Election Commentary:

"Limits of Tyrants are Prescribed by the Endurance of Those Whom They Oppress"

The AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER Issue # 100 December 21, 2000

Monitoring Corporate Agribusiness From a Public Interest Perspective

A.V. Krebs Editor\Publisher

It has been alleged that In 1555, Nostradamus wrote:

"Come the millennium, month 12, In the home of greatest power, The village idiot will come forth To be acclaimed the leader"

Ancient predictions and\or urban myths aside what we have witnessed in the U.S. of A. since November 7 would in most nations beyond our borders and shores rightfully be called a political coup d'etat by the right wing of our country's solitary Republicrat Party.

Not only have we witnessed the woeful spectacle of a presidential election being decided by a state that suffers from chronic "electile dysfunction," but we have seen one-quarter of our nation's population troop to the polls and vote for the lesser of two evils, while another one-quarter choose to invest the country's future in the evil of the two lessors.

It is bad enough that George W. Bush stole the election through lamentable legal sophistry with his final act of larceny being aided and abetted by a U.S.Supreme Court decision which occasioned even dissenting justice John Paul Stevens to write, "The position by the majority of this court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges." But then to add insult to injury the Republicrat Party and the political pundits that grovel at its feet are now calling for "healing and closure," attempting to festoon such ordure in the cloak of "bipartisanship."

As my good friend and colleague Bob Schildgen writes in the Winter issue of Mindfield: "But there is absolutely no reason for healing and closure. To pretend that there should be healing and closure is insane. Terrible Supreme Court decisions have divided the country bitterly before, as well they should have. The Dred Scott Decision, when the court declared in 1857 that a black person was not a citizen and had no legal rights as one, is the classic example. It took a civil war and a whole century of fighting to undue the evil works of that historic case." http://www.dnai.com/~mindfld/Mindfield_Mag.html

Unfortunately, Election 2000 was also not one of the prouder moments of our republic, for not only did the electorate embrace the corporate chosen two, but they rejected, save for some 2.7 million of them, a genuine opportunity to affirm economic and political democracy and elect a President and Vice-President --- Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke --- committed to those democratic ideals and the common, not the corporate, good.

Neither did rural America and our farm communities do themselves proud in this election, for looking at a map of the national results one can see where George W. Bush gained a great measure of his electoral college vote. Some pundits have observed that the votes in rural America reflected disgust concerning the morals, values and life style of the current president. If that is true, and with no effort here to condone or justify such behavior, our rural communities and family farmers who based their vote on such criteria may well have written their own death notice as family farmers, by voting for Republicrat Bush.

For while they seemed preoccupied with Republicrat Clinton's corpus morality they were ignoring the fact that it is was this same Republicrat President and his Congressional brethren who enacted, passed and signed the disastrous Freedom to Farm bill legislation; which stood by while one large corporate agribusiness after another sucked up their lesser rivals; while self-serving corporate hemispheric and international trade agreements were destroying a domestic family farm economy, while a Republicrat administration kept the revolving door between it and genetic engineering corporations well oiled at the same time attempting to cram down the throats of the American public unsafe and improperly tested products.

Immorality has many faces!

What makes this whole matter sadder, is that family farmers had a clear choice, a choice that could have led to an unprecedented revival of rural America, competitive markets for their goods and at same time providing consumers with healthy, nutritious, safe, available and affordable food while caring for and protecting an already fragile life-giving environment.

By rejecting the Nader\LaDuke candidacy and the well-thought out and positive populist farm policy initiatives that the Nader\LaDuke campaign presented, family farmers seemed to be saying that they preferred self-flagelation to self-preservation.

By way of example, in the months prior to election an effort was made to form a Family Farmers National Alliance for Nader\LaDuke, which would be a group of national recognized family farmers and rural activists who would issue a simple statement of support ( Issue #92) for the Nader\LaDuke candidacy and why they felt such support was necessary for the survival of family farm agriculture. Then, in whatever means available to the Alliance and its individual members, they would promulgate the statement to their neighbors, colleagues and communities.

Some 90 family farmers and rural activists were invited to join the Alliance with 49 accepting the invitation and 41 either refusing or failing to respond to said invitation. Disappointingly, the vast majority of those either refusing or not responding were family farmers. Some of those who declined did so because either they planned to vote for the lesser of two evils Gore or due to organizational sensitivities, despite the fact that it was made very clear that they were being asked to join the Alliance as individuals with any affiliation they so choose being for identification purposes only. Also, of these 41 who were invited into the Alliance and who did not sign the statement, over half of those individuals failed to even respond to the invitation.

Lest that one thinks this is an isolated example reflect back to when the U.S. Department of Justice issued their consent decree for public comment prior to approving the merger of Cargill, the nation's largest grain trader and private corporation, and its chief rival the commodity division of Continental Grain, at the time the nation's fifth largest private corporation.

According to the DofJ 67 individuals, eight public officials, 65 individual farmers, and nineteen organizations expressed their views on the proposed Final Judgment. While it is true that organizations such as the National Farmers Union and American Farm Bureau Federation submitted comments it is somewhat shocking that out of 1.9 million farmers in the U.S. only 65 individual farmers sought to express their thoughts on this historic merger.

Now faced with the grim prospect of a Republicrat Party intent on fashioning not only a "bipartisan" farm policy in the coming years, but an increasingly corporate-friendly U.S. Department of Agriculture and federal bureaucracy, family farm agriculture is on the threshold of witnessing its complete demise, UNLESS family farmers are politically willing to individually and collectively boldly step forward and fight for their survival.

In doing so it is time that they put aside such corporate self-serving, elitist-entrenched bureaucrat's political shibboleths as "healing and closure" and hail and promote division, division that separates people who vote their conscience and who believe in economic and political democracy from the corporate interests and their minions who vote their pocketbooks and believe that government is merely another commodity to be bought and possessed.

Such an effort will not be easy, for as Frederick Douglass's words from 1857 constantly remind us: "Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of the waters. This struggle may be both moral and physical, but it must be struggle.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. And these wrongs will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."