Part One:
FOOD DUMPING
We welcome Elizabeth Ransom, Associate Professor of International Affairs & Senior Research Associate, Rock Ethics Institute, Pennsylvania State University, and E. Melanie DuPuis, Professor and Chair, Environmental Studies and Science, at Pace University.
Why are farmers dumping milk down the drain and letting produce rot in fields? Why isn’t this food making its way to all the hungry people who are struggling to earn a subsistence living and feed their families? The answer is complicated, because of the inefficient economic system that governs how farmers finance their food-production businesses, distribute their products through middle-men, who have to get it to stores and customers while the perishable products are still edible.
Other factors include regional markets, the domination by conglomerates and agri-business over family farmers, and the market-distorting effects of government subsidy programs. Will we learn anything – by observing the strains created by the COVID-19 pandemic – about how we might make our food production economy work better?
Part Two:
SIMILARITIES BETWEEN TODAY’S SOCIETY AND THE PRE-CIVIL-WAR SOUTH
We speak with Mark Karlin, editor of BuzzFlash, about his piece comparing the pre-Confederacy oligarchy with today’s political economy. In the antebellum South, the oligarchy (wealthiest 7% of the white population) owned and exploited African slaves while subjugating and controlling non-rich white people. By turning the non-elites of both races against each other, the slave-owners were able to maintain their plantations and their privileged way of life.
Things are not so different today. Mega-corporations and the wealthiest “1%” dominate our economy as well as our political and social life. Poor and working-class whites, as well as people of color, immigrants and religious minorities, are marginalized, even as the work that they perform creates profits for the modern-day oligarchs. Just as in the pre-Civil War American South, the elites maintain power by stirring up racial hatred among the “lesser” groups.
