kurtster wrote:
As if going hungry is a big problem in the USA......

Quality of food consumed is a problem.

Heavily subsidized farmers and ranchers often have a significant environmental impact.  Though if you want to argue that folks would rather eat hamburgers and potato chips than salmon, I'd say that is about right.  Watershed ecology and salmon are still a tough sell.  

It is interesting how so many billions upon billions of US taxpayer dollars go to prop up farmers and ranchers in what are popular lifestyle sectors.  Is this American socialism at work distorting the economy, ruining health and making people more vulnerable to the pandemic?   Odd priorities.


Pasted bit:

It’s easy to scoff at the idea of honoring the proposed borders of “Greater Idaho,” not least because it’s almost inconceivable that both Idaho’s and Oregon’s legislatures would sign off on the proposal and send it to Congress for the necessary approval. Many conversations about the subject focus on “freedom” and diesel fuel, breezily dismissing questions of staggering importance in the West—water rights, public lands, the rights of Indigenous people—as details that will be ironed out later.

Oregon was itself founded in dispossession. Its constitution banned free Black people from living in the state.

(...)

Much of Oregon’s history was “driven by an understanding of violence as a commonplace method of solving problems,” Kittredge, the rancher memoirist, wrote.

(...)

“Portland this year looks like when I rolled into Baghdad for the first time,” Dean Brizendine, a former cop who owns the shop, told me from behind the gun counter.

Yeah ?  Well it ain't just Oregon. 

There are I believe, at least 4 counties in Virginia that want to go to West Virginia ... for the same reasons ...

.


Oh and the screw the farmers and ranchers ?  Then quit eating and go hungry.

Hard not to sympathize.

Scenes from Portland, where Black Lives Matter protesters have sparred with the Proud Boys in paintball brawls over the past year, and worries that liberal lawmakers in Salem will outlaw diesel fuel and artificial insemination of animals, have calcified many rural Oregonians’ sense of total alienation from the west side of the state. “This is not the Oregon I know,” Sandie Gilson, one of Move Oregon’s Border’s “county captains,” told me. “We were farmers and ranchers and loggers. None of those values are left.” Today, half of Oregon’s population lives in the Portland metropolitan area alone.



As for draining rivers for the benefit of famers and ranchers — not so sympathetic.

 R_P wrote:
Fixed, and didn’t go for the easy joke about how these intolerant selfish racists need their own private Idaho.

Modern America’s Most Successful Secessionist Movement
In rural Oregon, voters fed up with their state’s leftward turn have embraced a simple and outlandish idea: What if we were just Idaho?

Nicholas Kristof to Attempt Rare Columnist-to-Politician Pivot

Kristof as Governor of Oregon?   

I do appreciate his engaged investigative journalism but have grave doubts as to whether he can make the transition.  Among other challenges, I would guess that many in rural Oregon despise the New York Times as aloof urban elite media (which it is).