25 July 1997
Source: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Congressional Record: July 23, 1997 (Extensions)]
[Page E1496-E1499]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr23jy97-40]


                 ANTI-GOVERNMENT, ANTI-SOCIAL ATTITUDES

                                 ______


                           HON. DAVID R. OBEY

                              of wisconsin

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, July 23, 1997

  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, many of us are concerned about some of the
anti-government and anti-social attitudes that are developing in some
rural communities. It is important to understand that one of the
contributing factors in this unhealthy development is the economic
squeeze that is being placed on many hard-working farmers throughout
the country. Recently an article appeared in one of my hometown
newspapers, City Pages, which brings into sharp focus the psychological
emotional pressures that are fed by the cruel way that farmers have
been dealt with in national farm policy over the past decade or more.
One does not have to agree with every point in the article to recognize
that this analysis is attempting to bring to our attention some
profound truths about the damage that is being done to rural America by
those policies. I urge every American who cares about justice and cares
about the future social stability of the country to heed the concerns
brought to light so forcefully in the article.

                            Harvest of Rage

           how the rural crisis fuels antigovernment movement

                             (By Joel Dyer)

       It's two in the morning when the telephone rings waking
     Oklahoma City psychologist Glen Wallace. The farmer on the
     other end of the line has been drinking and is holding a
     loaded gun to his head. The distressed man tells Wallace that
     his farm is to be sold at auction within a few days. He goes
     on to explain that he can't bear the shame he has

[[Page E1497]]

     brought to his family and that the only way out is to kill
     himself.
       Within hours Wallace is at the farm. This time the farmer
     agrees to go into counseling; this time no one dies.
     Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Wallace has
     handled hundreds of these calls through AG-LINK, a farm
     crisis hotline, and many times the suicide attempts are
     successful. According to Mona Lee Brock, another former AG-
     LINK counselor, therapists in Oklahoma alone make more than
     150 on-site suicide interventions with farmers each year. And
     Oklahoma has only the third highest number of farm suicides
     in the nation, trailing both Montana and Wisconsin.
       A study conducted in 1989 at Oklahoma State University
     determined suicide is by far the leading cause of death on
     America's family farms, and that they are the direct result
     of economic stress.
       As heartwrenching as those statistics are, they also are
     related to a much broader issue. Those who have watched the
     previously strong family farm communities wither have seen
     radical, anti-government groups and militas step in all
     across the country, and especially in the Midwest.
       As far back as 1989, Wallace--then director of Rural Mental
     Health for Oklahoma--was beginning to see the birth pangs of
     today's heartland revolt. In his testimony before a U.S.
     congressional committee examining rural development, Wallace
     warned that farm-dependent rural areas were falling under a
     ``community psychosis:''
       ``Many debt-ridden farm families will become more
     suspicious of government, as their self-worth, their sense of
     belonging, their hope for the future deteriorates. . . These
     families are torn by divorce, domestic violence, alcoholism.
     There is a loss of relationships of these communities to the
     state and federal government.
       ``We have communities that are made up now of collectively
     depressed individuals, and the symptoms of that community
     depression are similar to what you would find in someone that
     has a long term chronic depression.''
       Wallace went on to tell the committee that if the rural
     economic system remained fragile, which it has, the community
     depression could turn into a decade's long social and
     cultural psychosis, which he described as ``stress
     syndrome.''
       In 1989, Wallace could only guess how this community
     psychosis would eventually express itself. He believes this
     transition is now a reality.
       ``We knew the anti-government backlash was just around the
     corner, but we didn't know exactly what form it would take.
     You can't treat human beings in a society the way farmers
     have been treated without them organizing and fighting back.
     It was just a matter of time.''

                           The Rural Sickness

       ``I don't even know if I should say this,'' says Wallace
     regarding the explosion that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah
     building killing 168 people, ``but the minute that bomb went
     off, I suspected it was because of the farm crisis. These
     people (farmers) have suffered so much.'' Wallace, who has
     spend much of his professional life counseling depressed
     farmers, could only hope he was wrong.
       The United States has lost more than 700,000 small- to
     medium-size family farms since 1980. For the 2 percent of
     America that makes its living from the land, this loss is a
     crisis that surpasses even the Great Depression. For the
     other 98 percent--those who gauge the health of the farm
     industry by the amount of food on our supermarket shelves--
     the farm crisis is a vaguely remembered headline from the
     last decade.
       But not for long. The farms are gone, yet the farmers
     remain. They've been transformed into a harvest of rage,
     fueled by the grief of their loss and blown by the winds of
     conspiracy and hate-filled rhetoric.
       By the tens of thousands they are being recruited by the
     anti-government militia movement. Some are being enlisted by
     the Freemen and Christian Identity groups that comprise the
     most violent components of this revolution of the heartland.
       Detractors of these violent groups such as Morris Dees of
     the Southern Poverty Law Center blame them for everything
     from the Oklahoma City bombing to the formation of militia
     organizations to influencing Pat Buchanan's rhetoric. They
     may be right.
       But the real question remains unanswered. Why has a
     religious and political ideology that has existed in sparse
     numbers since the 1940s, suddenly--within the last 15 years--
     become the driving force in the rapidly growing anti-
     government movement which Dees estimates has five million
     participants ranging from tax protesters to armed militia
     members?
       The main cause for the growth of these violent anti-
     government groups is economic, and the best example of this
     is the farm crisis. What was for two decades a war of
     economic policy has become a war of guns and bombs and arson.
       At the center of this storm is the ``justice'' movement, a
     radical vigilante court system, a spin-off of central
     Wisconsin's Posse Commitatus system of the 1980s, which will
     likely affect all our lives on some level in the future. It
     may have touched us already in the form of the Oklahoma City
     bombing.
       Freemen/Identity common-law courts are being convened in
     back rooms all across America, and sentences are being
     delivered. Trials are being held on subjects ranging from the
     Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' handling of Waco to
     a person's sexual preference or race. And the sentences are
     all the same--death.
       We may never prove the Oklahoma City bombing was the result
     of a secret common-law court, but we can show it was the
     result of some kind of sickness, a ``madness'' in the rural
     parts of our nation. Unless we move quickly to address the
     economic problems which spawned this ``madness'' we are
     likely entering the most violent time on American soil since
     the Civil War.
       Men and women who were once the backbone of our culture
     have declared war on the government they blame for their pain
     and suffering--and not without some cause.

                         The Economics of Hate

       The 1989 rural study showed that farmers took their own
     lives five times more often than they were killed by
     equipment accidents which, until the study, were considered
     to be the leading cause of death.
       ``These figures are probably very conservative,'' says Pat
     Lewis who directed the research. ``We've been provided with
     information from counselors and mental health workers that
     suggests that many of the accidental deaths are in reality,
     suicides.''

                           *   *   *   *   *

       In Oklahoma, the government is foreclosing on Josh Powers,
     a farmer who took out a $98,000 loan at 8 percent in 1969.
     That same loan today has an interest rate of 15 percent--
     almost twice as high as when the note was first issued. The
     angry farmer claims that he's paid back more than $150,000
     against the loan, yet he still owes $53,000 on the note. Says
     Powers, ``They'll spend millions to get me, a little guy, off
     the land--while Neil Bush just walks away from the savings
     and loan scandal.''
       The 1987 Farm Bill allowed for loans such as this to be
     ``written down,'' allowing farmers to bring their debt load
     back in line with the diminished value of their farm. The
     purpose of the bill was to keep financially strapped farmers
     on the land. But in a rarely equaled display of government
     bungling, this debt forgiveness process was left to the whims
     of county bureaucrats with little or no banking experience.
       As Wallace points out, ``Imagine the frustration when a
     small farmer sees the buddy or family member of one of these
     county agents getting a $5 million write-down at the same
     time the agent is foreclosing on them (the small farmer) for
     a measly $20,000. It happens all the time. When these little
     farmers complain, they're given this telephone number in
     Washington. It's become a big joke in farm country, I've even
     tried to call it for years. You get this recording and nobody
     ever calls you back.
       ``These farmers are literally at the mercy of these county
     bureaucrats and some of them are just horrible people . . .
     We've had to intervene several times to keep farmers from
     killing them.''
       Most Americans are unaware that the farm crisis isn't over.
     According to counselor Brock, things are as bad now for the
     family farmer as they were in the 80s. She notes that recent
     USDA figures that show the economic health of farms improving
     are, in fact, skewed by the inclusion of large farming
     cooperatives and corporate farms. Brock also says that
     ``state hotlines are busier than ever as the small family
     farmer is being pushed off the land.''
       According to Wallace thousands of people have died as a
     result of the farm crisis, but not just from suicides. The
     psychologist says the number of men and women who have died
     of heart attacks and other illnesses--directly as a result of
     stress brought on by foreclosure--dwarfs the suicide numbers.
       These deaths are often viewed as murder in farm country.
       This spring, I went to western Oklahoma and met with a
     group fo farmers who have become involved in the Freeman/
     Identity movement. This meeting demonstrated not only their
     belief that the government is to blame for their loss, but
     also the politics that evolve from that belief.
       ``They murdered her,'' says Sam Conners (not his real name)
     referring to the government. The room goes silent as the gray
     haired 60-year-old stares out the window of his soon-to-be-
     foreclosed farmhouse. In his left hand he holds a photograph
     of his wife who died of a heart attack in 1990. ``She fought
     'em as long as she could,'' he continues, ``but she finally
     gave out. Even when she was lying there in a coma and I was
     visiting her every day--bringing my nine-year-old boy to see
     his momma everyday--they wouldn't cut me no slack. All they
     cared about was getting me off my land so they could take it.
     But I tell you now, I'm never gonna' give up. They'll have to
     carry me off feet first and they probably will.''
       The other men in the room all quietly as they listen to
     Conners' story, their eyes alternating between their dirty
     work boots and the angry farmer. The conversation comes to a
     sudden halt with a ``click'' from a nearby tape recorder.
     Conners looks clumsy as he tries to change the small tape in
     the micro-cassette recorder. His thick earth-stained fingers
     seem poorly designed for the delicate task. ``I apologize for
     recording you,'' he says to this reporter. ``We just have to
     be careful.''
       With their low-tech safeguard back in place, one of the
     other men begins to speak. Tim, a California farmer who looks
     to be in his early 30s, describes his plight: another farm,
     another foreclosure, more anti-government sentiment. Only
     this time, the story is filled with the unmistakable
     religious overtones of the Christian Identity movement;

[[Page E1498]]

     one world government, Satan's Jewish bankers, the federal
     reserve, a fabricated Holocaust, a coming holy war. ``This
     kind of injustice is going on all over the country,'' says
     Tim. ``It's what happened to the folks in Montana (referring
     to the Freemen) and it's what happened to me. That's why
     LeRoy (Schweltzer, the leader of the Justus Township Freeman)
     was arrested. He was teaching people how to keep their farms
     and ranches. He was showing them that the government isn't
     constitutional. They foreclose on us so they can control the
     food supply. What they want to do is control the Christians.

                         The Mind of the Farmer

       Losing a farm doesn't happen overnight. It can often take
     four to six years from the time a farm family first gets into
     financial trouble. By the end, says Wallace, these families
     are victims of chronic long term stress. ``Once a person is
     to that point,'' he explains, ``there are only a few things
     that can happen.''
       ``There are basically four escape hatches for chronic long
     term stress. One, a person seeks help--usually through a
     church or the medical community. Two, they can't take the
     pain and they commit suicide. They hurt themselves. Three,
     they become psychotic. They lose touch with reality. They
     basically go crazy. And last, they become psychotic and turn
     their anger outward. They decide that since they hurt,
     they're going to make others hurt. These are the people that
     wind up threatening or even killing their lenders or FMHA
     agents. They're also the ones that are most susceptible to a
     violent anti-government message.''
       Unfortunately, psychotic personalities looking for support
     can find it in the wrong places. ``Any group,'' says Wallace,
     ``can fill the need for support. Not just good ones.
     Identity, militias or any anti-governmental group can come
     along and fill that role. Add their influence to a
     personality that is already violent towards others and you
     have an extremely dangerous individual.''
       No one knows how many members of the 700,000 farm families
     who have already lost their land or the additional hundreds
     of thousands that are still holding on to their farms under
     extreme duress have fallen prey to this violent psychosis,
     but those who have watched this situation develop agree the
     number is growing.
       Wallace says that most people don't understand the mindset
     of farmers. ``They ask, why don't farmers just get a new job
     or why does losing a farm cause someone to kill themselves or
     someone else?'' Another rural psychologist, Val Farmer, has
     written often on this subject. In an article in the Iowa
     Farmer Today, he explained why farm loss affects its victims
     so powerfully.
       ``To lose a farm is to lose part of one's own identity.
     There is probably no other occupation that has affects its
     victims so powerfully.
       ``To lose a farm is to lose part of one's own identity.
     There is probably no other occupation that has the potential
     for defining one's self so completely. Those who have gone
     through the loss of a family farm compare their grief to a
     death in the family, one of the hardest experiences in life.
       ``Like some deaths, the loss may have been preventable. If
     a farmer blames himself, the reaction is guilt. Guilt can
     stem from a violation of family trust. By failing to keep the
     farm in the family, he loses that for which others had
     sacrificed greatly. The loss of the farm also affects the
     loss of the opportunity to pass on the farm to a child. Guilt
     can also arise from failing to anticipate the conditions that
     eventually placed the farm at risk; government policy, trade
     policies, world economy, prices, weather.
       ``On the other hand, if the loss is perceived to have been
     caused by the actions and negligence of others, then the
     farmer is racked with feelings of anger, bitterness and
     betrayal. This feeling extends to lenders, government, the
     urban public or the specific actions of a particular
     individual or institution.''
       ``The stress intensifies with each new setback; failure to
     cash flow, inability to meet obligations, loan refusal,
     foreclosure notices, court appearances and farm auctions.''
     Farmer concludes that ``these people start grasping at
     straws--anything to slave off the inevitable.''

                          Preying on the Sick

       Wallace agrees with Farmer and believes the anti-government
     message is one such straw. ``When you reach the point where
     you're willing to kill yourself, anything sounds good. When
     these groups come along and tell a farmer that it's not his
     fault, it's the government's fault or the bank's fault,
     they're more than ready to listen. These groups are preying
     on sick individuals.''
       It's no wonder that groups like the Freemen, We the People
     and Christian Identity have found such enthusiastic support.
     They preach a message of hope for desperate men and women.
       The Freemen offer their converts a chance to save the farm
     through a quagmire of constitutional loopholes and their
     complicated interpretations of the Uniform Commercial Code.
     Their legal voodoo may seem nuts to a suburban dweller, but
     to a desperate farmer they offer a last hope to hang on to
     the land their grandfather homesteaded, a trust they intended
     to pass on to their children.
       And just how crazy their rhetoric is remains to be seen.
     Not all in the legal community scoff at the Freemen's claim,
     famed attorney Getty Spence--who represented Randy Weaver, a
     survivor of Ruby Ridge--has stated that at least some of
     their interpretations of constitutional law are accurate. It
     will be years before the court system manages to sort out the
     truth from the myth, and only then provided it desires to
     scrutinize itself--something it historically has shown little
     stomach for.
       Organizers of We the People told farmers they could receive
     windfalls of $20 million or more from the federal government.
     They explained to their audiences--which sometimes reached
     more than 500--that they had won a Supreme Court judgment
     against the feds for allowing the country to go off the gold
     standard. They claimed that for a $300 filing fee the
     desperate farmers could share in the riches.
       The media has repeatedly described the exploits of Freeman/
     We the People members: millions in hot checks, false liens,
     refusal to leave land that has been foreclosed by the bank
     and sold at auction and plans to kidnap and possibly kill
     judges.
       Members of the press, including the alternative press, have
     commented on the fact that what all these people seem to have
     in common is that they are unwilling to pay their bills.
       The Daily Oklahoman quoted an official describing these
     anti-government groups as saying: ``We are talking about
     people who are trying to legitimize being deadbeats and thugs
     by denying their responsibilities.''
       But that analysis is at best partially true and at worst
     dead wrong.
       What most of these radical anti-government people have in
     common--and what most government officials refuse to
     acknowledge--is that they were, first and foremost, unable to
     pay their bills. It was only after being unable to pay that
     they took up the notion of being unwilling to pay.
       These farmers are the canaries in the coal mine of
     America's economy. They are in effect monitoring the fallout
     from the ever widening ``gap'' between the classes. The
     canaries are dying and that bodes poorly for the rest of us
     in the mine.
       Both Farmer and Wallace agree that, as a rule, farmers have
     an extremely strong and perhaps unhealthy sense of morality
     when it comes to paying their bills. They suffer from deep
     humiliation and shame when they can't fulfill their financial
     obligations.
       Wallace says, ``It's only natural that they would embrace
     an ideology that comes along and says they are not only not
     bad for failing to pay their debts but rather are morally and
     politically correct to not pay their debts. It's a message
     that provides instant relief from the guilt that's making
     them sick.''
       In much the same way, only more dangerous, Christian
     Identity offers a way out for stressed farm families.
     Identity teaches that Whites and native Americans are God's
     chosen people and that Jews are the seed of Satan. Identity
     believers see a conspiracy of ``Satan's army of Jews'' taking
     control of banks, governments, media and most major
     corporations and destroying the family farm in order to
     control the food supply. They believe that we are at the
     beginning of a holy war where identity followers must battle
     these international forces of evil and establish a new and
     ``just'' government based on the principles of the Bible's
     Old Testament as they interpret it. They become a soldier in
     a holy war under orders to not give up their land or money to
     the Jewish enemy.

                          And Justice for Some

       The renegade legal system known as the ``Justice'' movement
     is now estimated to be in more than 40 states. It seems to
     have as many variations as the fractional anti-government
     movement that created it. Some mainstream Patriots hold
     common-law courts at venues where the press and those accused
     of crimes are invited to attend. Sentences from these
     publicly held trials usually result in lawsuits, arrest
     warrants, judgments and liens being filed against public
     officials.
       In Colorado, Attorney Gail Norton has been just one of the
     targets of these courts. She's had millions of dollars worth
     of bogus liens filed against her. Across the nation,
     thousands of public officials including governors, judges,
     county commissioners and legislatures have been the targets
     of this new ``paper terrorism.'' In most cases they are found
     guilty of cavorting with the enemy: the federal government.
       Ironically, arresting those involved in this mainstream
     common law court revolution isn't easy. It's not because they
     can't be found; it's because they may not be doing anything
     illegal. Last month, Richard Wintory, the chief deputy of the
     Oklahoma attorney general's office, told the Daily Oklahoman
     that he could not say whether common-law court organizers had
     broken any laws.
       The debate as to whether or not citizens have a
     constitutional right to convene grand juries and hold public
     trials will eventually be resolved. It's only one of the
     fascinating legal issues being raised by the heartland
     revolt. But there is a darker side to this vigilante court
     system, one that deals out death sentences in its quest to
     deliver justice and create a new and holy government.
       In his book Gathering Storm, Dees describes Identity this
     way: ``There is nothing `goody, goody' to `tender' bout
     Identity. It is a religion, a form of Christianity, that few
     churchgoers would recognize as that of Jesus, son of a loving
     God. It is a religion on steroids. It is a religion whose god
     commands the death of race traitors, homosexuals, and other
     so-called children of Satan.''

[[Page E1499]]

       It is for this reason that the common law courts convened
     by those groups influenced by the Identity belief system are
     by far the most dangerous. Death sentences can be doled out
     for almost any conceivable transgression.
       In the remote western Oklahoma farmhouse, Freeman/Identity
     farmers discussed the Justice movement. One man who had
     recently lost his farm to foreclosure explained their court
     system. ``What you're seeing right now is just the beginning
     of taking back our country, the true Israel. The Bible says
     that we're to be a just people. Where is justice in this
     country? Our judges turn loose rapists and murderers and put
     farmers in jail. We're about justice. Why would anyone be
     afraid of that?
       ``We're holding courts right now in every part of this
     land. We're finding people guilty and we're keeping records
     so we can carry out the sentences. It's the citizen's duty
     and right to hold common law courts. It's the militia's job
     to carry out the sentences.''
       The farmer goes on to explain that Identity doesn't believe
     in prisons. He says that nearly all serious offenses are
     dealt with by capital punishment and that this punishment
     system is based on the Bible, the first 10 amendments to the
     Constitution and the Magna Carta. When asked how these death
     sentences would be carried out, he says, ``There's a part of
     the militia that's getting ready to start working on that
     (death sentences). I think they're ready to go now. You'll
     start seeing it soon.''
       Perhaps we already have. Was the Oklahoma City bombing only
     the largest and most recent example? When asked, the men in
     the room state emphatically that they have no first hand
     knowledge of the bombing--even though some of them were
     questioned by the FBI within days of the deadly explosion.
     They say the don't condone it because so many innocent people
     died. But they agree that it may well have been the result of
     a secret court sentence. The court could have found the AFT
     guilty for any number of actions--including Waco and Ruby
     Ridge--and the militia foot soldiers, in this case McVeigh
     and Nichols, may have simply followed orders to carry out the
     sentence.
       Whatever the case in Oklahoma City, it seems likely that
     this new and radical system of vigilante justice can't help
     but produce similar catastrophes.
       The process that gave us that bomb was likely the result of
     the same stress-induced illness that is tearing our country
     apart one pipe bomb or burned-downed church at a time.
     Comprehending and healing that illness is our only hope for
     creating a future free of more bombs, more death and
     destruction.



                          ____________________

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


