I'm an Iowa native. I find the cartoon itself pretty ridiculous. Why shouldn't CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies earn more than farmers? In addition, every single farmer I've ever met is very well off. In addition to the money made while farming, farmers are sitting on millions of dollars of land.
And Larry and Sergey gave Sundar Pichai 200 mil. not to jump from Google and Steve gave Tim Cook 400 mil. to stay on. It's their private business how they compensate their executives.
For companies which are corporations, because a corporation is a creature of government, granted a charter by some government and permitted to operate within the jurisdiction of others with various privileges and protections because doing so is seen as serving the public interest for which those governments are responsible to their people.
That's the "say" I'm talking about. Where the public can vote to dis-incentivize out of control executive pay with taxes.
Making $5-50MM per year is a lot, but some make in excess of $1B per year and pay almost nothing in taxes. This money doesn't come from nowhere, and these multi-billionaire hedge fund managers are often squeezing it out of things like managed pension funds and other investment pools.
Except there are FAR more than 2129 farmers in Iowa. There are apparently >80,000 farms in Iowa and 130,000 farm operators.[1]
So, the CEOs of a few multi-national corporations make more than some undefined subset of farmers in Iowa. Are the 2129 the least successful farmers? The most? A random sampling? I assume the cartoonist meant something like 2129 * [average farm revenue] = sum(coo salaries)?
Partially agree. I do happen to think the cartoon raises a very valid point.
But... having known a lot of farmers they are indeed usually quite well off. And many of them are not aweshucks salt of the earth types people often perceive, but rather more like a sort of spoiled generational semi-duke or noble type thing looking down upon the little non-land owning commoners who they often pay very little and sometimes wantonly abuse.
That being said.. what was the guy thinking? He has to know who financially supports the paper. Maybe he was ready to do something else.
I've known a lot of farmers too, admittedly none of them from Iowa, and none of them were like what you describe. Maybe it's due to regional differences but I'm inclined to think you exaggerated rather a lot there.
Nope. No exaggeration. I've known probably 30+ farmers in 4 or 5 states (and even worked for a few) and many have attitudes exactly as I state
It's not that they were bad people or unkind (although some are... bordering on abusive), but it's the attitude of inherited big landowner. It absolutely exists.
In retrospect I suppose "spoiled" (in the sense a gulf state prince might be) probably isn't the right term. Every farmer I've known has worked hard and paid attention to their task. But the attitude I speak of is pervasive. The landed nobility and the little people. At least in my experience. And I found it unpleasant.
Agree with jccc... the point wasn't that a single farmer wasn't earning the same amount as 3 corporate CEOs, it was that the 3 CEOs earned more than 2000+ farmers combined.
Furthermore, I think you missed a level of insight about where the earning power is. That land may come with a mortgage and other liens. The trick is scrounging enough money to pay the mortgage every month on that land. Only after a lifetime of paying off the mortgage, does the typical farmer or rancher have enough equity in the land to make it a cash windfall when they sell.
I think the cartoon was commenting on the difficulty of making the farming business model work because of the tiny incoming cash flow from raising crops and being the frontline person working the land.
I agree. Not to mention that corn farming was not profitable at pre-recession commodity prices and even more so now without government subsidy.
In New Zealand, our main agricultural outputs (dairy and meat cattle) have recently gone into the unprofitable territory and it was only land speculation that kept the farms producing at the current level.
That's a naive view, and anecdata. Many farmers don't own their land but lease it. They're also subject to the whims of weather and the commodities market... not exactly a steady income.
Alot also loose the land they had, to the banks over time and become glorified landscape facility managers for the bank or for example a energy company.
The guy in that "My-little-farm"-book you've read, might never have smiled so happy, and it might never have been his "little-farm". I know a lot of people who wont accept this though. You got to be rich, living the good life out there- else, where to daydream-escape towards from a day in the city.
The USA prides itself on free speech AND capitalism, but there are obvious conflicts of interest demonstrated here.
I imagine losing Monsanto (or whomever's) ad revenue will be very painful to Iowa Farm News... Anyway, it's clear that Iowa Farm News would never intentionally and will never again speak against a major ad source like Monsanto/DuPont/John Deere, and every other news source has been put on notice.
That's the newsworthy item - the illusion that news outlets aren't on a leash.
Median farm income in the United States is -$930. Yes, negative dollars. Almost every farmer -- basically the bottom 95% at least -- relies on off-farm household income, and just hopes to make enough farming to keep up with debt service and opex (assuming they didn't go into debt on seed, which can happen).
Perhaps they should consider another line of work. If your bar isn't making money, or your hardware store is failing, no one suggests it's unfair the CEO of Budweiser makes more than many many bars combined, or the President of DeWalt makes hundreds of times more than a hardware store does. Why should it be different for farmers?
Worth looking at the historical farm policies of different countries. But, for the US in particular, the key concept is agrarian myth. I present two comments and suggest reading Age of Reform by Hofstadter.
> There is a general idea that somehow the fate of the United States is somehow bound to the fate of the agricultural community. There is a romantic appeal to the family farm as the symbol of the good life in this country. It stands for democracy in its purest and most classic form. This belief persists despite evidence to the contrary. [0]
> The agrarian myth is the belief that the most desirable form of community is found in rural, specifically agrarian, village life. In the agrarian village, fundamental Western values such as a strong work ethic, independence, and integrity are supposedly fostered and passed from one generation to the next. Consequently, declines in the value of agrarian life and agrarian villages are seen as signals of an even larger decline of society itself. For those who believe in the agrarian myth, community type and morality become inseparably connected in the rural agricultural village. All other contemporary manifestations of community are incomplete or counterfeit. [1]
Many of these farms actually make lots of money if you count the tax breaks. People buy lots of land for a giant house, but don't want to pay property tax for residential property. They'd rather pay at the rate for farm property. Add a few chickens or a horse and hey it's a farm!
I'm also from Iowa. The value of farmland is complex, and I'd venture that a farmer is very lucky to be "sitting on millions of dollars of land" if that is indeed the case. (Our farm sold for very well less than a million dollars a few years ago.)
I am sympathetic to him, but there is no constitutional right to an unbought press (like he is quoted as alleging). Editorial independence is not enshrined by the Constitution. At all.
To clarify, this is obviously a bad thing if it happened like he says, but since the press is free, his employer is allowed to fire him and find someone who will express a different opinion. It's a pretty bonehead decision to fire someone over a nearly completely inoffensive cartoon though...
I see this sort of defense a lot, and I find it interesting.
Some party does something many would find ill-conceived, reprehensible, or in some way greedy. Some other people come out declaring that the action wasn't illegal.
It's interesting to me, because often the legality of the situation isn't even in question (edit: as it is in this article).
In the article, the cartoonist mentions "“When it comes to altering someone’s opinion or someone’s voice for the purpose of wealth, I have a problem with that,” said Friday. “It’s our constitutional right to free speech and our constitutional right to free press.” "
The person above you is responding to the claim that this was unconstitutional, which is most certainly is not.
The important part of that being the alt-text: "I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express."
That's exactly my point. Citing the first amendment is a very weak argument, even weaker when he cites it in a situation where it does not apply. It's so weak that it weakens an argument that otherwise is very strong, that the press is so influenced by money that they cannot handle any amount of criticism, even from a cartoon.
It is an issue. I was responding to the allegation in the article that the Constitution was supposed to protect against this sort of thing, which it isn't. Yellow journalism was the water the founding fathers swam in; editorial independence is a relatively new idea.
It's a very good idea, and it should be preserved and fought for, but it's not an idea that has any basis in the Constitution.
"Not technically illegal" is not much of a claim to morality, obviously. Firing a cartoonist because an advertiser doesn't like him is against the public interest, and probably against the long-term interests of the paper itself; it's a bad idea and the people who did it should feel bad, and they deserve all the bad press they get.
> Editorial independence is not enshrined by the Constitution. At all.
That's -- still -- an understatement. The right to freedom of the press in the Constitution is exactly the right of the publisher to exert editorial control. Doing so is not merely not unconstitutional, it is Constitutionally protected.
You have no more Constitutional right to control someone else's press because "freedom of the press" than you have to direct someone else's vote because "right to vote".
The borrow from The West Wing, making sure Farm News can publish whatever it wants is the only way we can make sure The New York Times can publish whatever IT wants. Anything else is an extraordinarily slippery slope.
That is exactly wrong. The editor gets to pick what goes in the paper, who to employ and etc.
What this does say is that the editor didn't review the comic before printing it, and then fired the cartoonist after the fact. This seems unfair to me and I sympathize, but it is entirely within his rights.
Maybe he lost his job because it's just not a good comic. It's seriously just a written statement of fact needlessly wrapped in a drawing of two (identical?) people standing by a fence.
It's more funny and provocative than most of the comics you see in newspapers, depressing enough. Compared to Mallard Filmore, The Family Circus, etc...
There isn't even a semblance of editorial separation anymore.
That separation did good things like give people a reasonable expectation that what was presented was more or less unbiased facts. Now more than ever, we don't have that. If one is smart and looking for the truth, you have to cross-check with other sources.
One says you might have had to do that always but, now everything is suspect. I don't mean that conspiratorially, I mean I have to think, "Could someone profit from me thinking this is true?"
For everything. I wouldn't be surprised if someone manipulated the weather reports slightly to raise sales of coats and umbrellas. It'd be so easy and could make a significant difference. "Your Weather Report is brought to you by Burlington Coat Factory"
> One says you might have had to do that always but, now everything is suspect.
Everything was already suspect. I automatically distrust someone more if they claim a lack of bias, and trust someone slightly more if they explicitly disclose likely sources of bias. Given knowledge of someone's bias, I can weight the information they're providing more appropriately.
paging Barbara Streisand...(yeah its not perfect but its close)
Seriously though, at what point do people in leadership positions really internalize the influence and power of digital social networks. Social networks are not new, the have existed and spread information(and opinions)since the dawn of our species. Online versions in some form have existed since the telegraph/phone/usenet/facebook (take your pick). You cannot control the flow or spread of information, and you have almost no control over the framing it is spread with. This is a story about a cartoonist, for farmers, in Iowa being discussed internationally...
For christ's sake consider alternate points of view before you act in haste. You can find people of all points of view on the internet, but they seem to be united in opposition to schadenfreude and generalized stupidity/hypocrisy/hamfisted-ness under the guise of 'scandal' and knocking others down a peg. Stop feeding the beast.
It probably wasn't even anyone that high up in those companies. It was probably some PR guy or gal. But the company spends so much in advertising with the publication that the mere mention of withdrawal of ad dollars was enough to get the owner or editor to back down and fire the cartoonist.
I think this encapsulates exactly what is wrong with the world we live in.. We humans need 1. Food and 2. shelter if the weather is too cold or hot.. everything else is a bonus.. and this shows our systems value the fundamental need of food below everything else, a world turned on its head.
85 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadCould it be instead that the cartoon is about the scale of the difference? There is an actual number in the punchline.
[Edit: Nebraska native, by the way.]
> Every single farmer I've ever met is very well off.
Maybe you're in an area where the crops are in demand and your view is heavily biased.
Making $5-50MM per year is a lot, but some make in excess of $1B per year and pay almost nothing in taxes. This money doesn't come from nowhere, and these multi-billionaire hedge fund managers are often squeezing it out of things like managed pension funds and other investment pools.
"There is. In year 2015 the CEOs of Monsanto, DuPont Pioneer and John Deere combined made more money than 2,129 Iowa farmers."
Note 'combined'.
Yeah, I know, pedantic, but it takes something away from the point for me.
That 2129 of them are doing very poorly shouldn't come as much of a surprise. I'd be surprised if at least 3% of them aren't actually losing money!
There is something to be said about income distribution, but it didn't make it accurately through the comic strip.
␄
† https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/edwards/EdwS...
So, the CEOs of a few multi-national corporations make more than some undefined subset of farmers in Iowa. Are the 2129 the least successful farmers? The most? A random sampling? I assume the cartoonist meant something like 2129 * [average farm revenue] = sum(coo salaries)?
1 - https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/articles/edwards/EdwS...
But... having known a lot of farmers they are indeed usually quite well off. And many of them are not aweshucks salt of the earth types people often perceive, but rather more like a sort of spoiled generational semi-duke or noble type thing looking down upon the little non-land owning commoners who they often pay very little and sometimes wantonly abuse.
That being said.. what was the guy thinking? He has to know who financially supports the paper. Maybe he was ready to do something else.
It's not that they were bad people or unkind (although some are... bordering on abusive), but it's the attitude of inherited big landowner. It absolutely exists.
In retrospect I suppose "spoiled" (in the sense a gulf state prince might be) probably isn't the right term. Every farmer I've known has worked hard and paid attention to their task. But the attitude I speak of is pervasive. The landed nobility and the little people. At least in my experience. And I found it unpleasant.
Furthermore, I think you missed a level of insight about where the earning power is. That land may come with a mortgage and other liens. The trick is scrounging enough money to pay the mortgage every month on that land. Only after a lifetime of paying off the mortgage, does the typical farmer or rancher have enough equity in the land to make it a cash windfall when they sell.
I think the cartoon was commenting on the difficulty of making the farming business model work because of the tiny incoming cash flow from raising crops and being the frontline person working the land.
In New Zealand, our main agricultural outputs (dairy and meat cattle) have recently gone into the unprofitable territory and it was only land speculation that kept the farms producing at the current level.
The guy in that "My-little-farm"-book you've read, might never have smiled so happy, and it might never have been his "little-farm". I know a lot of people who wont accept this though. You got to be rich, living the good life out there- else, where to daydream-escape towards from a day in the city.
I imagine losing Monsanto (or whomever's) ad revenue will be very painful to Iowa Farm News... Anyway, it's clear that Iowa Farm News would never intentionally and will never again speak against a major ad source like Monsanto/DuPont/John Deere, and every other news source has been put on notice.
That's the newsworthy item - the illusion that news outlets aren't on a leash.
> There is a general idea that somehow the fate of the United States is somehow bound to the fate of the agricultural community. There is a romantic appeal to the family farm as the symbol of the good life in this country. It stands for democracy in its purest and most classic form. This belief persists despite evidence to the contrary. [0]
> The agrarian myth is the belief that the most desirable form of community is found in rural, specifically agrarian, village life. In the agrarian village, fundamental Western values such as a strong work ethic, independence, and integrity are supposedly fostered and passed from one generation to the next. Consequently, declines in the value of agrarian life and agrarian villages are seen as signals of an even larger decline of society itself. For those who believe in the agrarian myth, community type and morality become inseparably connected in the rural agricultural village. All other contemporary manifestations of community are incomplete or counterfeit. [1]
[0] http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/36568/1/sp02re01.pdf
[1] http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/community/n10.xml
To clarify, this is obviously a bad thing if it happened like he says, but since the press is free, his employer is allowed to fire him and find someone who will express a different opinion. It's a pretty bonehead decision to fire someone over a nearly completely inoffensive cartoon though...
Some party does something many would find ill-conceived, reprehensible, or in some way greedy. Some other people come out declaring that the action wasn't illegal.
It's interesting to me, because often the legality of the situation isn't even in question (edit: as it is in this article).
The person above you is responding to the claim that this was unconstitutional, which is most certainly is not.
So? That's another issue to fix, not a justification for this being a non-issue.
https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2012/12/19/breaking-down-...
It's a very good idea, and it should be preserved and fought for, but it's not an idea that has any basis in the Constitution.
"Not technically illegal" is not much of a claim to morality, obviously. Firing a cartoonist because an advertiser doesn't like him is against the public interest, and probably against the long-term interests of the paper itself; it's a bad idea and the people who did it should feel bad, and they deserve all the bad press they get.
That's -- still -- an understatement. The right to freedom of the press in the Constitution is exactly the right of the publisher to exert editorial control. Doing so is not merely not unconstitutional, it is Constitutionally protected.
You have no more Constitutional right to control someone else's press because "freedom of the press" than you have to direct someone else's vote because "right to vote".
What this does say is that the editor didn't review the comic before printing it, and then fired the cartoonist after the fact. This seems unfair to me and I sympathize, but it is entirely within his rights.
You have extremely strict standards!
That separation did good things like give people a reasonable expectation that what was presented was more or less unbiased facts. Now more than ever, we don't have that. If one is smart and looking for the truth, you have to cross-check with other sources.
One says you might have had to do that always but, now everything is suspect. I don't mean that conspiratorially, I mean I have to think, "Could someone profit from me thinking this is true?"
For everything. I wouldn't be surprised if someone manipulated the weather reports slightly to raise sales of coats and umbrellas. It'd be so easy and could make a significant difference. "Your Weather Report is brought to you by Burlington Coat Factory"
Everything was already suspect. I automatically distrust someone more if they claim a lack of bias, and trust someone slightly more if they explicitly disclose likely sources of bias. Given knowledge of someone's bias, I can weight the information they're providing more appropriately.
Seriously though, at what point do people in leadership positions really internalize the influence and power of digital social networks. Social networks are not new, the have existed and spread information(and opinions)since the dawn of our species. Online versions in some form have existed since the telegraph/phone/usenet/facebook (take your pick). You cannot control the flow or spread of information, and you have almost no control over the framing it is spread with. This is a story about a cartoonist, for farmers, in Iowa being discussed internationally...
For christ's sake consider alternate points of view before you act in haste. You can find people of all points of view on the internet, but they seem to be united in opposition to schadenfreude and generalized stupidity/hypocrisy/hamfisted-ness under the guise of 'scandal' and knocking others down a peg. Stop feeding the beast.
http://www.equilar.com/reports/17-2-100-largest-company-CEOs...
Do the top 3 tech giant CEOs on the list make more than 2192 of you?
Surely if the cartoonist submitted it to the editor of the paper before it was published, shouldn't the editor be the one getting fired?