.
He marveled at how a rural state that saw 50 of its 105 counties lose population between 1990 and 2000 keeps getting tricked into electing politicians who rail against abortion while cutting taxes on corporations that send jobs overseas.
Abortion, he said, hasn't gone away, but the jobs sure have.
"The trick never ages, the illusion never wears off," Frank wrote. "Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."
Westar, suffrage, evolution
Nowhere has this scenario run more amok, Frank writes, than former Westar executive David Wittig's use of the forces of deregulation to "pull down millions of dollars in compensation even while the company's share price plummeted and employees were laid off to reduce costs."
For much of the state's history and especially during White's tenure, Kansas was perceived to be a place ruled by decency, common sense and hard work. It symbolized all that was right with America.
But in the aftermath of the state Board of Education questioning the need to teach evolution, of Olathe Republican Sen. Kay O'Connor doubting the merits of women's suffrage, and Topeka's homophobic minister Fred Phelps finding a national stage, Frank argues Kansas has lost its once-precious normalcy.
He compares the state to "staring into the eyes of a lunatic."
KU political science professor Burdett Loomis said he had seen Frank's book and liked it.
"I think he's onto something," said Loomis, who twice critiqued early drafts of Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"
"I don't agree with everything he says, but the question of whether lowering taxes and reducing the role of government has hurt the Kansas constituency is certainly there."
Thomas Frank Not just Kansas
Donald Worster, a distinguished professor of history at KU, said he found Frank's essay overly harsh.
"I don't disagree that there are people who don't know they're being manipulated or who are being taken advantage of by their politicians. That's true in Kansas, and it's true in the Great Plains." Worster said. "But it's also true in the cities as well. I lived in Boston for a period of time, and I can assure you that the argument can be made that the Boston Irish have not been served well by the Democratic machine there."
Worster said he bristled at Frank's line about looking into the eyes of a lunatic. "I don't see that," he said.
Worster also questioned Frank's notion that Kansas' once-great populist leanings have, in recent years, been displaced by ill-reasoned conservatism.
"He has a point, but it's not new," Worster said. "Kansas has been the most reliable Republican state in the country since Abe Lincoln with the exception, maybe, of Utah."
He added, "The idea that until recently Kansans voted in their economic self-interest is not historically true. It's been this way a very long time."
Worster said he was hard-pressed to see how the Great Plains voting Democratic would have led to a more prosperous Kansas.
"I'm not a Republican," he said, "but I don't know that the Democrats have paid more attention to the decline of the Great Plains. So much of what's happening is driven by letting a market-driven economy have its way. I've not seen Democrats wanting to interfere with those market forces, either."
��I'm outraged'
Frank is wrong when he assumes that prosperity is measured by the amount of money a person makes, said Tim Shallenburger, a conservative Republican from Baxter Springs who served as speaker of the Kansas House and state treasurer before losing to Kathleen Sebelius in the 2002 gubernatorial race.
"We're not as materialistic as he thinks we are," Shallenburger said. "A lot of people -- most people, I'd say -- would rather be free than rich or beholden to some kind of government program. Everybody assumes thhat the guy living in a box under a bridge somewhere would be for the ��party of welfare.' But when you go talk to the guy, he doesn't want anything to do with a government program. He'd rather be in a box.
"There's this assumption out there that we're all supposed to say ��Thank you, rich people, for all these programs you want to create for us," Shallenburger said. "But you know what? We don't want them. That's why we vote for conservatives like (U.S. Sen.) Sam Brownback, and that's why issues like abortion and guns resonate so well. It's not that we're ignorant or that we're being manipulated, it's that we don't want what he's selling."
Dwight Sutherland, a conservative advocate from Johnson County, said he spent four hours being interviewed by Frank last year.
"I guess I have to withhold judgment on the book. I haven't seen it yet," Sutherland said. "But I saw the article, and I'm outraged."
Sutherland said he was most upset that Frank linked Wittig's reign at Westar with the conservatives.
"Wittig supported Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, in the 2002 election," Sutherland said. "He has absolutely no connection with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. None.
Whom to blame
"The only conservative connection to the David Wittig thing is that he's being aggressively prosecuted by Eric Melgren, a conservative Republican prosecutor appointed by Sam Brownback," Sutherland said. "It's the moderate wing of the party that's all for corporate welfare. Not the conservative wing."
Frank did not disagree. "All of what he says is true," Frank said. "But when you add up all the evidence as to what makes the David Wittigs of the world possible, the conservatives were very much a factor."
Campaign records show that in addition to supporting Sebelius before her run for governor, Wittig contributed to Shallenburger's gubernatorial campaign, as well as to then-Gov. Bill Graves and the entire sitting Kansas congressional delegation: Republican senators Brownback and Pat Roberts, Republican Congressmen Jim Ryun, Jerry Moran and Todd Tiahrt, and Democratic Rep. Dennis Moore.
Other Westar executives contributed to Brownback and to U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kansas.
Frank said he enjoyed his time talking with Sutherland.
"I suspect he'll like the book better," he said. "I don't let the moderates off the hook."
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