Wampum

Three years ago when we came to Iowa to start organizing for Gore I was very critical of ethanol, the litmus test question for every candidate in every campaign. There was negative total energy output, the better case for switch grass, on marginal land, the agro pollution resulting in dead sea conditions in the Gulf, the agro patent seed problem ...

In the past month I've driven five times from one end of the Old North West to the other, and reflected on what I've learned, and what I'm leaving, as we move from an Iowa adjacency, to northern Appalachia. From corn, soy, alfalfa rotation and silo prices and manufacturing to the more diverse, or simply different, economic regime of the east.

A "green" critique of "the pledge" (corn based ethanol) seems incomplete, and parochial, in isolation. A lot of corn sugar goes into soda pop and an enhanced sweetener stream into a large segment of the processed foods industry. Also, its all they've got. Oklahoma and Texas sweet light crude are just as far away as Gulf heavy, and wind is still under priced by coal that never pays for the direct impact of the plume down-wind, let alone the true cost of atmospheric injection of fossil carbon.

A "diversity" critique of industrial corn/soy/alfalfa/hog/chicken agriculture seems incomplete, and parochial, in isolation. Markets, and public policies, have created labor, commodity, and capital concentrations, and imagining, let alone changing these in one region in isolation fails to imagine, let alone changing these in others. Transport is more than just the Iowa-to-NYC cost in the calculation of farm margins, it is also the failure of banking and insurance, to thrive west of the Hudson.

Four years of travels in most of the United States, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and North Dakota omitted, has been a political and economic (are those really distinct?) and social (and is that distinct too?) education. Today is the first day of my life as a Cornell Law spouse, in the modest confines of Ithaca. Constructing a house-centered family living situation and deconstructing a trailer-centered family living situation.

In 2011 the Iowa caucus song will tease the ears of hacks, and someone will test the ability of the Obama machine to repeat its success at capturing the caucus. Single Payer and the ability to articulate an economic vision grounded in Iowa, not as imagined inside the Beltway, or from Chicago, and a vigorous execution of a caucus field plan and a smart, and fully lawyered-up campaign (after all, the incumbant administration is the product of planned caucus capture in Iowa, Nevada and Texas, and many of those Obats got administration jobs and will go on the re-elect nickle in the 11/12 winter).

Single Payer is about as pervasive as an issue gets.