Bernie 2020
May 5, 2019
Sanders Unveils Plan To Rebuild Rural America
OSAGE, Iowa – U.S. Sen. Bernie
Sanders today unveiled a comprehensive plan to rebuild and reinvest in
rural America. In a speech at the Mitchell County Fairgrounds in Osage,
Iowa, Sanders outlined a detailed blueprint to protect farmers from
monopolistic agribusiness corporations and climate change, and to focus
more federal investments on rural communities that have too often been
ignored by Washington.
“While corporate profits soar in agribusiness, while merger after
merger gives even more power to a handful of huge conglomerates,
thousands of family farmers are forced off their land every year
because the prices they get for their products are lower than the cost
of production,” Sanders said. “Tragically, instead of seeing good jobs,
education and health care coming into our rural communities, we are far
too often seeing desperation and depression - and a terrible increase
in suicide and opioid addiction. We need to turn this around. We
cannot create an economy that works for all Americans if we continue to
neglect the needs of rural America.”
Much of Sanders’ plan deals with the agriculture sector, which is a
primary source of income for one in 5 rural counties across the
country. As large agribusiness corporations have been permitted to
consolidate and vertically integrate, farmers today now receive the
lowest share of consumers’ food dollar in recorded history. Meanwhile,
rural communities have been ravaged by pollution. To reverse the trend,
Sanders would:
- Intensify antitrust enforcement to
block new monopolistic mergers and ban contract farming
- Protect farmers from predatory patent
lawsuits from seed corporations.
- Reform farm subsidies so that the
majority aren’t going to giant farms, but to small- and mid-sized farms.
- Restrict foreign ownership of American
farmland, which poses economic threats to farmers and also raises
national security concerns about the food supply.
- Stop effectively exempting factory
farms from the anti-pollution laws that other large-scale industrial
operations face, and take action against corporations whose products
are creating herbicide drift and polluting organic farms.
A separate part of Sanders’ plan deals
with reinvesting in rural economies and communities. Sanders proposes
to increase funding for rural teacher pay and for rural public
education including ESL programs, classes for students with
disabilities, student transportation and college accredited
classes.
As president, Bernie will pass his recently introduced legislation to
increase funding for community health centers and invest more resources
in the national health service corps, which extends health care into
underserved areas. Sanders also proposes to expand labor and workplace
protections for farmworkers and protect them from Trump’s deportation
machine.
Read the full plan
HERE.
Watch Bernie’s speech on the plan in Osage, Iowa
HERE.
###
May 5, 2019
Contact:
Roger Ouellette
Bill Neidhardt
NEWS: Sanders' Prepared Remarks on Plan to Rebuild Rural
America
OSAGE, Iowa – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders today unveiled his comprehensive
plan to rebuild and reinvest in rural America in Osage.
Here are the full remarks:
For the past 28 years, I have had the honor of representing one of the
most rural states in America - the State of Vermont - where people in
small towns know each other by name.
Where they go to the same schools together. Where they go to the same
restaurants, stores and movie theatres. Where their children play
in the same little league baseball games. Where they go to the
same doctors and hospitals when they get sick.
Where their parents and grandparents go to the same nursing
homes. Where people grow up together, raise families and grow old
together. In other words, where there is a real sense of
community.
I know that is true in Vermont and it is true in Iowa as well.
There is something very beautiful and special about the rural way of
life and it is something that we should celebrate and cherish with
every fiber of our being.
But let me be very honest with you. What you understand and what I
understand is that rural America is in a state of massive decline and
that is an issue that we have got to address.
The reality is that we have a Congress, a White House and a corporate
media that has, for far too long, ignored the many crises facing rural
America.
In Iowa, in Vermont and all over this country, we have seen more and
more young people leave the small towns they grew up in and love, not
because they don’t want to stay, but because there are fewer and fewer
jobs that pay a living wage.
According to a recent study, nearly 35 percent of rural counties in the
United States are experiencing protracted and significant population
loss. In Iowa and Vermont the numbers are even worse.
Two-thirds of Iowa’s counties and more than half of the counties in
Vermont have experienced declining populations.
We have seen schools, churches and community centers shut down, and
once vibrant Main Streets become boarded up and deserted.
In Iowa, in Vermont and all across rural America, we have seen family
farmers go out of business as the prices they receive for their
products decline rapidly and large agri-business corporations and
factory farming take over agriculture.
We have seen rural hospitals and nursing homes shut down, and not
enough doctors, nurses and dentists to provide the quality health care
that rural Americans deserve.
Tragically, instead of seeing good jobs, education and health care
coming into our rural communities, we are far too often seeing
desperation and depression - and a terrible increase in suicide and
opioid addiction.
We need to turn this around. We cannot create an economy that
works for all Americans if we continue to neglect the needs of rural
America.
But let me be clear. If we are to accomplish our goals, we need a
massive grassroots effort to stand up to the greed of corporate America
– a greed which is destroying the American middle class in so many
ways. It is true in agriculture, but it is also true in almost
every part of our lives.
Let me give you a few examples: at a time when the average interest
rate on credit cards is now over 17 percent and even higher for credit
cards purchased in stores, Wall Street is making record-breaking
profits and paying their CEOs outrageous compensation packages.
At a time when the top 10 drug companies in this country made $69
billion in profits in profits last year, 1 out of 5 Americans cannot
afford the medicine they need because we pay, by far, the highest
prices in the world for prescription drugs.
At a time when the top 5 insurance companies made over $20 billion in
profits and the top 65 CEOs in the healthcare industry made $1.7
billion in compensation in 2017, 34 million Americans are uninsured
even more are underinsured as the price of healthcare continues to soar.
At a time when climate change ravishes the planet, the fossil fuel
industry continues to make huge profits while their CEOs lie to the
American people about the dangers of carbon emissions.
And it is no different in terms of agriculture.
While corporate profits soar in agribusiness, while merger after merger
gives even more power to a handful of huge conglomerates, thousands of
family farmers are forced off their land every year because the prices
they get for their products is lower than the cost of production.
Today, I am releasing a plan that I will fight to implement as
president to strengthen, rejuvenate and revitalize rural America.
Let me give you just a few of the highlights.
First and foremost, when we talk about rural America, we have got to
talk about agriculture and the crisis in family farms.
Today, roughly one in 5 rural counties across the country rely on
farming as a primary source of income. Here in Iowa, a third of
the entire state’s economy is tied directly to agriculture and
ominously more and more and more of the state’s agriculture is being
dominated by just a handful of large corporations.
Shockingly, over the past 40 years, the U.S. has lost 90 percent of its
pork producers, 88 percent of its dairy producers and 95 percent of its
egg farmers.
In rural America, we are seeing giant agri-business conglomerates
extract as much wealth out of small communities as they can, while
family farmers are going bankrupt and, in many cases, treated like
modern-day indentured servants. That is unacceptable and together
was are going to change that.
In too many rural communities there is only one buyer of crops, which
means farmers and ranchers are at their mercy. They are forced to use
one corporation’s feed and livestock. They are forced to accept one
corporation’s costs, and they are forced to accept one corporation’s
lower and lower payment rates.
The result: Today, for every dollar Americans spend on food, farmers
earn less than 15 cents – which is the smallest share in the modern-day
history of our nation.
And the same is true on the buying end for farmers. In many cases,
there really is only one seller of seeds and chemicals, which lets the
sellers dictate the prices.
This growing monopolization of agriculture is unfair to food producers.
It is unfair to consumers. It is unfair to the environment. And it has
got to change.
We cannot continue to allow just four large companies to control 82
percent of the beef packing industry, 85 percent of soybean processing,
63 percent of pork packing, and 53 percent of chicken processing.
We cannot continue to allow Monsanto to control 80 percent of U.S. corn
and more than 90 percent of U.S. soybean seed patents – a situation
that has only gotten worse after the Trump administration approved
Monsanto’s disastrous merger with Bayer.
We can no longer tolerate 96 percent of chickens and 42 percent of hogs
being owned by large food processors and rented to farmers who are too
poor to own their own land or livestock.
We cannot continue to allow the top 10 percent of farms to receive 77
percent of all government subsidies – with much of this money going to
absentee farm owners, who live in big cities, renting out their land.
Here is what is going in agriculture today, farm bankruptcies in the
Midwest are at their highest level in a decade. People whose families
have worked the land for generations are being driven off their farms.
Meanwhile the CEO who controls Smithfield Foods, one of the large
agribusinesses in the United States received a $291 million
compensation package in 2017.
Let me be as clear as I can be. We need more family farms in
America, not more factory farms.
If Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster were alive today, you know
what he would say to these huge agri-business companies: He would say
break them up. And working together, that is exactly what we are
going to do.
As president, I will not only impose an immediate moratorium on
agri-business mergers, I will nominate an Attorney General who will
aggressively address the growing monopolization of the American economy
including agriculture. In other words my Attorney General will
aggressively breakup agri-business monopolies that are devastating
family farmers.
In my view, no industry should be controlled by one or two
corporations, and that includes giant agri-business conglomerates.
Working together, we are going to strengthen antitrust laws that
protect family farmers from the corporate middlemen that stand between
the food grower and the consumer.
We are going to apply antitrust laws to the companies that control the
seeds.
We are going to reform our patent laws to protect farmers from
predatory patent lawsuits from companies like Monsanto.
We are going to make sure rural residents have the right to sue
companies when their genetically altered crops contaminate nearby
farmland.
And working together, we will restore the agency that enforces
antitrust laws in the meatpacking industry – an agency that Trump
eliminated.
We have also got to recognize that the control large corporations have
over farmers is not just about the crops, the seeds and the livestock.
It’s also about the farming equipment.
Unbelievably, farmers are unable to even repair their own tractors or
other equipment because of the greed of companies like John Deere.
In many cases, farmers can’t change engine settings, they can’t
retrofit old equipment with new features, and they can’t modify their
tractors to meet new environmental standards without going through an
authorized repair agent.
How insane is that?
While John Deere is ripping off farmers, its CEO made over $18 million
in compensation last year. By the way, despite making $2.2 billion in
profit, it utilized the loopholes that Trump’s tax bill gave them and
paid nothing in federal income taxes.
The idea that a farmer who buys a tractor or other farm equipment for
many thousands of dollars is unable to fix it in the most
cost-effective way is beyond belief.
Together we are going to pass a national right-to-repair law that gives
every farmer in America full rights over the machinery they purchase.
And yes, companies like John Deere are going to pay their fair share of
taxes.
When we talk about how giant factory farms are destroying the social
fabric of rural America, we cannot ignore the horrific environmental
impact that they are having on rural communities.
Over the past 30 years, the number of factory farms in America has
skyrocketed from about 3,600 in the early 1980s to more than 19,000
today.
This change has resulted in the loss of over 82% of independent hog
producers from 1982 to 2007 in Iowa alone, even though the number of
hogs has increased exponentially. Everyday family farmers are
driven off their land as we see the growth of massive consolidated
industrial farms.
In Iowa alone, there are over 10,000 factory farms. This massive
concentration has caused an environmental catastrophe.
Make no mistake about it. These factory farms are a threat to the
air we breathe, the water we drink and the communities we live in.
Incredibly, and this really is incredible, factory farms are
responsible for 1.4 trillion pounds of animal waste in America.
Given this reality, it is unacceptable that Republicans in Congress
have been doing all that they can to exempt factory farms from
environmental laws.
Unbelievably the Trump administration recently proposed a rule to
exempt factory farms from reporting pollution emissions under “right to
know” laws -- even though communities near these operations are
experiencing nausea, headaches, increased rates of asthma and chronic
lung disease as a result of pollution.
It goes without saying, working together we are going to reverse that
rule.
Working together, we will apply the full force of the Clean Water Act,
on factory farms.
And let me tell you something else we’re going to do. We’re going
to regulate large factory farms under the Clean Air Act as industrial
factories not only to improve the environment but also to improve the
lives of rural Americans.
Further, we must transition away from farming systems that currently
require chemical-intensive, industrial farming practices that extract
wealth from rural communities, degrade the soil and pollute the
environment.
And when we talk about improving the life of rural Americans, we can no
longer tolerate a situation in which federal aide to agriculture goes
in exactly the wrong direction. We must end a system where the top 10
percent of farmers get 77 percent of subsidies from the USDA. Our job
is to protect family-based agriculture. Not to make billion dollar
corporations even richer.
Our agricultural policies have become so absurd that Trump’s own
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue collected more than a quarter of a
million dollars in farm subsidies, even though he isn’t even a farmer
-- he just rents the land he owns.
It goes without saying that farmers should not be forced to sell their
crops below the cost of production. Farmers deserve a fair price for
the very hard work they do.
When we are in the White House, we will reform these subsidies, and
make sure they are targeted more towards independent family farmers who
are actually working on their land.
And when we talk about the need to ensure a fair price for family
farmers we are talking about the need for parity price floors to ensure
farmers earn the cost of production plus living expenses.
We need to enact supply management programs and re-establish the grain
reserve to prevent shortages and surpluses, to ensure farmers earn a
decent income and to ensure consumers receive a high-quality, stable,
and secure supply of agricultural goods.
If we are going to rebuild rural America, we need to rebuild the
agricultural infrastructure in small towns. This includes independent
processing facilities, that were lost during consolidation since the
70’s and 80’s. Farmers should have a choice where to sell their
livestock or crops. In other words, we need competition.
Today, the average age of a farmer in the United States is 58. Clearly
if we are going to strengthen family based agriculture we need to help
young farmers transition on to the land and ensure farming allows them
to support their families.
Further we need to make sure people of all races and backgrounds can
engage in agriculture. We need young people, women, and people of color
back on the land.
In 1914, 14% of American farmers were black. Today fewer than 2% are.
We need our EQIP and Guaranteed Loan programs to stop going to factory
farm infrastructure and start going to small farmers.
We need to prioritize regenerative and sustainable farming practices
that sequester carbon in the soil like returning livestock to pasture
land and transitioning away from mono-crop, fence row to fence row
farming.
The industrial agriculture model of farming is not working for farmers,
it’s working for giant agribusiness conglomerates. This has got
to change.
Our trade policies should not hurt farmers and ranchers in America and
across the world. We need trade policies that prioritize domestic
food security - not dumping low-cost commodities on other nations -
undermining the local farmers there.
Farmers, workers, and environmentalists need a seat at the table during
international trade negotiations.
And it isn’t just corporate control of agriculture that is a concern --
we must also challenge foreign ownership.
America’s ability to grow our own food and feed our population is a
national security issue. But more and more of our cropland is
controlled by foreign corporations and governments.
One agricultural publication estimated that “the government of China
now controls more than 400 American farms consisting of a hundred
thousand acres of farmland...33 processing plants, and one out of every
four American hogs.”
As president I will put the Secretary of Agriculture on the national
security panel that regulates foreign investments in the United States.
We will also strengthen the laws governing those foreign investments,
so that they take into account national security concerns about our
food supply.
Despite what Donald Trump may think, climate change is real. It is
caused by human activity. And it is already causing devastating
problems in our country and around the world. It is a moral imperative
that the planet we leave to our children must be healthy and habitable.
As president of the United States I will do everything possible to lead
the world to fundamentally transform our energy system away from fossil
fuels towards energy efficiency and sustainable energy. We are talking
about making massive investments in wind, solar, and geothermal -
precisely the kinds of investments that can revitalize and rejuvenate
rural America.
And let me take this opportunity to congratulate Iowa, which now
generates about 30% of its electricity from wind.
Our current food system accounts for 25% of all greenhouse gas
emissions. Not only can farmers drastically reduce their on-farm
emissions, but farmers also have the potential to actually sequester
10% of ALL carbon emissions in the soil. But we can’t do this with ‘get
big or get out’ industrial farming.
We need to pass legislation that includes a strong plan to help farmers
transition into regenerative, independent family farming practices.
Further, we need to pass comprehensive disaster coverage and make sure
that family farmers in Iowa receive their fair share of payments for
the devastating floods that have ravaged this state. Floods
and other natural disasters will only increase as climate change
continues to wreak havoc on our planet.
We must also recognize that immigrants play a critical role in
America’s agricultural sector and rural communities.
In Iowa, Vermont and throughout rural America, many undocumented
workers live in constant fear of deportation and lack basic human
rights.
We need comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path towards
citizenship and expanded visas for our undocumented farm workers.
And we must stop the mass workplace raids that rip families apart. And
we must stop locking children in cages.
There is no question that we need to substantially rebuild rural
America. And let me tell you what that means.
It means that every person in rural America and every person in this
country is entitled to healthcare as a human right. Farmers have some
of the highest uninsured rates in America and 41% of dairy farmers lack
health insurance.
We will join the rest of the industrialized world in guaranteeing
healthcare to every man woman and child.
This will be an enormous help to struggling farmers who today cannot
afford the outrageous cost of healthcare in this country.
We will not keep people in rural America or bring new people into our
small towns unless we have high quality education.
Our young people will not stay in rural America unless they receive an
education that allows them to create and work in the jobs of the
future.
It is unacceptable that rural teachers make substantially less pay than
teachers in the suburbs. We will pay rural teachers a living wage with
good benefits.
It is unacceptable that more than half of all children in Iowa don't
have access to a childcare space, while tens of thousands of Iowans
live in childcare deserts.
It goes without saying that you are not going to have small businesses
create jobs in rural America if we don’t have state of the art
broadband and cell phone service. It is beyond comprehension that
today, 39 percent of Americans living in rural areas lack Internet
access.
We will expand high-speed Internet access to every American –
particularly in our rural areas.
Look. We have an enormous amount of work in front of us. But this
what I believe. Farmers do some of the most important work in the
world. They feed us and they sustain us.
Rural America has historically been a wonderful place to raise a family
and enjoy a good life.
If we stand together, and are prepared to take on the greed of powerful
corporate interests there is absolutely no reason why we cannot rebuild
family based agriculture and our rural communities and I pledge to work
with you to do just that.
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