Summary
Michigan farmer Rebecca Carlson, a longtime Trump supporter, faces bankruptcy as Trump’s funding freezes stall a $400,000 USDA grant for hiring temporary workers.
Carlson, who hoped Trump’s second term would revive her struggling cherry farm, already spent $200,000 preparing for labor under the H-2A visa program.
With funding halted, she risks losing $200,000 more and can’t move forward with critical hires.
Trump’s new tariffs and immigration crackdowns threaten agriculture costs and labor availability, leaving farmers uncertain and frustrated with unmet promises.
So let me get this straight: she had everything planned and set up under the policies of the Biden administration, everything was working fine and a large part of the plan were immigrant workers. So naturally she voted for Trump. I struggle to empathize, tbh.
Struggle to empathize? I’m reading this with glee.
In Dutch we have a saying: “Wie zijn billen brand moet op de blaren zitten” ->( if you burn your asscheeks, you have to sit on the blisters). It means that if you do something stupid, you have to suffer the consequences
I like that
In the english speaking world, we say, fuck around and find out. I feel sorry for people like this… until i realise this is literally what they voted for. Suck shit arsewipes.
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It’s only half-topical, but let me say one thing: farmers are romanticised waaay too much in my opinion. Yes, they usually have a more precarious business, and agriculture as such is, of course, very much the foundation of our societies and very lives.
But don’t be blinded by the image of homesteading and such - most farmers are basically just business owners, with their class interests often removing them from a large part of the population. Many of the seasonal workers for example have shit pay on top of shit conditions, and they are notoriously overrepresented with some kind of “rurally wholesome” image, when they can be just as much business assholes, that mainly own a piece of land and the machinery necessary to use it for agriculture.
This will only get worse, because bankruptcy like this has one main effect: consolidation, even more farmland operated by big business, even though I personally think small business like this one is clearly already not as good as people tend to make it out as.
People romanticize farming because it was the basis of society and its economy 100 years ago. Agriculture was key to human survival for millenia before that.
In our increasingly tech driven lives, there’s something pure about your work being dedicated to cultivating the earth and bringing sustenance to people.
But there are modern US farm owners that harken the image of plantation owners during America’s chattel slavery era. Exploiting undocumented workers with undignified working conditions and paying them insufficiently in exchange for irreversibly wearing down their bodies.
Agreed, and to add to this, I grew up in farmland and have never met a broke farmer. These folks are typically quite wealthy thanks to massive government subsidies. Huge modern home, brand new cars, plenty of toys like ATVs. They’re not living the same life as the standard working class.
The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy, after all…
Lol
Why do you say that?
Its a musk quote. Pretty sure others have said it before him though.
Ahh, I didn’t know.
Terrifying lol
Do you want to hate yourself both literally and philosophically? Seek out the news coverage from your closest Sinclair affiliate. There’s a good chance this is more attributable to the fall of the fourth estate than any sort of ignorance or stupidity. A lot of these people get their news from the local broadcast. And when Sinclair controls all of those they cannot help but be uninformed.
This is actually a chance for us to reach out to them pointing out the failure of the media they relied to be informed with. Or we could choose to not build allies and coalitions and just laugh at them. For things that we ourselves could easily fall victim to
they cannot help but be uninformed.
Bullshit. They’ve had way too long to figure out that reality doesn’t match up with the news they’re getting. It’s just easier to not question it
Their reality is legitimately different from your own. And as long as you refuse to acknowledge that. You will just push them to cling to their lies as much as you are clinging to your own.
By virtue of simply being here both of us are not typical or average. A lot of typical average people still don’t use the internet and don’t even rely much on cable. When everything around them tells them that reality is one particular way. And in general it doesn’t often negatively impact them they’ll believe it. Now when the cognitive dissonance is really hitting is the best time to break them from it.
I lived in the rust belt for over a decade and have spent the vast majority of my life in a very conservative district. I literally know farmers personally. I promise you I know what life is like for many of these people. It’s nice to think that we could push or pull them but they’re as willfully deluded as it gets. The number of people I know that could barely afford gas to get to work and then continue to vote Republican in deep red districts for decades as they stripped them of any kind of benefit is insane. There is no reaching out to them they already rejected reality. I’ve had so many conversations with individuals about politics in these areas and you can see them rejecting reality when you point out examples from their real life. They can help being uninformed and choose every day not to. They know the politicians they voted for took they’re benefits and they’re going to vote for them again because that’s easier than facing the reality that they made their own bed. Trying to reach out to them is why the Dems are pushing right and trying to coax Republicans to their side and the willful indoctrination is why that has not, and never will, work. These are proudly ignorant people
Nope, it’s a choice to uninformed. Stop making excuse for dumb asses.
Plenty of people choose to actually be informed on actual policy, and use critical thinking to figure out what it means for society.
They’re racist, anti intellectuals who choose to be fed bullshit cos it’s fits with their poisonous, dumb ass racist ideology of “immigrant bad”
Stop making excuses for them.
I don’t struggle to empathize. I’m downright gleeful these people are getting the instant karma they so rightfully deserve.
I seriously hate these people more than Trump.
I mean, did they do literally no research into what his policy proposals were? What the repercussions would be for those in her line of work? Did it not occur to her that the migrants she pays shit wages to were the people he was ranting about deporting?
The answer, of course, is no. She did no research. She dedicated no meaningful thought to it. She wanted to fuck the liberals because they put Harriet Tubman on a twenty dollar bill and she heard about the three trans athletes in her entire state and that was about where her consideration of the matter ended.
On a just barely positive note, we dedicate a frankly stupid amount of funding to keeping farms going despite their being laughably uncompetitive, most of the funding not really helping our food supply or economy, so it would probably be for the better if these cuts stick and idiots like her are forced to actually run their farms like businesses instead of thousand acre welfare queens.
thousand acre welfare queens
Holy shit lol
She is racist.
That’s why she voted for Trump.
All the excuses she gives are secondary to the fact that she’s white and hates seeing non-whites who didn’t work as hard as her get government cheese.
These people voted Trump not because of “fuck the libs” or “save my farm” but because, they were first and foremost, racists.
You are right but it still makes me sad that she’s just going to get gobbled up by some factory farm. Some about leopards and faces I guess.
That is literally what will happen if small farms go under. This would make our food supply chain even more homogeneous and less resilient. And probably increase costs at the supermarket as a result. It’s too bad so many of these farmers are actively voting against their actual interests instead. For many of them the “find out” phase will hit them like a semi truck and they will never recover.
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
Lyndon B Johnson
(Why did I think it was Steinbeck)
LBJ and Steinbeck were contemporaries. LBJ was born and died a few years after Steinbeck.
Well, they will echo fox news narrative to blame dems and Obama and Biden.
Shouldn’t make you sad it should make you angry. She voted for this and now wants sympathy. Her and her farm can fucking burn, consequences of actions n that.
I mean, did they do literally no research into what his policy proposals were?
They “researched” hard enough to see the ® beside his name and voted based on that research.
Farmers in the US are just welfare nobility
Not really. The few independent small farmers left are just trying to make a living and raise their families.
The problem is the big conglomerate farms that own millions of acres that siphon off millions of gallons of water because they can.
… Holy shit, this woman is fucking dumb and deserves to lose her farm.
-
wantedNeeded a grant from the Government.-Needed to hire migrant workers.
-Voted for the guy saying he was going to gut federal funding programs and close the borders.
Republicans believe in I guess what you’d call individual exceptionalism, in that they always believe that these shitty awful policies are magic missiles that will only target the “bad people” and not themselves or the “good people” they know. I’ll never forget that when they were planning the Muslim ban, a person I worked with was talking about how they’re all the enemy and we should keep them out. When I pointed out that he worked with a Muslim woman, he went “oh, well, that’s different, I know her, she’s a good person” without even ruminating on it for a second. For him, the logic was obvious, the bad policy wouldn’t affect her because he knows her and knows that she’s a good person, so obviously she’d be spared the ill effects of any bad policy. That’s why instead of getting fucking pissed, these people are always confused and astonished when the bad policy they advocated for affects them. “But wait, no, I’m a good person, there must be some mistake”. No, there’s no mistake, dumbass, good or bad person never entered the equation, just in the club or out of the club.
“I’ll admit to you, I bleed Republican. (…) Her farm had been awarded a grant worth $400,000 through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (…) Carlson was planning to use her USDA grant money to hire 10 temporary workers from Guatemala to help with this year’s harvest.”
The sheer amount of stupidity is crazy. The same people that were crying that everything bad was the fault of Biden actually had they farm working thanks to Biden.
Will they realize at some point ?
I thought you are going to mention that she’s receiving an enormous amount of money from the government, even though she’s Republican.
I can forgive someone for now knowing who specifically enacted some bill or something, but being simultaneously against supporting people with government handouts while relying on $400K from the government to survive? Wtf.
There seems to be a huge disconnect between supporting trump and paying attention.
The real gulf of America.
This got me 😂
MAGA, by hiring foreign people because as she says, “The American worker doesn’t like labor, they don’t like to do laborious jobs”.
400k for 10 workers. How much of that do they make? Why isn’t she working hard? Let her farm go under, she’s a welfare queen. What a dumb cunt.
Her farm had been awarded a grant worth $400,000 through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help pay for the costs associated with hiring seasonal workers from overseas through the H-2A visa program, which farmers have used for years to hire temporary agricultural workers.
The USDA describes the program on its website as a way to address labor shortages on American farms and reduce illegal immigration. It’s backed by $65 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan, a Covid stimulus bill passed in 2021.
IOW she was only getting that $400K because of a program funded under Biden. Which of course is why trump is freezing it, along with programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, also passed under Biden. He wants to undo everything Biden did.
Carlson has been trying to get an answer from the USDA about the status of her grant, but her grant manager told her that they were “awaiting guidance from leadership.” When she followed up more recently, she received an out-of-office email.
Because they got fired!
So she voted Trump after relying on a Biden era grant. Geez
Hope she loses everything because somebody this dumb isn’t ever gonna learn the lesson
Whatever she loses, it will be the libs fault.
Who could have seen this coming, except for EVERYONE! Lose your farm, get fucked and don’t vote for a fascist next time.
Despite all this, we all know damn well that she will vote republican again. She’ll vote for whatever scum trump endorses. These people never learn.
brave of you to assume there will be another election.
I’m sorry, if you’re growing cherries, fucking expensive ass cherries, and can’t stay afloat without almost a half million dollars of welfare, then what the fuck are you even doing? I don’t fully agree with it, but I at least understand the importance of giving welfare to people growing crops we actually need, but frivolous shit like cherries? What a waste. If we’re paying almost a half million dollars in taxes to give you cherry welfare, those cherries better be free or close to it.
I can’t speak for this lady, but farming is expensive. There are tons of unnecessary challenges that are expensive to overcome (e.g., no right to repair on John Deere, seeds/genetic lines owned by Monsanto, etc.). Essentially, if I recall correctly most farming operations require tons of subsidies to continue existing. This woman’s political beliefs are against her own interests and are terrible, but the money the U.S. gives the farmers is more about our system being broken than problems with the farmers.
This woman voted against her own interests. If she loses her farm, I won’t feel bad for her. I do feel bad for farmers in general, and I don’t begrudge them their subsidies in many cases because of the way the system is set up. I think John Oliver has one or two episodes on farming. If you haven’t looked into it, I think that’s a great place to start.
If cherries are expensive, blame capitalism, not cherries. Cherries are densely nutritious: one cup of American cherries has less than 100 calories, but 12% of the vitamin C you need in a day, vitamins A, B6 and K, potassium, copper, manganese, is very high in polyphenols – which protect against diabetes, brain disease, heart disease, certain cancers, aid in muscle recovery after strain, and ease inflammation, especially in the joints. As a bonus, cherries also contain serotonin, tryptophan and melatonin, which elevate your mood when you are awake and then help you get a good night’s sleep.
You can buy all those things separately, as supplements, for significantly more than the cost of a cup of cherries, or you can buy an entire pound of your favourite type of cherries for between $US2.20 and $US5.26 depending on type (prices as of yesterday). In Canada, the price when converted, is about the same. I would not recommend trying to get all your nutrients just from cherries, though: many years ago, a friend and I raided a neighbour’s tree and ate our fill, then spent some time in our respective bathrooms learning that cherries also have a lot of fibre!
There has been so many stories of Trump over the year’s fucking over small businesses, he requests a custom piece, they spend weeks/months making it. He never pays.
I want to say I can’t believe people are this dumb. People are this dumb.
Yet to many of this followers these stories are all just bullshit lefty propaganda to smear the name of their great leader. They aren’t completely dumb they just have been brainwashed to only believe certain people and certain news organizations.
Trump doesn’t care about small businesses? But how???
They are dumbasses who deserve everything they encounter.
Fuck them.
