> Workers are being squeezed on one end and small farmers are being squeezed on the other, and the gains go somewhere else entirely while small communities fall into despair and die out.

This seems to have all started when we turned the dollar into a melting iceberg jn 1913 (created the Federal Reserve, which is basicaly a cabal of private banksters with a veneer of government), and it intensified when we decided to make dollars our primary national export product in 1971 (when Nixon closed the gold convertibility window for foreign central banks). Since then, workers are squeezed for working hard and trying to save for the future, but not understanding that if they're saying in dollars they'll never get ahead.

My guess specific to farming is that federal subsidies for corn and energy have driven prices up in ways that price smaller-scale farms out of the market.