Down (and angry) on the farm
Downs, Peter
FARMERS ARE GROPING FOR A NEW POLITICAL VISION Down (and angry) on the farm PETER DOWNS ORBAN LIBERALS and radicals usually think of farmers as forming a bastion of conservatism, the constituency...
...They support 100-percent parity prices for agriculture, and they support a moratorium on farm foreclosures...
...I'm trying to keep them from getting it...
...percent off the real value...
...Many farmers can't hold on much longer...
...Parity means, to most farmers,"the cost of production plus a fair profit," that is, a profit comparable to what other businesses are making...
...The AAM's goal remains parity, but it has revised some of its ideas about how that is to be achieved...
...Because if they tell you that 'if you want to eat, you dig a hole in that cement,' you're going to try to...
...Last month's "Grass Roots Convention" of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), the third that has been held, demonstrated such changes...
...When they get the farm ground, they can control anything there is...
...As some conservative positions have fallen into disrepute with members of the A AM, the New Right has moved to reinforce others and introduce "new solutions...
...Prices improved somewhat during 1978 and 1979, but they have fallen since...
...According to the Federal Reserve Bank, the farm debt in 1981 reached almost 180 billion dollars, more than double what it was in 1976, and 48 percent of farm loans are delinquent...
...Yet while their spirit recalls the Populists, their program recalls the New Deal...
...The American Farm Bureau Federation traditionally championed free enterprise, but speakers and delegates at the A AM convention agreed that "Free enterprise is a myth...
...How radical they will become if the farm crisis continues is impossible to say...
...This is happening to all your small businesses, not just farming...
...The convention delegate from Illinois, for example, said: "The unproductive sector is based on bankers, land speculators, drug runners, the military, and the commodities and securities exchange," not the old and the poor...
...He said inflation was caused by the government always printing so much money...
...FARMERS ARE GROPING FOR A NEW POLITICAL VISION Down (and angry) on the farm PETER DOWNS ORBAN LIBERALS and radicals usually think of farmers as forming a bastion of conservatism, the constituency of George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan, of the Moral Majority and religious fundamentalism, and a home of American jingoism and such paramilitary groups as the Seventy-sixers and the Minutemen...
...The A AM still opposes embargoes, but it no longer argues that exports will solve price problems...
...Farmers are fighting to survive as small businessmen and women...
...All right, I can see how that makes sense, but when you put the two together, they don't make a lick of sense...
...Today, however, conditions are different...
...When an agrarian protest movement springs up, however, many radicals focus on such actions as a march on Washington or a gift of food to striking coal miners to conclude that"family farmers'' are radicals ready to battle corporate capitalism...
...These ideas are popular with many farmers, but many others reject them...
...When you lose it, when you lose the family farm, what you've lost is a little family church, you lose what used to be the local school, where I went to school...
...They're owning more and more and the little guy is owning less and less...
...In the winters of 1978 and 1979, the A AM mounted tractorcades to Washington to lobby for parity...
...The delegate from Illinois said merely that "people have to decide that they don't want the banks running the country...
...Every twenty-five years the government would take one-half of a corporation's assets, like it does when an individual dies...
...It isn't only the price for the few farmers that are left that should concern people, it's the way of life that's gone...
...Farmers' political ideas are in flux...
...They support gasohol, which would increase the demand for grain...
...The AAM was founded in 1977 in Colorado and quickly spread throughout rural America, spurred by the precipitous drop in farm income...
...Members also blockaded bridges from Mexico and Canada to bring attention to imports, and it promoted gasohol as the fuel of the future...
...Like I was saying, your big conglomerates are grabbing up all your small businesses...
...For instance, Tom Benson, the delegate from Minnesota, said with the assent of delegates from Arkansas and other states: "The corporations are eating us up, making slaves of us...
...This is the central idea behind all the political positions they adopted at the A AM convention...
...They claim that their program worked between 1940 and 1950, discounting the effects of World War II...
...Thus the renewed impetus to farmers' protests...
...Fanners, small businessmen, and some professionals are the last stronghold of democracy...
...Despite the disparity of the above views, there is a core of ideas associated with the concept of parity on which farmers display a remarkable amount of agreement...
...You've lost a whole way of life . . . The American way of life we've always had...
...They oppose embargoes, but also oppose low export prices...
...They are ready to accept limitation on the prerogatives of the owners of property in order to preserve a more universal right to private property...
...Labor isn't...
...Three years later, the same sentiments are still common...
...The crisis in farm incomes has led farmers to reject such traditional ideas as free enterprise and exports as the road to prosperity...
...A return to the gold standard would just see the rich hoarding gold and we'd still have nothing...
...The U.S...
...The only ones who can stop them are small businessmen, farmers, and laboring people...
...THESE VIEWS are part of a conservative philosophy, but they need not lead to conservative politics...
...When farmers go, that's the end of it...
...Farmers had 107 percent of parity and we had full employment...
...Traditional conservative thought does exert a strong influence on much of the farming population, but the farm crisis of the last six years has led many farmers to rethink their views...
...Their idea of democracy is based on a society of independent small producers...
...Yet, they say, the federal government continues to encourage expanding production...
...But if they told you that 'if you want to keep warm, you dig a hole in that cement,' you'll tell them to go somewhere and stay put and you'll take off down the road and go someplace else...
...When there's no food anywhere, when they control the food, you'll do anything they tell you...
...Others pointed out that "gold is a means of exchange just like paper money...
...Some examples: in 1979, Lewis Saun-ders, now the financial secretary of the AAM, explained that "Either we can get something straightened out here with the management of our government, or we're going to let her (farming) go right down in the hole and end up in the corporate style structure that government seems to advocate in every walk of life today...
...Much of the AAM's leadership blames the* squeeze on farm incomes on "the transfer of wealth from the productive sector, agriculture, to the unproductive sector, medicare, medicaid, and social security," or claims that the only long-run solution is a return to the gold standard...
...Another farmer from Michigaa phrased it this way: "I feel that the only thing in the world they (Big Business) don't have, as far as energy is concerned, is our farmland...
...These ideas recall the attitudes of the Populists towards Big Business (which at that time was preeminently the railroads) and eastern banks...
...The problem, charge farmers, is that our government representatives have been bought and are conspiring to help corporations take over agriculture...
...The farmers' solution is to reorient the bias of government towards small business...
...There isn't any free enterprise in agriculture, there hasn't been any, and there never will be any," because of monopsony in the grain and meat markets...
...Three years ago, however, farmers argued in favor of exports, saying that if marketing corporations faced a large consumer market "they would be able to pay farmers more for farm products...
...Contrary to pro-corporate conservatism, some AAM members went so far as to suggest a legal limit on the amount of land a person (or corporation) could own, or a corporate "estate tax" to make it easier for individuals to compete...
...The AAM's goal was 100-percent parity prices for farmers...
...The reality is not so simple...
...They support soil conservation, which would take land out of production...
...From a high in 1973-74, real farm income fell until, in 1977, it was at its lowest level since the Great Depression...
...The agricultural crisis has pushed farmers away from some traditional conservative views towards a resurrection of Populism...
...Until they get the farm ground they don't have pre-control of everything...
...These big conglomerates are going to get control of everything...
...In the words of the convention delegate from Minnesota, "They're owned and educated by the corporations.'' In the AAM, opposition to the government is not opposition to the government as such, but opposition to government bias towards big business...
...Today, farmers link the concept of parity with an ideal of rural life and democracy...
...It thought these could be obtained by legislation setting a minimum price for agricultural products, limiting imports, and expanding markets...
...But judging by the American Agriculture Movement, whatever farmers decide, it will be based on protecting their own private property...
...I feel that the country's going to be gone right along with farmers...
...Nobody has a chance anymore to be their own boss . . . The American people have to wake up to what is happening...
...Central to both ideas and actions, however, is the claim that the protection of petty private production, small business, takes precedence over the protection of unlimited property rights...
...The total net income from farming last year was only slightly greater than the total interest on farmers' debt...
...Then he says that high interest rates are caused by the government borrowing so much money to cover its deficits that there's not much left for the rest of us...
...Department of Agriculture estimates that the nominal value of net farm income in 1982 will be equal to that of 1977, though inflation has eaten almost 40 PETER DOWNS 15 afree-lance writer who has covered the AAMfor the past three years...
...That will help save the country too, along with me...
...They have to say they're sick of giving the oil companies money to buy Montgomery Wards...
...When there's a recession, Labor doesn't dare strike...
...If they can't control that, they can't control the country...
...Thus, it is clear that the New Right does not have a headlock on farmers, but at the same time neither are farmers likely to become socialists...
...Their conception of freedom means having one's immediate world under one's individual control, independent of what others may want...
...Now, I can see that if you make a lot of something its going to be worth less...
...Such programs as commodity price supports and federal loans are supposedly being used to keep prices low...
...As for Reaganomics, a common view was expressed by the delegate from Missouri, who said: "My Congressman came down to talk about Reaganomics...
...All that production for export accomplished, speakers charged, "was lower farm prices so that the corporations could extend their control of agriculture from the United States to Latin America, Asia, and Africa...
...They were telling us that 600,000 farms is plenty, now they think they can do the job with 200,000...
...Today we're down to 2.3 million farms, but the government feeling is for more and more of the large corporate style farms...
...Liberals and radicals have frequently attacked the power of large corporations and attempted to defend "the little guy...
Vol. 109 • February 1982 • No. 4
