Alexis C. Madrigal writes
The Whitewashing of the American Farmer: Dodge Ram Super Bowl Ad Edition:
Dodge Ram turned heads [during the Super Bowl] with its high-production value remake of a Farms.com YouTube video, featuring conservative radio broadcaster Paul Harvey's voice laid over beautiful photographs of Americans farmers. [...]
But there's a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting. [...]
It's true that whites are the managers of 96 percent of the nation's farms, according to the USDA's 2007 Census of Agriculture. But the agricultural workforce is overwhelmingly Mexican with some workers from Central America thrown in. The Department of Labor's National Agriculture Worker Survey has found that over the last decade, around 70 percent of farmworkers in America were born in Mexico, most in a few states along the Pacific coast. This should not be news. Everyone knows this is how farms are run.
And yet when a company decided to pay homage to the people who grow our food, they left out the people who do much of the labor, particularly on the big farms that continue to power the food system. You want to tell a grand story about the glories of working the land? You want to celebrate the people who grow food? You want to expound on the positive 'merican qualities that agricultural work develops in people? Great! What a nice, nostalgic idea!
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Here's the
ad. And here are
some photos by Lisa Hamilton from the RealRural.org for contrast.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Obama Caps CEO Salaries of TARP Recipients; Who Will Work for a Paltry $500,000 Per Year?
Look, here's the situation: Bush may have wanted to bail out his backers in the financial services industry, and that may have driven his support for the $700 billion bailout. But most people who supported it did it in spite of the irresponsible CEO's who helped create the collapse of the credit markets. Most people who supported the bailout did so because it was too important to the entire economy to keep credit from completely drying up. It was a case of how people often refer to what FDR did during the Depression: it was saving capitalism from the capitalists.
But the guys (and they're almost all guys) who blew their companies' money on obscure "financial products" that were mostly just bets on bets on bets, they don't deserve any great rewards from the taxpayers. It's not in the public interest to make sure they continue to get over over 350 times the pay of the average American worker.
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Tweet of the Day:
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show,
Greg Dworkin in his regular spot, then UK fan
GideonAB. The latest incidents of gun violence in the news, the state of play for legislation on gun policy, filibuster reform, etc. And having finally seen
Lincoln, lots of talk about how times may change, but political dynamics sometimes stay very much the same. What might we expect to pass? And what should we continue to push for though we may not win right now?
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