Small Things Count

Two weeks ago, the Old Testament section that was read at Mass was very striking in light of some of the things we are hearing from the Corporate side in recent news.  The reading was powerful, as read at Mass, but my translation is slightly different and not as strong. However, it talked about the powerful laughing about how they will own all the people and even sell their refuse for profit.  The final line was, “The Lord said, I will never forget what they have done.”

When I was listening to that reading, it brought to mind CEO’s who recently have been bragging that they pay the lowest wages they are allowed to (including less than minimum for tipped workers), and absolutely will never offer benefits to their low-wage workers–that they would make everyone part time in preference to providing health insurance.  But it also called to mind the subsidies that go to the agribusinesses, while masquerading as “saving the family farm”.  (Way back when I was a little girl we were farmers–the family farm of the time was still 40 to 100 acres.  My father campaigned against farm subsidies, because he said they only go to the big farms, and he said they were designed to do away with the small family farm–that was nearly 60 years ago).    There is a recent study that shows there are many, many farms still operated by “family farmers” and only a few corporate giants–but the subsidies mainly go to the few corporate giants–the Monsantos, ConAgras, Tyson Foods.  The study included this paragraph:

“The reality is that farming itself is generally a terrible business. There’s much more—and much easier—money to be made by selling farmers the raw materials of their trade—like seeds, fertilizer, or livestock feed. And there’s also plenty of money in buying farmers’ output cheap (say, corn or hogs) and selling it dear (as, say, pork chops or high-fructose corn syrup). In his excellent 2004 book Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, Richard Manning pungently describes the situation:

A farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.”

 Theresa Rieve