Marc Brazeau Profile picture
May 7, 2020 15 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Ag's ability to fend off regulation is a problem for the community but ultimately a problem for ag as well.

1/10
2. For the community, ag externalizing their costs onto everyone else is an obvious problem. But often the more insidious problem is that if you try to use democratic institutions to regulate ag, you'll likely fail, but you could also end up losing those democratic institutions.
3. When the citizen/farmer-led Arkansas State Plant Board tried to reign in the neighbor-to-neighbor damage from dicamba, Monsanto tried to sue them out of existence.

arkansasonline.com/news/2019/dec/…
4. And then they sued each board member individually.

npr.org/sections/thesa…
5. In Minnesota, when ag lobbying groups didn't like the rulings on CAFO regulations coming out of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the just eliminated the MPCA.

indyweek.com/news/archives/…
6. In North Carolina, the hog industry managed to get the state legislature to override the governor's veto of a law that severely curtailed the property rights of homeowners, arbitrarily exempting CAFOs from public nuisance lawsuits.

indyweek.com/news/archives/…
7. Ag-gag laws in Iowa, Idaho, Utah, and Kansas ran so blatantly afoul of 1st Amendment rights that they struck were down in court. Ag-gag laws that barely pass constitutional muster remain on the books in several states, continuing to violate 1st Amendment freedoms.
8. The upshot of all this is that, while ag may get their way in a narrow sense of the term, they remain embattled, untrusted, and very difficult to be in coalition with other potential allies.
9. As long as they get their way on these issues, that may not matter to them. But I overhear enough grousing about the lack of trust and the feeling of being politically embattled to think that at least some of them do.
As political power shifts inexorably to urban centers they may find themselves needing political allies who are wary of ag trade organizations that are so hostile to responsible regulation and when push comes to shove, to democratic institutions and basic constitutional rights
~ fin ~

#fafdlstorm

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More from @eatcookwrite

Aug 16, 2021
A (not so) quick personal note on what it means to be pushing back 'elective procedures' to work around COVID outbreaks.

I needed 'elective' surgery last summer which was put off for months as hospitals were taken over by COVID.

I was not going in for a tummy tuck.
I needed open-heart surgery to replace a congenitally defective heart valve that was failing. The only thing 'elective' about it was choosing the date.
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This is something I haven't seen adequately discussed for the vaccine-hesitant who are waiting for more info about long-term effects.

The problem is that they are in the wrong paradigm.
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In cases where potential vaccines have had negative health effects, those effects have been observed within two months.
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Jul 30, 2021
Krystall Ball is playing three-card monte here and Bernie was too polite to call her out on it. It's her fans who aren't following the cards.
Ball first frames Biden's problem as being willing to let some of his agenda be killed by the filibuster. Bernie says that Biden can't snap his fingers and end the filibuster.
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Jul 29, 2021
It's hard to believe how thirsty my tomatillos and chiles are. I started a kitchen garden in 2018 which helped me understand farming a bit better in little ways. #fafdlstorm 1/8
But nothing compares to the way I've completely internalized the revolutionary nature of the invention of irrigation 600 years or so. 2/8
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"The saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it,” suggests that materialism drives us. It’s even harder to get a man to understand something when his community and identity depend on his not understanding it"
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I think there is a lot more room for federal spending and I'm really happy that the general consensus has moved in that direction. But it is not surprising to see pushback against sums considered science fiction just a few years back. The full $3.5 trillion was always unlikely.
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