Willie Nelson

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Rachel Neulander, known as medicinesocks online, softly sings her version of “A Peaceful Solution” a cappella after a tasty guitar picking intro. There is so much peace and love in this version that it seems to just come off the page and embrace you.

This example of peace and love by medicinesocks will become more valuable in the days ahead. It will behoove us all to remember peaceful solutions.

As international financiers and multinational corporations manipulate governments to further impoverish normal people a few groups here and there have taken to the streets.  Mostly though, peaceful populations have chosen to accept the extortion and robbery as representative for business as usual.

One place this extortion and robbery shows up most strongly is in what passes for health care in the United States. The U.S. is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not have a universal health care system.

The U.S. lags other wealthy nations in such measures as infant mortality and life expectancy. No one seems to dispute the sad state of the U.S. health care system.

Extortion occurs when someone obtains money, property or services through coercion. Coercion is the practice of compelling a person or manipulating them to behave in an involuntary way (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation or some other form of pressure or force.

Robbery can occur without any verbal or written threat. Of course, robbery is still the taking of goods against the will of another.

The current system of health care in the United States is extortion when threats and intimidation is used to take goods from people. The current system of health care in the United States is robbery when goods are simply taken from the people without the pretense of offering “protection.”

No one seems to dispute the threats, intimidation or the plain outright taking of money practiced by the health care system in the United States. This is one reason why health care reform is regularly debated in congress.

But still, with all the debate in congress and the widespread general knowledge of the faults of the current health care system in the United States nothing changes. No new laws are passed and the system is not significantly changed or replaced.

We are told the issue is complicated but are not told who complicates it and why they may be doing so. The obvious answer is that the various elements of the current health care system come together to complicate the issue intentionally to keep their profits flowing.

Washington’s largest lobby, the pharmaceutical industry, racked up another banner year on Capitol Hill in 2007, backed by a record $168 million lobbying effort. The American Medical Association ranks 13th among the top all-time political donors from 1989 to 2008.

The American Hospital Association, the American Dental Association, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Eli Lilly & Company, GlaxoSmithKline and all the major insurance companies show up in the same list of the top 100 of all-time political donors from 1989 to 2008. No other industry dominates political donations the way the health care industry does.

The top spending lobbies include the American Medical Association at number 2, American Hospital Association at number 4, Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America at number 6 and Blue Cross/Blue Shield at number 12. It is not any wonder why United States health care is in the state it is in.

We recently saw how the so-called Wall Street bailout was universally resisted by U.S. citizens and yet still passed once the holdout members of congress were individually bought off by pork barrel projects. Big money controls your health care and it does so to their exclusive profit.

Taking back America includes your health care.

A Peaceful Solution (New additional lyrics by Rachel Neulander)

There’s a peaceful solution. It’s called peaceful revolution
Now let’s give back America.
There’s a war– we gotta end it,
Let’s not lie to defend it!
We gotta get our conscience back, America.

It’s a dream, now believe it,
Get ready to receive it.
We gotta give back America!

To the people of first nations
Teaching wisdom, love and patience
We gotta give, give back America.
War is over, no one won it!
Let’s remember what we done
Let us study war no more, America!

It’s a dream, now believe it.
Get ready to receive it!
Don’t let’s ever, ever make a war again.

There’s a peaceful solution,
no more war no more pollution-
Let us heal the deal with hemp, America.
Jefferson and Edison
Would be proud if we grew medicine
Healing energy for all the earth,
America

There’s a peaceful solution, it’s called peaceful revolution
And its gonna heal the world
not just America!
We are children of the earth,
Peace and freedom ours from birth.
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on!

There was a peaceful solution
It was a healing evolution
When we gave and gathered love & peace,
America!

* * * * Artist’s Statement * * * * *

How long have you been working for peace?

Since I was about two years old. I’m one of those negotiator people. you see, my mother was an extreme, explosive, combative person, so, to protect myself and to help her and the world to get along a little better I started young in my career as a diplomat, anger management coach, translator and vibe mechanic.

I used (and still use) music and art as a form of meditation and medicine, to soothe myself and to make people like my mother and others smile and think. music and art will often work a spell of peace when words have failed.

when there’s conflict it’s best if at least one person stays calm and tries to translate the ideas of each side of the argument to the other in a way that makes conflicting ideas just a little more understandable to those who hold them.

art can do that, and music almost never needs translation. as far as i know, everyone on the planet loves and understands some kind of music.

it takes wit and sweat and it doesn’t always work to try for peace, but if at least one person in a crisis rises to the task, peace is restored and the crisis will be averted.

What motivates you to work for peace and the environment?

has there been a time without wars in the world ever since i was born 54 years ago?

my parents and older sisters lived through several wars before i was born, witnessed auschwitz and hiroshima. i was told as a child to never forget the evils of nazism and apartheid in europe, but too, that space was a race and that race and class and national politics were differences that mattered. i don’t believe any of that!

i was taught at school how to curl up under my desk in case of an atomic bomb attack, and my cousins and friends’ older brothers went off to the Vietnam war. what good ever came of that?

the war we’re in now is the gloomy, gory life and energy sucking backdrop to everything i do. to everything we all do now, isn’t it? hasn’t it only made matters worse? haven’t enough people suffered and died to call for an end to this dreary mess yet? and wasn’t this all based on a set of lies anyway, false threats and assumptions that didn’t turn out real at all?

for real, don’t we all yearn for peace, and freedom, at long long last? what would it feel like? how would it look? artists give us a vision of what we can become… cinema and video are such powerful media, our modern muses….

i saw the civil rights movement in america televised in black and white. we all watched those throngs of brave, vulnerable people, black & white, linking arms together and marching peacefully down american city streets singing hymns about peace and freedom and equality. i saw police with snarling dogs and sticks and tear gas and horses coming to strike those peaceful protests down. i witnessed this and more.

as a teenager i spent my 15th summer hiking and camping all over new england, sleeping under the stars. i fell in love with my planet then and resolved then to take care of her my whole life long.

like anne frank and gandhi and mlk and john lennon and bob marley and willie nelson and amy and my friends on youtube and every artist whose work ever stood for peace all in all we deeply love this planet of ours, and we’re proof that people, given the chance to live in peace, to work and play and make art and music together in a context of love and community, are happy, resourceful, generous and good at heart, and nature, well, we can all agree on one thing- nature’s magnificent!

and i have grown sons now. considering the life we’ve led, all i’ve tried to live by and teach them, as i learned it myself, about life, i’d be surprised and dismayed if they’re weren’t making music and art, and doing everything they do with their lives for the sake of their souls’ refreshment and to try to inspire a wholesome and healing response in others, if they’re not not in solidarity with the throngs still today crying out for justice in the battle-scarred streets of all the world’s cities, calling for the restoration of planetary health a reverence for all living things, for peace and accord and relief and cooperation among nations and equal rights for all humans, then what are we really about? what kind of mother was i?

i want to mention and thank my partner of fourteen years, fellow medicinesocks channeler Norman B, who is my angel, my muse, and most ardent collaborator. norm, thank you for believing in peace and in me. none of this would have happened without you. thank you for giving me an artist’s life!

Norman has been at work on a monster of a project. it is almost complete and about to go to press as i write this! seven broadside pamphlets will unfold the story of global warming in poetry and science, laid out so we can all understand what has happened and what we now (right away!) can do about it. inspired by this peace project norman has opened a new channel, GL0Warm to showcase the project. i hope you’ll all check in, soon and often. there is a peaceful solution! we can stop the pollution!

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The epoch of the bully nears eclipse.

Jim Bianco, president of Chicago based Bianco Research LLC, crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The so-called bailout has cost, so far, more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

The so-called bailout has also already far surpassed our nation’s second largest historical expense, World War II, and is still growing. Perhaps someone would at first think that we would be getting something for all this money.

But no, remember, this expenditure is not for anything tangible. This is an act of appeasement to the biggest bullies the world has ever been victimized by.

There will be an end to this extortion only when there is nothing left to take and that day has nearly arrived. The parasite cannot live now that it has killed its host.

With not only all the low hanging fruit consumed but the entire orchard now pulped up for toilet paper, international capital turns on itself and cannibalizes its own financial appendages to survive. The so-called bailout is the price of our admission to the spectacle.

When no one has any lunch money left the bully starves. A starving bully is not a pretty sight and starving to death puts the bully into an evil mood.

Regardless of what the bully does next in its death throws, we are not obligated to come to its aid. Whatever goodwill the bully may have gained, in sharing the small parts that mattered to it least, has long been expended in backstabbing deceits.

The system has reduced itself to a handful of international financial corporations that have acted beyond redemption. No one cares about the so-called winners because they have won without honor and defeated kinder, gentler and more peaceful systems through deception, treachery and massive violence.

People have enough to deal with now that food and shelter have unnecessarily become uncertain for too many. The guarantees once taken for granted are proving to be ultimately empty promises exchanged for an impossible future of perpetual growth that outrageously profited only a few.

The great white bully’s dream, the racist ethnocentric manifest destiny, has been revealed as a grand con ultimately betraying those who once conquered the world in the name of civilization. Those who yet foolishly cling to it in denial will be the last consumed and to suffer the most as it fully vanishes from the realm of possibility.

The evidence is on the front pages of every surviving newspaper, regardless of how how the collapse of capitalism is spun. Indigenous people and other marginalized and excluded individuals stand on the periphery and nod their heads in unison as their prophecies come to pass.

No system can grow forever on finite resources, yet that was the essential promise of capitalism. The few who insisted on loudly exclaiming the obvious falseness of the lie were discounted and criticized if not out right silenced.

No more political challenges to capitalism exists, all serious opposition has been neutralized or converted. The global success of capitalism seals the certainty of its demise by destroying the necessary balance between human activity and the accessible resources of the planet.

The biggest consumer of liquid petroleum fuels is the U.S. Armed Forces. They will be the last to run out and they will run the last of it out dealing death and mayhem as long as business as usual persists.

The role of the U.S. Armed Forces is to guarantee that business as usual persists. It does not take more than two brain cells to bump together for anyone to figure this one out.

Already things have progressed far enough that those who had previously found alternatives to business as usual are now experiencing the benefits. There is no place else to go, you must liberate the land you stand on from the demands of business as usual.

For many people it is no longer an option to embrace something other than business as usual. As formidable as finding alternatives to business as usual may seem the sooner you start the better because you will then be less dependent upon a collapsing system and therefore escape a degree of risk.

Imagine, it may at first seem overwhelming for livestock to flee the security of habits and the promised benefits of the farm. But when it comes to butchering time any life on the other side of the fence surpasses the certain death of the paddock.

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Economic crises are not natural disasters.

The actions of bankers, officials, and developers bring on these crises. They appear beyond our control, but they are not inescapable facts of life.

For all the talk of collapse, the system itself is as healthy as ever. The fundamental relationships remain unchanged: employers and employees, politicians and voters, police and policed.

Our masters may loan us cars or houses to pacify us, but we still lack control over our own lives. Perhaps now you are ready to seek alternatives to business as usual.

Crises like this are part of the protection racket that keeps them in business. They profit on the industries that contribute to global warming and when hurricanes destroy our neighborhoods they replace them with condominiums and sell us energy-saving light bulbs.

They profit on the invasions that secure more resources for the economy, and also on the occupations in which our friends and relatives die. They profited from the subprime mortgages that contributed to the latest disaster, and now they’re profiting from the so-called bailout.

Imagine another kind of crisis, one that could really pose a threat to their market monopolies: people building communities based on cooperation and self-determination. Imagine a world in which we’d never be vulnerable to the whims of a market monopoly again.

As far as we are concerned, it cannot come soon enough.

As much as competition in nature is hyped, the natural world is overwhelmingly cooperative. If you just think about it, it only makes sense that we would get more done and live better, longer, lives by cooperating with our environments and ourselves.

Peaceful cooperation abounds in nature creating a harmonious interactive whole that seeks to isolate and eliminate egregious perpetrators of senseless violence. The senselessly violent exhaust both themselves and their prey.

In nature crisis is an exceptional state and during our contemporary civilization the exceptional state has become the norm. Constant crisis separates human beings from nature as much as any other criteria.

Do not forget that while freedom, independence, and self-sufficiency were all popular values, our national origins were as a slave-owning society built on land stolen from native peoples. It seems that now the bankers have come to enslave us all as they take away real estate that people have put their life savings into.

The system itself is little changed.

The strategies the system employs to distract us from the facts of our circumstances constantly changes. Dramatic changes, crises for many people, are manipulated for the system’s maximum advantage and need to control.

While everyone anguishes over the loss of personal affluence something huge seems to have slipped through the cracks, namely a country of, by and for the people. The major concern is no longer economic or financial; it’s for the return of the USA to its free market economy and constitutional roots.

President Bush admits “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” It goes without saying that he has also abandoned democratic or constitutional principles to ’save the country.’

There is a part of me that is flabergasted beyond comprehension that the people of the United States of America seems to be tolerating a $700 Billion theft. I suppose that since this is more than all the fingers and toes in the country, the people just have not been able to add it all up.

All that money is stolen, gone down the tubes and will never be seen again. The thieves acted in plain sight openly aided and abetted by Congress and the U.S. Treasury.

Rather than act in their own interest, the people of the United States of America have chosen to once again place their future in the hands of the same system that now so brazenly ripped them off. Even as they watch Mr. Obama put a thin coat of paint on business as usual the people willingly go back to the same old rigged game.

The end of crisises being business as usual will be peace becoming business as usual. This will be the peaceful revolution and all it takes is your willingness and committment to significant meaningful change.

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Kathy contributes her beautiful a cappella version of “A Peaceful Solution” recorded in her kitchen sound stage. Her simple, sincere and sweet expression of peace offers us a glimpse into the rewards of an authentic down home musician singing about something she believes in.

She also demonstrates an example of the power and honesty of modestly doing what she loves. Kathy shows us what any of us could do if we would just follow the same straight forward instinct.

In the face of Exxon Mobil achieving not only its own record profit making but the biggest profit ever made by any U.S. corporation perhaps we should all consider staying in our kitchens. Consider the fact that British Petroleum, BP, also reported a record earning report for the same time period.

Together just these two oil corporations made $24.83 billion in the past third quarter. It seems to me that appears to be just plain old obscene given what everyone else is going through these days.

Maybe having a fuel efficient car is not enough. Maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus or at least riding with someone else would be a good thing to do.

Not only reducing carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming but also reducing the profits of those who triumph on our suffering and hardships would be something worth doing. Certainly none of the candidates would suggest this but that is not the only thing we are not hearing from them.

No candidate is talking about ending the counter productive and unsuccessful so-called war on drugs that has lead the U.S. to imprison more of its citizens than any other country in history since Stalin’s U.S.S.R.

No candidate is talking about ending the so-called war on terror that has only terrorized U.S. citizens and stripped us of many important rights and freedoms.

No candidate is talking about stopping all domestic spying including those operations and programs in cooperation with foreign governments that spy on Americans and bypass the law.

No candidate is talking about repealing the Patriot Acts.

No candidate is talking about repealing the Military Commissions Act.

No candidate is talking about stopping the criminalizing of dissent and the harassment of journalists.

No candidate is talking about publicly investigating 9/11 and revealing all the facts and evidence already uncovered by many citizen investigators then hunting down all those responsible including Americans.

No candidate is talking about stopping the sale of armaments and weapons to other countries.

No candidate is talking about stopping killing people needlessly.

No candidate is talking about convicting Blackwater of murders and assassinations in Iraq and Afghanistan and dismantling this private mercenary army.

No candidate is talking about disabling the so-called defense industry, the American war machine and stopping all torture and rendition programs and activities.

No candidate is talking about returning all overseas military personnel, except perhaps those guarding embassies, to the United States.

No candidate is talking about real job training in providing real services to Americans in health care and community services and repair and maintenance of the nation’s infrastructure.

No candidate is talking about re-localizing the entire country in production, manufacturing, food production and all other essential services.

No candidate is talking about becoming a model nation on population control, sustainable living, localized living, healthy living practices, lowering the carbon footprint and reducing the energy demands of U.S. citizens.

No candidate is talking about enforcing minimum mileage standards on all new transportation.

No candidate is talking about ending new freeway construction that makes no sense in the face of peak oil.

No candidate is talking about ending all corporate welfare and special protections, subsidies and privileges.

No candidate is talking about punishing offenders along with industry and corporate transgressions in violation of strict air, water and soil contamination standards with prison time, not just fines.

No candidate is talking about abolishing factory farming of animals.

No candidate is talking about abolishing animal testing.

No candidate is talking about ending all trawling, overfishing and enforcing strict limits.

No candidate is talking about ending ocean dumping.

No candidate is talking about respecting the sovereignty and international rights of nations to be self-governing and self-protecting.

No candidate is talking about stopping the sanctions and restrictions that are starving and killing civilians in foreign countries.

No candidate is talking about ending all federal presence from sovereign Native American lands.

No candidate is talking about recognizing the sovereignty of the Hawaiian people.

No candidate is talking about restoring the Palestinian homeland.

No candidate is talking about restoring the Tibetan homeland.

No candidate is talking about removing all Presidential signing statements and Executive Orders while abolishing this practice and illegal behavior forever.

No candidate is talking about removing all Congressional and Senate perks and special privileges and exemptions including the practice of voting themselves pay raises.

No candidate is talking about abolishing the Federal Reserve and arresting Henry Paulson and Alan Greenspan for high crimes and misdemeanors.

No candidate is talking about abolishing the Electoral College and enabling direct democracy requiring paper ballots that can be trusted and accounted for accurately.

I know there is more, a lot more, but perhaps you get the sense of what I’m talking about.

Maybe Kathy has the right idea.

Maybe it is time that we all retired to our kitchens, sing some songs and start talking among ourselves using the technologies we already have.

Maybe it is time to take back America.

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It’s About America
by Willie Nelson

They say timing is everything. This speech made to the National Farmers Union 81st convention on March 1, 1983. Could have been this morning. It’s time for the American people to know why the economy is going downhill. It was going downhill in 1983 and it’s still going downhill. Why? We once were strong - now we are not. Why? Eddie Albert knew the answer in 1983. I believe it is still true today. What do you think?

Eddie Albert
81st Annual Convention
National Farmers Union
San Diego, California
March 1, 1983

There was once a strong farm policy. It developed during the other depression — the thirties.

A lot of thought went on to figure out what went wrong — why, how, when and where.

Some of the thinkers wanted to prevent another depression. Others had in mind making money out of it.

There were some good farm programs proposed, but there were some strong forces lined up opposing their adoption.

Although in 1941 the depression still continued, there was a war coming on and there were a few intelligent congressmen who realized that if we were to win this war, we must have a strong economic base.

Early in 1942, the Banking and Currency Committee adopted the concept of “parity”. Congress then passed the Steagall Amendment, which provided for 100 percent parity for all raw materials and the amendment was attached to the “defense act of W.W. II”.

Hitler had already done the same thing. Germany had been destitute and gearing up for war, Hitler established a fair price floor for all raw materials. Within a year, Germany was on the road to recovery.

Our recovery started in 1942, the year of the Steagall Amendment, but the war got the credit.

From 1943 to 1952, we had the Steagall Amendment and economic stability. Farm raw materials were supported at 100 percent of parity. It provided a steady flow of earned income to buy government bonds to finance the war and post-war conversion to peacetime.

There was a sound dollar, no inflation.

There was approximate full employment.

Now, these circumstances didn’t just evolve as the natural consequences of “supply side” economics, or “demand side” economics. They evolved as the result of some careful thought by some very intelligent people which resulted in laws and regulations enacted by Congress and certain wartime powers delegated to the president of the United States.

They included the Steagall Amendment, wage and price controls, the temporary abandonment of the gold standard and other measures, plus the dedication of a proud and loyal citizenry determined to win the war and also to win the peace. And they worked!

However, as I said, some folks didn’t like this. They didn’t like restriction on their actions, their investment return, the growing political power of farmers and their friendship with labor. That bothered them.

They are powerful people — well organized.

After the war, in 1952, (the Steagall Amendment) was allowed to expire after ten years of economic stability.

In 1953, the Farm Act of 1953 took its place with sliding parity, 60 to 90 percent. The bad guys won. You and I know which of those figures it’s going to slide toward.

That was their first important step. What these folks had decided was they had to have ownership of the land. That would eliminate government interference and they knew something about making money during shortages.

The shortages in the 80’s and 90’s will be mainly in food. Ownership of the land is where the power lies - political and dollar power. Land is collateral. Ownership controls wages, surpluses. Ask the South American farmers. This has been true for centuries.

So their goal, very clearly, was to get hold of the land and they decided to do this by moving 2 million farmers off the land into the cities and replace them with a small number of super farms, corporate-owned, a few large family managed operations, and several million small farms, financed primarily by off-farm income.

These plans were spelled out in literally dozens of reports, policy recommendations and studies that are available in almost any land-grant college library or the Library of Congress.

And so, the Committee for Economic Development (CED) was born. Let me give you some actual quotes from its papers - its approach was:

“Removal of excess resources (farmers) to be utilized in other sectors of the economy, to generate greater returns on investments. (Excess resources — farmers — were measured by return on investment).

“The movement of people has not been fast enough to take full advantage of the opportunities that improving farm technologies, thus increasing capital, create”. (You are not moving fast enough, they have a plan).

Their plan, which was called “the adaptive approach,” was almost identical with Russia’s first ‘five-year plan’ of ‘28-33. We, too, were to move millions of farmers and ranchers into cities for the advantage of industry.

Never mind the city problems!

“The adaptive approach utilizes positive government action to facilitate and promote the movement of labor and capital where they will be most productive and will earn the most income”.

“The support of prices has deterred the movement out of agriculture.”

And, how about this?

“If the farm labor force were to be, five years hence, no more than two-thirds as large as it’s present size of approximately 5.5 millions, the program would involve moving off the farm about two million of the present labor force, plus a number equal to a large part of the new entrants, who would otherwise join the farm labor force in the five years.” There you go kids.

They recommended:

“The price supports for wheat, cotton, rice, feed, grains and related crops, new under price supports, be reduced immediately.” (3 cents a lb. on rice, 22 cents a lb. on cotton…). Never mind the market, the demand, your costs.

“The importance of such price adjustments would discourage further commitments of new productive resources to those crops unless it appeared profitable at lower prices.” Profitable at lower prices? Whose?

The corporate presidents and academics who make up the CED, recommended the elimination of one third of the farm population within five years by enforcing low parity pricing. As they stated, the primary benefits of their recommendations would be:

1. Increased return on corporate investment in agriculture.
2. Over two million farmers and families entering the urban labor pool, which would tend to depress wages.
3. Lower prices of agriculture products which would both increase foreign trade and provide cheaper raw materials for domestic food and fiber processors.
4. “…invest in projects that break up village life by drawing people to centers of employment away from the village…because village life is a major source of opposition to change. Where there are religious obstacles to modern economic progress, the religion may have to be taken seriously or its character altered.”
Eight years later they issued a report:

“The desired result–one-third fewer farmers–was achieved.”

Two million farmers were moved off their family farms-by suppressing supports–were moved into the cities to look for employment, housing, depress labor’s wages, bankrupt some cities. Bankrupt their rural towns and communities, close their schools, over crowd the city schools, hospitals. Over 200 years to build the greatest nation in human history, and in only five years, shattering our delicate economic balance by tampering with the farm prices and bringing on our greatest, and most painful and dangerous depression.

Back to the report–

Their evaluation was that their analysis and recommendations were fundamentally correct and that the government had faithfully implemented their recommended policies.

“We do not mean to overlook the poverty that still persists among many small farmers and other rural Americans.” One third of U.S. families are rural and 40 percent of these live in poverty.

“Farmers who can neither attain a decent standard of living nor find an adequate non-farm job represent a strong case for direct income support…..assistance to low income farmers should be contingent, not upon farm production or a presumption that low farm prices are the cause of an adequate income, but upon need…. we believe development of adequate federal welfare programs.” Not a fair price for production, but welfare.

Although the strategies and tactics of the CED are carefully spelled out, it is never hinted until the very end what their underlying goals and motivations might be.

“A recurrence of agricultural instability must be kept in mind so as to maintain an atmosphere relatively free of the political pressures from farmers in the past.”

Minimizing farmers’ power was crucial to the corporations for several reasons.

Farmers had historically aligned themselves with trade unions and urban workers, including the formation of farmer-labor parties, which held political power in a dozen Midwest and southwest states. The men who developed these specific programs to accomplish the aims of lenders and large corporations were mostly hired economists who were then placed in the necessary positions of power within the government (USDA), to bring into being their recommended programs.

Now, do you still believe that your problems result from what the economists call ”supply and demand” and that nothing can be done about the surplus but lower the price even further?

Why did I stress all raw materials, and especially farm income? Is there something different, something we haven’t discussed?

Let me go back for a moment to those ten successful stable years of parity, from ’43 to ’52, and the Steagall Amendment.

What did we learn from those ten years? What lessons?

An economist named Kuznets, later a Nobel Prize winner, noticed that there seemed to be six most important sectors that dominated our economy. They were:

1. Farm income
2. Wages
3. Interest income
4. Small businesses and professionals
5. Rentals
6. Corporations

Hubert Humphrey expressed it even shorter: “A 3 legged stool — capital, raw materials and labor. Short change any one of those three legs and the stool falls over”. He was talking of balance.

Go back to six sectors. Kuznets states that to provide a healthy economy, they, too must exist in a reasonably precise balance in relations to our national income. For example, (1) farm income, which they intended to suppress, should share in about six to 8 percent of our national income; (2) wages, labor, etc. 66 or 67 percent, (3) interest income 1.2 percent; (4) small business 10.5 percent; (5) rents 3.8 percent; (6) corporations 12.6 percent.

Those were roughly the shares of those sectors of our national income during our prosperous base period, ‘43 - ‘52.

For example, 40 years of statistics show that (1) if farm income falls one percent, then unemployment for labor rises one percent; and (2) if farm income rises one percent, then unemployment falls one percent. All six sectors are connected. Touch one and you affect the other five.

They intended to suppress farm income to achieve their plan. Now, to tamper with farm income, raw materials, is foolish and dangerous.

Unlike the other five sectors, farm products are “raw materials“. Raw materials — grain, oil, minerals, coal, timber, fish, etc., etc. — they are the base of our economy, the foundation. When they are harvested, dug up, cut down, whatever, they are new wealth for our nation, something that did not exist before. In the case of farm products, they are new every year, are perishable, non-storable, are consumed every year - unlike metals, for example — and farm products are 70 percent of all our raw materials.

I’m indebted for this information, by the way, to the Raw Materials National Council and the National Organization of Raw Materials……..

Back to raw materials - grain, oil, iron ore, coal, minerals, cotton, wool, tobacco are raw materials.

As I said, new raw materials are the base of our new growth each year, our prosperity. A factory wheel does not turn until some fellow drives up in a truck, up to the factory door, unloads some raw materials, gets a receipt and drives off.

Only then can the processing start. Labor takes over; oil is turned into gasoline, plastics, fertilizer, energy. Grain is turned into bread and Twinkies. Iron ore into steel, steel into cars, planes, skyscrapers, concrete into highways and all into prosperity wages for consumers. And let us not forget that although nothing happens to the raw materials until labor gets her or his hands on it and starts the raw materials up the processing ladder.

The raw materials rise in value as they are improved, worked upon, transformed, creating jobs for labor, wages turning workers into consumers with money in their pockets, enabling them to buy the farmer’s produce and surplus and enabling the farmer to have money to buy industry’s production of tools, trucks, combines, etc.

Now, what is of equal importance and can not be exaggerated, these raw materials must have a price, not only a fair price to the producer, but a correct price, to carry out that balance correctly — neither too high nor too low.

By the time those raw materials reach the top of the processing ladder, those base price dollars for the raw materials will multiply themselves five times, all the way up to contribute five-to-one to our nation’s annual income and that raw material processing and national income figure represents our strength, our health, our wealth, our security, our livelihood, our democracy, our freedom, our civilization.

Another bit of good news. Raw materials multiply-five-to-one. But, agricultural raw materials multiply seven-to-one.

This is known as the “multiplier effect.” It is known as the lever. I’ll tell you why.

Let’s say the base price is 3 dollars a bushel. Multiply that by 7. That’s 21 dollars. But, you multiply 21 dollars by 12 billion bushels and you get 252 billion dollars.

That’s serious money, but the lever works both ways.

Suppose the price is suppressed to $2. Two times 7 is only 14, not 21. 14 times 12 billion bushels equals 168 billion dollars. By dropping the farm price $1, we have robbed the national income, jobs, wages, and consumption by $84 billion in one harvest.

Farm production is 70 percent of raw materials and, unlike five sectors of the economy, multiples itself seven-to-one. You can’t short change a lever like this without causing a depression. And, you don’t forget, farmers have been short changed in the past 30 tears –$2, $3, $4 a bushel. Using the average figures from our ‘43-‘52 base as a yardstick, and nothing that the farm sector’s 6.6 percent share at the national income in ‘43-’52 was purchased downward for 30 years until today - it is no longer 6.6 per cent but 8/10th of one percent, multiply that loss per bushel times seven times 12 billion bushels, times 30 years and you are talking very serious money, around $5 trillion -maybe more- lost forever to the people of the United States.

Imagine $5 trillion held back from the economic processing ladder, held back from creating jobs, wages, construction, consumption taxes, our world leadership actually - because a few clever fellows decided they would rip off the farmers.

If you start chopping away at the roots of a tree you have no right to be surprised when you see the leaves and branches whither and die, the roots are not fed and almost die.

They don’t realize that 12 million workers are idle, out of jobs, because the farmer has not been getting enough money to buy the industrial tools those workers had been making. The plants were closed down and workers were put out on the street. Idle. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Those 12 million idle, hungry American workers have no money to buy the farmer’s food–his grain, bread, cereals, corn, and beef– so the farmer has a surplus.

Debt. Easy credit. Land prices going up. Remember “get big or get out? Remember Butz? Open up marginal land. Seventy million acres. Plant fence row to fence row. Right up to the doorstop, debt.

After 30 years of this, our public and private debt over $6 trillion. Who knows? Some say over $11 trillion. What’s the annual interest on that? How, who will pay it? Our national deficit this year around $200 billion, and growing. And next year, worse.

Two hundred billion dollars is your farm loan this year. Interest, say $20 billion. But did I hear correctly? Your income is around 19 billion.

Six trillion; 11 trillion. Nobody seems to know. A debt has to be paid and will be paid, either by the borrowers or the lenders or the taxpayers.

Who pays it? My new granddaughter? Yours? Our great grandchildren? Our great, great, great grandchildren? How?

What have we done with this rich continent that god gave us, free? These beautiful United States of America. What have we done?

What are we going to do?

Thank you.

for further reading please see:
Economics born of the Earth

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