Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Proud to be fossil patriots from Kansas (see below).
FREE LANCE:
A BILL FOR THE BIG FARMERS
Both the House and Senate versions of the federal budget included deficiency payments that compensate farmers for low market prices. But, according to the Center for Rural Affairs in Walthill, Neb., both versions cut benefits to family-size farms, while practically exempting the largest farms from cuts. The Senate bill would cut payments on an additional 15 percent of base acres, but the largest farms have sufficient acreage to continue receiving the maximum $100,000 payments under the program. The House version appears to close one loophole but leaves others open, letting the largest farms escape cuts. The only exceptions are large cotton and rice farmers, who would sacrifice marketing loan gains.
Urban consumers benefit from the low market prices that the deficiency program is designed to compensate, but many still have trouble sympathizing with farmers who work with hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets, but the National Family Farm Coalition puts it in perspective in the Preamble to its Ames Platform, which noted that in 1990 nearly 22 percent of U.S. farm operator households had incomes below the official poverty threshold, twice the rate of all U.S. families; from 1982 to 1993 the index of prices received by farmers rose only 7.5 percent while the index of prices paid by farmers rose 23 percent; and in 1993 the average price of corn per bushel was $2.12 (in 1987 dollars), compared with $5.23 in 1975, while wheat was $2.61 a bushel compared with $7.30. The median return on investment by the food processing industry from 1990-1994 was 15.9 percent, compared with 11.4 percent for all industries and 3.4 percent for farmers. PROUD TO BE FOSSIL PATRIOTS FROM KANSAS
While researching the historical underpinnings of the Populist movement, we ran across the following definitions:
CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
POPULIST, n. A fossil patriot of the early agricultural period, found in the old red soapstone underlying Kansas; characterized by an uncommon spread of ear, which some naturalists contend gave him the power of flight, though Professors Morse and Whitney, pursuing independent lines of thought, have ingeniously pointed out that had he possessed it he would have gone elsewhere. In the picturesque speech of his period, some fragments of which have come down to us, he was known as "The Matter with Kansas."
WHO WE ARE
Jim Cullen has been in journalism for 20 years, working at weekly and daily newspapers in Iowa, Louisiana and Texas. Most recently, he spent nearly four years as associate editor of The Texas Observer in Austin. At these papers, Jim has served as a political reporter and columnist.
John Cullen has worked as a photographer, reporter and editor at newspapers in Iowa and Washington state. He was named Iowa's Press Photographer of the Year.
Six years ago, John founded The Storm Lake Times, a twice weekly county seat newspaper in his Iowa hometown.
Art Cullen has worked at daily and weekly newspapers in Iowa for 16 years as a reporter and editor. He twice won the Champion-Tuck Award for Economic Reporting, based at Dartmouth College, for reporting on the Farm Crisis in Iowa.
Our cover artist, Dolores Cullen, is married to Art. They have four children, including two uncontrollable twin 3-year-old boys.
The Cullens are the sons of the late Pat and Eileen Cullen of Storm Lake. Pat Cullen was foolish enough to run as a Democrat for the Iowa Legislature on the Kennedy ticket. He had a KKK cross burned in his "honor".He lost.
FREE LANCE:
NOTHING IN LIFE, ESPECIALLY THE PRESS, IS FREE
A strike at Detroit's two daily newspapers continued into its fourth month. When picket lines of the six striking unions temporarily stopped delivery of Sunday newspapers in early September, the newspaper was forced to airlift copies from the printing plant by helicopter. Finally, the newspapers got a judge to limit the number of pickets outside the plant, which effectively allowed the newspapers to get their trucks through the picket lines.
While many advertisers have pulled out, including Kmart Corp. and the major grocery chains, six national corporations continued to advertise in the scab newspapers: J.C. Penney, Lord & Taylor, Target, Home Depot, Dayton-Hudson and Montgomery Ward. The AFL-CIO has called for a nationwide boycott of those businesses.
Both Gannett and Knight-Ridder have tried to bring in replacements from other newspapers. Labor Notes, a Detroit-based labor magazine, noted ironically that only last year the Free Press editorialized against the use of permanent replacements during strikes, but its owners told Guild members they would begin hiring permanent replacements on August 10 and more than 1,100 had been hired by Labor Day.
In the Detroit Journal online strike paper, Margaret Trimer-Hartley wrote that "Gannet and Knight-Ridder, Inc. know they will need far fewer workers as technology takes over the industry. Busting the unions would enable the companies to easily get rid of all the workers they no longer need. No more buyouts. No more severance packages. No more strings attached.
"Additionally, the millionaires and billionaires who head these corporations could exert even more control over the editorial content of the press without the unions. For example, reporters who cannot negotiate cost of living raises through their unions will likely do -- or write -- whatever they think their bosses want them to just to get a raise.
If you are a progressive populist ...
