Goodbye to Kansas populism

Kansas, now a hotbed of Tea Party reactionaries, was once a center of radical prairie populism.  In the late 1800s Mary Elizabeth Lease crisscrossed the state, exhorting Kansas farmers to “raise less corn and more hell.”  “Sockless Jerry” Simpson, an opponent of large banks, advocated public ownership of the railroads and universal suffrage, and was elected to the House of Representatives three times.

Now I read in Lancaster Farming that a Kansas senate legislative committee is hearing testimony on a bill that would allow “out-of-state ownership of corporate farms in Kansas and eliminate the authority of county commissions to block development of corporate swine and dairy operations.”  Conservative governor Brownback supports the change.  Both houses of the Kansas legislature are controlled by Republicans, sympathetic to agribusiness rather than family farms.

The President of the Kansas Farmers Union, which represents family farms, said this:  “Every time a 2,000-cow dairy goes in, it takes 20 dairy farmers out of a community.  That is not economic development; that is rural depopulation.”

I should point out that the people of Kansas elected these corporate lapdogs.  Maybe people do get the government they deserve, but I still feel bad for the Kansas family farmers.