The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout

[NicholeW.]

A couple of questions.

1) Those "farms" produce mainly soybeans and corn (Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa.) It's state policy and agribusiness. When soil's depleted and basically dead what grows on it? Never say never.

2) American universities have top-notch graduate programs and top-notch research profs. For the most part undergraduate education has much the same "look and feel" of those elementary and secondary programs you dismiss. The days are mostly gone where you can go to a state university and get moved in ways that make humanities and arts and learning for it's own sake worthwhile as an undergrad. Instead you get mostly "professional school" educations.

Nope, no Brookings Institute stuff by any of us. But soil and education depletion are rather more serious than you apparently believe, I think.

Nichole

[tekla]

Top soil - the stuff that makes farming possible - has depleted by 50% in most of Iowa in the last 100 years.  Efforts have slowed the loss, but some loss is always happening.  Agriculture, agribusiness if you prefer, is not possible to sustain at the rate we've been doing it.  And, even if you can grow it, you still have to transport it to market, and fuel rates have added a lot of cost to the coast-to-coast salad, while a lot of prices are far more expensive in California, my GF is back in Mich, and can't believe the prices they are paying for produce compared with Safeway down the street.

Education - Yes, many grad programs are great, undergrad, particularly at the huge state schools, particularly in the liberal arts are pretty much trashed.