"but cities aren't great either" Yeah & everyone already knows it. Meanwhile the élites of rural areas & small towns are still spinning this "boohoo cities are carving us out" BS & getting away with it. sit down & shut up while I learn you something
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*Everywhere* has an élite. The grodiest meth-country counties all have a nice subdivision somewhere. Seriously. Where do you think the people who own the pawn shop/liquor store/gun shop combo strip malls live?
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The urban/rural divide is a myth. They're both run by greedy assholes who are running their surroundings into the ground for profit. Where is the difference? Anyway, back to how this plays out in rural/small town life.
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There's a certain kind of folks who are attracted to small town/rural living because IT'S EASIER TO BE A BIG FISH IN A SMALL POND. You know what's the easiest way to stay a big fish? Keep the pond small. Even better, drain it dry.
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This goes triple in places where the only game in town is land. Either through agriculture, mining/drilling rights, or (in niche cases like Fayetteville, a city w no economy besides property rental, thx Ft Bragg) res/com real estate. That's because land is a zero-sum game.
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If you and/or your clique own all the land, nobody else can live or do business there without your blessing. Assumptions that make sense in urban areas, like "if you want to be rich & powerful you do it by seeking profit," go out the window in locales w land-based economies.
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Plantation owners actively prevented cotton mills from being built in the pre-Civil War South *even though they knew mills were more profitable than plantations* because they introduced a giant free working class that slaveowners couldn't beat, evict, or run out of town at will.
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sheds a whole new light on that "whaaaaa the North stole all our money by having all the cotton mills" talking point, doesn't it gee. how did the South, a region with a 100% cotton-based economy (that THEY RAN) wind up with NO MILLS? they did it to themselves, the stupid fucks
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Ever notice how ICE raids against "farmworkers" never actually seem to happen at farms? Always at meat plants? Same dynamic. Meat plants are year-round operations, w lots of people that landowners don't have the same control over as they do farm workers. So they call for backup.
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The real story of "the death of family farms"? Mostly big landowners evicting sharecroppers & tenants. Not just in the South- nearly half of Iowa's "family farmers" in 1920 were actually tenants. That's why the countryside "used to be radical" & now it's super conservative.
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Folks who make their living owning property, btw, are also terrified of LGBTQ+ reality because their wealth is all about dynastic accumulation. Social-climbing through marriage is a HUGE component of their livelihood.
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So how tf are they supposed to keep a lock on wealth without compulsive heterosexuality? They NEED it. Hence these folks being militantly anti-LGBTQ+. Along with all the general racism and misogyny that also prop up these estates' wealth & status.
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The funny part is this "big fish drain the pond to stay on top" phenomenon is REALLY well-documented in poor countries & oil oligarchies. But the vast majority of the United States (in terms of square miles) behaves the exact same way. It's called resource curse.
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If there's a significant natural resource, you often wind up with a small wealthy clique that owns it. They refuse to invest in any other kind of business or infrastructure (including basic civil rights). That way, they own everything and everyONE.
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It's a cheap way to be powerful. They're happy to be super-wealthy if it's easy to do so (see: oil oligarchs) but "middling wealthy while everyone else around me is desperate" is fine too. Hence, stifling economic development to stay on top.
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Again, most of the US's square mileage operates this way.
@buttpraxis if you feel like we're being herded into slums, you ain't wrong.Show this thread -
There's ~20-30 urban cores where the ruling class figured out how to monetize the post-1940 flood of rural refugees. This drives up basic costs of living. Everywhere else? Resource curse.
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Anyway, it's one thing to know what the problem is and a whole nother thing to DO something about it. Which is something I've been thinking a lot about the last couple years, watching Fayetteville NC's élite curb-stomp anything & anyone that could challenge their supremacy.pic.twitter.com/f666LQ0dJT
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I'm also thinking about it a lot as I'm writing a book rn on all the livelihoods that agriculture COULD support- if farmers actually invested in their businesses instead of doing the Southern cotton planter thing where they offload processing onto outside partners
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and then bitch about how they only make a tiny portion of the consumer dollar. That's bc farming is only a tiny portion of the work that goes into making the food. To make FOOD instead of bulk commodities, they'd have to invest in creating real jobs & shit.
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And farmers don't want to do that because (despite the rhetoric about how small farmers = Jesus)- in the grand scheme of rural economics, the vast majority of farmers are really just biggish fish in a small pond. Who do NOT want to build their local economy & infrastructure.
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All this is to say- if we're serious about fixing the food system, I think big employee-owned farm/food operations are the only way to fly. And WHAT A COINCIDENCE, they could also fix this "we're all being herded into expensive slums and it's destroying our democracy" problem.
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A lot of co's are switching to 100% remote work. I heard rumors Salesforce just did so? That's 40-50K people with a lot more freedom to just get up & go. So now, there's a Discourse about general tech & office workers moving to rural areas for lower cost of living.
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This isn't w/out potential downsides. 1. Gentrification or the "Cary NC" model. Instead of bringing jobs to rural areas per se, it just leads to new exclaves. These are soon gerrymandered into irrelevance just like the old blue cities. thread break, brb
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2. White-collar tech & office workers aren't THAT universally progressive
3. These are jobs that are more or less inaccessible to folks already living in rural areasShow this thread -
For reasons #2 & 3, you don't want to put all the eggs in the tech worker basket. You want diverse economic activity in rural areas, not just a tech exodus. And for reason #1, whatever the approach is, you want to cover a LOT of area. Not just make a few new exclaves.
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Here's a great example of an investment in rural areas & land-based livelihoods. There's tons of demand for high-end dairy products that's filled by imports bc we don't make much fancy cheese here.
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Could give you a 20-page report on why, but it boils down to "dairy farmers have a cotton planter problem & that's why they're all swirling the drain rn but nobody will admit it." : / Like the resource curse problem causes a SHOCKING amount of rural pain & suffering
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and nobody notices bc it's always blamed on "agribusiness" & everyone says "yeah that sounds legit" : / BUT WHAT IF THERE WERE JUST BIG-ASS CSA'S THAT YOU COULD LIVE ON/NEAR, AND THEY MADE GOOD FUCKIN CHEESE. AND IDK, SOUP
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This is a little similar to the "agrihood" concept. Except agrihoods seem to be neo-country clubs where the golf course was replaced by what a "working farm" that probably isn't agrihoods also kinda look like the exurb from Get Out if we're being honest. no thanks!
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