Word: rural
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Subsidies aren't the only cause of expansion, but they do "wed farming regions to an ongoing pattern of economic consolidation," concluded the Kansas City study. Nebraska's Center for Rural Affairs found the 2002 farm bill--the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act--spent six times as much on subsidies for the state's top 20 farmers as on rural development programs for the 20 counties losing the most population. And the South's cotton and rice farmers get even fatter checks than Middle America's grain farmers, which is why Korth managed to persuade the Nebraska Farm Bureau...
That's fine by Congress, which is considering a $5 billion "permanent disaster fund" to streamline these bailouts for persistent failures. "The system doesn't serve any consistent public-policy goal," says economist Bruce Babcock, director of Iowa State University's Center for Agricultural and Rural Development. "It only makes sense if the mission is finding ways to shovel money to farmers...
EVEN BEFORE THE Agriculture Committee began work on the farm bill, chairman Peterson took Pelosi to meet with farm groups and warned her that Democratic freshmen in rural districts might lose seats if farm programs were revamped. Reformers countered with polls showing support for strict payment limits in those districts, and an analysis showing that most of those districts would receive more money under Kind-Flake through conservation payments. But as a Pelosi aide told them, it didn't matter whether the danger was real; it only mattered that freshmen Democrats believed it. The aggies flew in hundreds of farmers...
...remarkable statement: the best retail company ever created, the largest company in the world, with annual sales of $345 billion, is struggling. So it requires a big, bold fix. The company that Sam Walton created for the rural South is being massively overhauled to compete in the more urban, more competitive universe where it now lives. You might not notice it yet if you shop there, but Wal-Mart is in the midst of a revolution, an audacious three-year plan that will change practically everything the company does: the way it builds and operates stores, the way it buys...
Next year is critical for Wal-Mart: it must deliver on the promises made to Wall Street. In its struggles, Wal-Mart faintly resembles another company that once ruled retailing from a central HQ. Sears, Roebuck grew fat supplying rural and small-town America, but ultimately its culture couldn't adjust to shopping-mall America or to discounters. Shoppers today have little idea how awesome was the power of the Chicago merchant. And before Sears there was the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., the A&P, an urban power that once ran nearly 16,000 U.S. stores. Competitors quaked before...