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Flame » in reply to On a Bisexual Built for Two.................

Speaking of Big Sugar...
ER — (archived)

Remember a few years ago when the Florida sugar growers were running a set of ads on TV to promote their massive subsidies and opposition to Everglades preservation efforts and candidates who favored them? They showed this kindly "Auntie Em"-type old lady in a country kitchen explaining why we should vote for their candidates and referenda while she was pulling a pie from the oven: white hair, flowered apron, every rural bucolic American icon you can think of. Her rap was the usual gorgonzola about "independent American farm families struggling to make ends meet".

Next time you Yankees come on down for a Florida vacation take a small side trip down the back roads by Lake Okeechobee way and take a look at the farms for yourself. No trim barns and stables and quaint homesteads with picket fences here, this is corporate farming at its finest, black and brown migrant workers living in grubby, mass-produced housing, small towns transformed into Little Mexicos, it made California's central valley look like "Little House on the Prarie".

And there has been improvement in South Florida! I remember when the Feds would occasionally break up real slavery operations, places where good old boys with shotguns and dogs kept farm help from leaving prematurely, before the citrus was all in...

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