There's a war going on. It's happening mostly behind the scenes, at the desks of a coven of crooked bureaucrats and banksters nationwide. If you thought the bank bail out ate a hole in your pocket, look at what the banksters, unindicted bureaucrats and land thieves have been doing to the nation's farmers and to the security of your food supply.
The ongoing thievery in the banking, insurance and real estate industry has ripped the heart out of the economy. As the result of organized financial crime in the financial services and real estate industry, Americans have lost billions of dollars in real estate equity, retirement accounts and investment equity.
An overly friendly regulatory system allowed banks to "leverage", or lend the same funds over and over, leveraging money to impossible heights. Some banks leveraged a dollar up to 20 times or more, and when the system finally crashed, the domino effect reverberated across the board, from banking, to real estate, to investment planning and beyond. No industry is untouched, no city unscathed.
Aided, abetted, and possibly mousetrapped by untold numbers of quantative analysts, "AKA" quants, many of whom are Chinese nationals, the financial services industry created thousands of new investment vehicles in uncharted waters. Now, after the mathematical models of these mystery meat and secret sauce investment vehicles have been found to be tainted, the world's financial system continues to reel from the effects of this financial food poisoning.
Everybody's blaming everyone else. The Republicans blame regulation. The Democrats say there wasn't enough regulation. Industry analysts blame faulty mathematics, and the investors, employees and taxpayers want to put behinds behind bars.
Funny thing. For all of the trillions of dollars in equity and real estate value that was lost, for all of the evidence of collusion, corruption, conspiracy, theft, forgery, document deception and other asserted criminal acts, few have gone to jail.
As one observer of the American condition once said, "The best way to rob a bank is to own one." And, indeed, the insiders have been busy carting off the loot as fast as their fingers could offshore the funds.
The only thing that keeps any currency afloat is the faith of the people using it. This is why many banks and financial institutions don't prosecute the inside thieves and crooks. If people knew the extent of insider fraud and thievery in the credit card industry, in banking, real estate, they'd be up in arms.
Even worse: they would lose faith in the system, and that, we just can't afford. After all, the "dollar" or any other currency is only as valuable as people believe it to be. When we lose faith in the system, the value of the currency drops as well.
Which brings us back to the current situation: just what is it going to take to "get America up and running again?"
There are so many places that these unindicted financial felons infest these days, that we'd need an entire army of financial investigators and prosecutors to ferret them out and send their brethren up the river.
While the nation's attention is diverted by the shennanigans on Wall Street, an equally important band of financial miscreants continues along their merry way in the nation's agriculture loan industry. Billions of dollars in land, equipment, livestock and crops continues to be stolen, misappropriated, diverted, or even destroyed, by agencies which are rarely audited, even though billions of dollars in agricultural equipment, livestock and loans passes through their hands.
Long before the current financial crash, the seeds for the financial misappropriation had already sprouted in the nation's farm loan bureaucracy. Aided and abetted by a policy to weed out small-scale farmers, through the manipulation of the loan process,a policy begun in 1972, (see Congressional Record,"Young Executives Plan to Liquidate Farmers, 6-16-1972-6-26-1972),small scale bureaucrats found a nice niche manipulating bureaucratic policy and sometimes fattening their wallets.
Under the guise of making the nation's food supply more "efficient", the Plan laid the foundation for a scheme of driving more than 2 million small farmers out of business by 2000. The plan created a hostile atmosphere, and generated a fertile environment for illegal methods to drive family farmers out of business and has succeded beyond its wildest dreams.
Some call it genocide.
With its bias toward corporate farming, the Report said its investigation included, "establishnments that cannot reasonably be called farms and are inconsistent with the Department's farm income mission." (Ibid)
Family farmers were, quite simply, not what the feds wanted. The Report's statistics "include[d] establishments that cannot rasonably be called farms and are inconsistent with the Department's farm income mission." (Ibid)
In that light, the "executives", who included a group of young, upcoming administrators in the Agriculture Department in 1972, wrote that "Agriculture should be viewed as an industry which consumes resources, provides emplloyment, and produces goods of value to society." (Ibid)
Small family farms, which were mostly operated by families, did not fall into the category of viable business operations,accordig to the "executives." Unfortunately for millions of family farmers across the nation, bureaucrats took this report as a green light to redirect farm loan programs toward large, industrial farms and to, according to several farm activists, "starve out", lesser entitities.
Their methods then and now reportedly include: manipulation of loan regulations, document forgery, deceptive, often illegal practices of holding up loans funds, delaying disbursement of operating capital, illegally sharing applicant information with banks, realtors and investors, and feuding with outspoken farmers of all ethnicities.
When black farmers had finally had enough and filed the Black Farmer Lawsuit in 1999, the system really started churning. The lawsuit mandated that the black farmer "prove his case" by finding a "similarly situated white farmer" who had received a loan, when the black farmer was denied a loan.
Unfortunately for the white farmers who allowed the black farmers to use their information, the farm agency often retaliated in a big way. One white farmer in Texas, who allowed a black farmer to use him as a "similarly situated white farmer", wound up on the wrong side of a feud with the federal farm loan system--and eventually ended up in prison for his pains.
According to Larry N. Mack, a white farmer fronm Palestine, Texas, "While on the County Committee (Farm Service loan committee), I, along with the other two members, refused a direct order from the County Supervisor, as directed by the State Office, to find a borrower ineligible for a loan. Later, I reported an illegal case of racial discrimination. I was named as a similarly situated delinquent white borrower in two of the Pigford v Glickman cases. My advocacy for Black ranchers motivated USDA to retaliate." (Larry N. Mack, "Some Highlights of the Mack Experience With the USDA's Farm Service Agency's Farm Loan Program 1991-2001")
Mr. Mack's experience with the federal farm loan system mirrors that of millions of farmers across the nation. Mack accuses the USDA of destroying his ranch operation by: 1. Failing to keep accurate sales records; 2. delaying sales; 3. Presenting misinformation and untruths both in and out of court; 4. USDA and other DOJ staff simply acted in bad faith by failing to follow the laws and regulatios [of the United States](Ibid)
Farm supporters say the agency's manipulation of loan documents, its failure to keep accurate records, its proven delaying of farm loan fund disbursement and its acting in bad faith--including allegations of perjury by agency personnel, have generated nothing less than a war on small farmers.
The fact that the agency has the power to delay or even retract the disbursement of funds, together with the USDA's policy of rewarding loan officers who "clear bankruptices" puts too much power and too many ethical conflicts in the hands of Farm Service Agency loan officers.
It is a clear conflict of interest when the loan officer who wrote the loan gets a bonus for clearing bankrupt farmers off the books. This is almost a certain prescription for driving farmers into bankruptcy.
Some farmers and ranchers have been driven into bankruptcy by a policy so Machiavellian that one simply has to admire it for its deviousness. It goes like this.
A farmer or rancher gets a loan to purchase animals (cows) or crops. The loan is secured by the animals or crops. If the farmer sells these "secured assets" without permission, he could be sent to prison for selling secured assets.
So, in order to drive the farmer out of business, the agency simply refuses the farmer permission to sell the cattle or crop. If the farmer can't sell, he can't pay the loan back; if he sells without permission, the agency could have him arrested for selling secured assets. If the agency delays permission, the animals may be too old for the market, prices may have dropped, or drought conditions may necessitate the sale of a few animals in order to feed the others.
According to Larry Mack, "...in 1991, USDA refused the shipment of our '91 calf crop per the Form 1991, their formal release of their lien on the calves. There was no reason given other than the calves were mortgaged property and if I sold them I would be in 'big trouble.' (Ibid)
The agency repeated its refusal to release the lien in 1992, and, according to Mack, "This pattern of retaliation was repeated over and over in various farms for the next several years, until 2001. USDA never stopped the sale of our calves, onlydelayed them and consequently the income. The net result of these delays was to cvausr me to be delinquent on the loan installment payments. It was clearly shown on the Form 1962 that the money for the payments was to come from the sale proceeds. Without the sale, there is no payment." (Ibid)
The '93 calf crop was worth or than the value of the loan which it collateralized, but Mack says "USDA never had any intention of the loan being repaid. The sales were delilberately delayed so the loan would fall into delinquency and theyo could obtain a lien on the land during the necessary restructuring. Once they obtained a lien on the land, they used their "starve out procedure" to methodically destroy our equity in the cattle so they could take the land." (Ibid)
The parallels between the collusion, corruption and conflicts of interest in the farm loan, real estate and mortgage banking industry can not be ignored. The illegal sharing of information, insider trading, lack of regulatory oversight, document deception, theft and collusion have cost millions of farmers and homeowners their livelihoods and even their lives.
Hundreds of farmers have committed suicide, or have been driven to nervous breakdowns or heart attacks because of the hostile, often illegal actions of the federal farm loan bureaucracy. The Young Executives Report has generated 40 years of bureaucratic hostility, providing a fertile environment for institutional racism and bias against family farmers, generating billions of dollars worth of lawsuits, and, ultimately, compromising the nation's food supply, through the over-dependence on factory farming.
Concentrating on mega-factory farms puts too much power in the hands of too few farm operators, and generates a vulnerability that we can not afford. Some are sadly deluded if they believe that "...America has evolved to where it doesn't need to raise it's own food." (Troy Marshall, Beef Cow Calf Weekly, 4-24-08
The corruption in the loan industry has created a massive vulnerability in three critical sectors of the US economy: farming, housing, and banking.It has already been proven that self-regulation in these industries has created corruption, collusion and massive losses. Unless and until a viable regulatory structure is developed, the nation will continue to lose billions to fraudsters and theives.
Monica Davis is an author, columnnist, radio personality and public speaker. She is has written 5 books and hundreds of articles on a variety of subjects including, lynching, black farmers, food security, alternative energy, economics and politics. She is published in the US, Great Britain and India. Her articles have been read into the Congressional Record and used by home schoolers in New Zealand. Ms. Davis has conducted seminars and presentations on black farmers and the plight of farm women at universities and museums. Her book, Land, Legacy and Lynching: Building the Future in Black America has been cited in several doctoral dissertations.
Her author website is: http://www.lulu.com/...
She may be reached at: davis4000_2000@yahoo.com