L E T T E R S

November 29, 2007

Just a heads up to those not involved in resource production; we who own land and water and are in production agriculture have had our private property under GPS and other un-invited for years. If we move a hair on said property, we risk being "jailed" under someone else's opinion "you altered nature."

Resource producers are the most chokingly regulated, spied on and vilified in our nation.

For example, people who are not prudent with their actions and engage in the use of toxic words, drugs, extortion and sex bring a huge financial drain on taxpayers. Their actions should be considered as tangible as an oil spill, and answer to NEPA. They serve no purpose, and cost a culture dearly.

Before you launch into any non-constructive, time wasting, non-good-product-producing campaigns like empeachment, you better make certain you have a safe food source to give you the energy to do so.

We've come to a point in history, where "prioritization" of missions is critical.

For starters- concentrate on:
Defeating "LOST"
Stop federal welfare to groups like The Nature Conservancy.
Stay as much land as is possible- in resource production (You cannot feed the world out of a windowsill garden.).
Replace "income" tax with a "consumption" tax (Simple math will tell you the guy who buys a Rolls will spend more on that tax, than the guy who buys a used Plymouth. It's the only FAIR way to go!).
Stop the flow of illegal immigration.
Start honoring our Constitution.
Reintroduce civility and manners.
Get smart and not succumb to the psychological warfare foisted upon us.
Learn to discern fact from fiction, and fantasy from reality.
To save our nation from socialism, you must choose a side. Do you know which side to choose?
Learn how to be a good neighbor, then be one.

Who Are These People? by Jane Smiley

Over the weekend, I managed to avoid reading the article in the New York Times about agriculture in Malawi for about four hours. I knew what would happen, and when I finally read the article, it happened -- I was livid. In case you haven't read it, it is entitled "Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts". The experts happen to be the folks at the World Bank.

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Judging by the article, what they are expert in is not soil science, growing food, generosity, or humanity. The gist of the article is that for years the World Bank, in its punitive way, "advised" the government of Malawi not to subsidize fertilizer handouts to the farmers, but to let the "free market" work. The result was famine, starvation, and the almost total depletion of local soils, as starving farmers planted without fertilizing the soil and depleted it more and more, thus killing themselves and wrecking the environment. This seems to have been fine with the World Bank, who were acting on principle: "In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi's farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food."

What was that again?

Their advice was, don't feed your children or elderly relatives, or even yourselves, but grow things like, I don't know (I really don't), sugar cane or tobacco, export it using lots of high-priced fuel, and then import a few, I don't know, potatoes or ears of corn, and hope for the best.

According to the article, part of the hunger problem in Africa is a lack of fertilizer (something they have plenty of in Washington, D.C.). The World Bank opposes fertilizer subsidies in order to -- well,it boggles the mind. In order to what? Get rid of the population? Degrade the soil beyond repair? I cannot think of any other reasons.
What is the goal here? Regularized financial markets? More billionaires? Really, it makes you almost vomit to imagine how the minds of these people work. Don't they understand free market capitalism? Free market capitalism operates by lurching here and there and then correcting itself. Every correction is a correction for a reason -- people made bad choices and then had to pay for them, often with their houses, sometimes with their lives or those of their relatives.

In the US, the agricultural free market has brought us lots of booms and busts, depleted soil, contaminated groundwater, superbugs, obesity, the end of the family farm, and numerous other
disasters. But the World Bank says "More of the same". Free marketers never seem to understand what an investment is -- it is something that cannot actually be "corrected" at all easily, and so people who make them (as in ethanol factories for processing corn kernels into fuel) want to protect them. In order to protect them, they fight tooth and nail against innovation and "correction". You and I might call this stupidity. The free marketers call it "creative destruction". During "creative destruction", lives and livelihoods are lost.

Doesn't that sound fun?

Of course, if you are sitting in your luxury office high in some building somewhere, perhaps it is fun to watch people starve. Perhaps it is fun to pronounce "expertly" when you don't know beans about how things grow and how agriculture works. Perhaps it is fun to coerce people into acting on your stupidities. But really, the rest of the human race has to wonder where these World Bank experts gained their expertise -- oh, I mean their sociopathic personality disorders.

Jane,

Thank you!

Thank you for bringing attention to something very rotten.

Please look at the "U.S. Cattle Industry Diagram" in www.GoodNeighborLaw.com That, along with many more articles will equip one with truths and facts about Agricultural production.

The U.N., World Bank and their unfair trade practices are killing Ag production in America...deliberately leaving our nation vulnerable to un-friendly nations for our food.

We should ALL be asking "Why?"

They denegrate farming/ranching practices - leading urbanites to believe we need to take all American soil out of production, and turn it into play grounds.

Farmers and ranchers engage in honorable work providing safe, nutrious and delicious products. Plus, they maintain some of the last reservoirs of great "families"... on earth.

Yet, in today's culture, they're more ridiculed, villified, and chokingly regulated than any other profession.

If, for example, Bill Maher was as regulated, he would never made it on TV at all. Smart readers, think on that, and you'll figure out the why easily.

The U.N., Nature Conservancy, European Union, Ted Turner and yes, our own Federal government as their partners, are hell bent on taking land and water out of production agriculture. This is well documented as true, and transcends gravely serious.
Their actions will directly deprive you and I of those wonderful Farmers Markets like the one in Santa Monica.
And again...bring us to the mercy of monopolies, oligopolies and their off shore buddies - thereby controlling the last remnants of independence straight out of us.

Thank you again, for bringing this to light.

Silknspart- on Huffington Post 12/11

For starters, here are a few things - whomever we vote in to be our leader - has a duty to do; regardless their gender, political affiliation, religious bent or ethnicity.

1) Protect our private property and constitutional rights.
2)Get out of the grant business and stop federal welfare to groups like the Nature Conservancy.
3) Stop stealing (eminent domain) property and gifting it to private entities.
4) Sell millions of acres of public land back into the private sector and reactivate resource production.
5) Stop LOST!
6) Stay our sovereignty.
7) Get out of the welfare business and beef up National security - infrastructure of highways/bridges etc. - fair trade and on.
8) Eliminate "income" tax and bring in some form of "consumption/fair/flat" tax.
9) Embrace the essence of "do no harm to thy neighbor."
10) Most importantly, maintain unfailing decency, civility, manners, honesty, thoughtfulness, obedience to our laws, humbleness, never crude or coarse, cheerful, warm, just, and not be beholden to any human.

In other words, someone we'd be joyful having as a role model for our children.
Thank you.

Silknspart- on Huffington Post 1-3-08
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/i-am-conventional-wisdom_b_78958.html

Maxbyte,

As a long time Bunch Quitter, I can assure you you're correct on the "herd" mentality.

In the agriculture world, we are forced minute by minute...to protect ourselves at great, unnecessary costs mentally, physically, and financially...from the deliberately misled herd, who have been convinced by those they so blindly follow, we're obligated to "hand over" the land and water we privately own, or have usage agreements to produce food.

That herd mind set is killing ag production in America. Sure hope the followers are prepared to pay more (in every way) for imported food from un-friendly nations.

Did you know that 66% of the farm bill budget goes to nutrition? Nutrition as in "Food Stamps, School lunches and on. In other words, only 34% goes to "growing food." This information is withheld from the consumer/public, for perpetuation of the perception "farmers and ranchers are subsidized welfare receipients," is an essential tool in shutting down production in America.

Other tools used to crush America's ag producers include ESA (Endangered Species), Conservation Easements, Animal I.D., Estate Tax, and nine zillion pieces of statutes that pepper us with choking regulations (like LOST, Clean water acts).
Unless we STOP groups including TNC, who are fast gaining control over the usage of America's land and water, we are doomed.

Take away America's ability to feed itself, and you take away everything!

I'm looking for a candidate for president who not only understands the danger of this direction, but one who is "Bunch Quitter" enough to stop it. Know any?