PoliticsUSA: Primary Votes: Women candidates win in key races, besides trending up they are also trending conserve

The enti-incumbent trend continues in the latest round of primary votes to select party-candidates in various states. The outstanding win among Democrats, to my mind, was nevertheless an incumbent in the USA Senate, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. She has for months stood out from her colleagues because of her accounting background, her role on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and hence her vigourous campaign to curb the wilder rampages of financial interests in the derivatives markets. They were --along with housing-mortage snake-oil lending by Fannie May, Freedie Mac and assorted sordid banks -- a chief cause of the Great Recession we hope to have begun shaking off (Greece!, Hungary?).

Sen. Lincoln has her own natural interest: to protect the agricultural derivatives markets from the worst abuses that undermine the smaller farms, often family farms, that are plentiful in her state. This has given her, as well, a national concern for the overall agricultural policy of the USA, and ins+t into the difference between farmers and large farming corporations. From this centerpoint, she has worked hard to achieve as much as is presently possible to her and like-minded Senators, a fair and effective Financial Regulation law -- especially its section on Derivatives and its subsection on Agricultural Derivatives. You may recognize these financial zones as related to the futures markets in agricultural commodities -- corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. Futures markets focussed not on the usual food commodities but instead on financial instruments, however, have distorted the already-existing dangers of destabilization by excesses in selling and buying the outcomes anticipated in farming and coporate agriculture. It always has had and will have a speculative edge, due to the need to know what size and quantity can be expected from future harvests of foodstuffs. But with experienced commodity-futures speculators eyeing and shifting in part to participate in the wider deployment of derivatives investment, there's a stituation where food futures are impacted by the feedback loop from lucrative financial futures, based on paper and digital obfuscations. That's the impact dynamics of financial sector spill-over into the once-ordinary ho-hum trading in food commodities. The newer kind of speculation sets the tone too much for the time-worn speculation on what food will be on hand for American tables several months from now.

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