More Biden administration disappointment

But not surprise.

The secretary of agriculture is an underrated and important Cabinet member whose work intersects with climate change, workers’ safety, racial justice, antitrust, rural development, and of course, feeding the country.

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On Tuesday, after some public tokenizing and horse trading, President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team crowned dairy industry lobbyist and former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to lead the Department of Agriculture. Vilsack won out over House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn’s pick, Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was also backed by progressives. Whereas Fudge represented an opportunity to unite the USDA’s rural and urban constituents and address the agency’s long history of racial discrimination, Vilsack is a rerun of pro-corporate policies that continue to drive rural communities away from the Democratic Party.

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This is because Vilsack doesn’t actually speak to the totality and needs of rural people. In his work at the Department of Agriculture and as a dairy lobbyist, Vilsack represents the powerful few of Big Ag.

As agriculture secretary, Vilsack let down independent family farmers when he failed to take on agribusiness domination.

  The Intercept

Which is not to say he won't be an improvement over Sonny Perdue, but that's a very low bar.

Starting in 2010, Vilsack’s USDA along with the Department of Justice held a series of hearings across the country where farmers shared stories of abuse and anti-competitive conduct by dominant meatpackers, such as Tyson or Smithfield, and seed and chemical goliaths, such as Monsanto.

This listening tour culminated in promising new rules to reinvigorate and update the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, a Progressive Era anti-monopoly law that established fair codes of conduct in the livestock industry. Vilsack had complete authority to finalize these rules, but in the face of industry and congressional pressure, he decided to expand their comment period from the usual 60 days to 150 days, which pushed any finalization past the 2010 midterms. At that point, Republicans took the House in a tea party insurgency and proceeded to pass funding riders that blocked the Department of Agriculture from passing the rule.

How convenient.

Vilsack eventually introduced watered-down regulations of meatpacker mistreatment in his very last days in office, but at this point many farmers who spoke out at risk of retaliation had lost faith.

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Vilsack’s USDA also put meatpacker profits over worker and food safety by implementing a new poultry inspection system that, among other changes, opened a door for plants to run at faster speeds and transferred some inspection duties from USDA staff to meatpacking employees.

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Historically, the USDA has driven racial wealth disparities by systemically denying Black farmers loans or access to other farm supports. These actions contributed to a 98 percent decrease in the number of Black farmers from 1920 to 1997, as well as mass land dispossession that affected 98 percent of Black agricultural landowners. While Vilsack has touted his civil rights record at the department, an investigation by The Counter found Vilsack’s USDA promoted misleading and inaccurate claims about an increase in Black farmers and a record low in civil rights complaints. Racial lending disparities also persisted under Vilsack’s tenure and Vilsack personally failed to prioritize civil rights.

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To top it all off, Vilsack ousted Georgia’s USDA rural development director and civil rights leader, Shirley Sherrod, based on false claims circulated by right-wing platform Breitbart. Civil rights leaders recently told Biden that Vilsack’s association with this incident could jeopardize Democrats’ prospects in the Georgia’s Senate runoff elections next month.

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Vilsack, along with most of the Democratic establishment, strongly supports ethanol as a renewable biofuel and a market for excess commodity corn. Some 30 million acres of U.S. corn will turn into ethanol this year. But many environmentalists now believe the pollution, chemical use, and soil degradation associated with growing more corn outweighs any benefits of replacing oil with ethanol. Tom Philpott’s book “Perilous Bounty” documents how the persistent overproduction of monoculture corn and soybeans will eventually ruin America’s farmland, especially in Vilsack’s home state of Iowa.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.