Posted on 10/28/2009 7:12:50 PM PDT by Danae
Ok this was just funny enough to pass along. The Source of STFU.
Southern Tenant Farmers Union. No seriously! In 1934 the biracial organization started up in response to the New Deal and the farm subsidies that had the effect of encouraging medium and large land owners to take a good bit of their land out of farming to get the subsidy. That had the effect of throwing about 200,000 black families off the land who were tenants and sharecroppers. It forced thousands of Black share Croppers and white small holders to drift to the cities. The STFU, was not able to effect or stop the Land Owners from closing down the land. The Government money was too good. In fact, It STILL is, farm subsidies are in the tens of billions today, on land that has not been farmed in some cases for generations.
No seriously, its in my History book.
Roosevelt's new deal in the process of stabilizing food prices and inserting government control, took the lively hoods of a lot of families from them. Talk about weighing the good of the many over the good of the few...
Interesting. TSOL had a different connotation at one time, someone really dug for that one though.
It’s not very well known, but in 1934, the Feds, in their efforts to stabilize farm and commodity prices, went to many hundreds of farms in the midwest and opened briefcases full of cash on the farmers’ tables. They paid more than what the then-current price of cattle was to the farmers, but teams of Fed agents shot the farmers’ herds, buried them with bulldozers, and poured lime on them. Likewise, many hundreds of fruit orchards were burned. The farmers/growers were compensated for their losses, but were deprived of their ability to make a living, and most of them, in debt for their land, were foreclosed off their farms and ranches and were left with essentially nothing.
I need one of their tshirts!
on abbreviations; have you seen schwarzenegger’s veto letter to the california state assembly??
unreal
just google it ~ i won’t post it
“schwarzenegger veto letter”
STFU stands for the Southern Tenants Farmers Union???
STFU!!!
Hee Hee.
livelihoods — no, seriously, it’s in my dictionary! ;-)
Someone told me about that 15 years ago-that when people were starving in the depression our government was killing thousands of head of cattle and plowing crops under.
I had a hard time believing it because I wasn’t fully awake as to the dangers of government, but I did believe it because of who it was that told me. It was truly shocking to learn just how evil our own government could be.
If you go find almost anyone age 85 or so or older (~~age 10 or higher in 1933-4) who lived in the rural Midwest, talking about Ohio, Michigan, Minn, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma (I am sure sure I am leaving out some states, besides, it was a nat’l program)and ask them about this, they will confirm it as so. I was reading a thread on Denninger’s site that wandered off-topic into this area and so I cannot readily retrieve it for you. Easily 5 folks chimed in, that their relatives had been bought out, forced to kill their cattle or burn their crops, and after paying off their debts, were forced off their land. Karl D said a relative of his had his apple orchard burned.
This 3-letter FDR program was the “AAA”, Agricultural Adjustment Act, which on preliminary research was the first of only a very few of FDRs’ edicts/agencies which was ultimately overturned by the USSC. Even so, eventually became the model for currently running agricultural subsidy and pay-to-not-plant programs. I can’t claim to know very much about this because it is news to me. But there’s plenty available searching for “Agricultural Adjustment Act”.
I found this site pretty interesting:
http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/water_03.html
Thanks for the link.
Oh my goodness! I knew that the black sharecroppers left my grandfather’s farm in 35 and left their Mammy behind to fend for herself. I never did know why they left. I always thought they went to Detroit to find work. We were living in another sharecroppers cabin on the farm and my Daddy brought Mammy to our house to live with us. She was the spiritual influence in my young life. I adored her.
WOW. Talk about government control. Thats just amazing. People were starving for lack of money, jobs and food, and the fed was burning family farms.
Unbelievable.
Yes, well, consider the “judgement call” the government was trying to achieve/enforce. The gov thought it better that farm prices be propped up even if it meant that goodly numbers of people starved or were forced off the source of their livelihoods. There must have been consideration, apparently, of longer term impacts. For example, if I burn an orchard, it will not produce apples for some number of years even if replanted immediately, and certainly not in the numbers it used to. Likewise, if I slaughter a herd of cows (otherwise not knowing anything about raising cattle) I assume a farmer raising cows for meat can’t sell all his cows as veal (freshly-born cows) without depleting the longer term productivity of his herd, even if veal fetches a higher price per pound. So, my point is, this was clearly and as usual done out of this “we know best” type of mindset and let the results fall where they may.
Watch this, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpUDUVORDI
The gov was trying to create inflation, because the price collapses that were happening in the many markets (stocks, commods, etc;) was viewed as far more insidious.
Al you say is true. They were ultimately trying to increase farm income by reducing supply. It also had the effect of stabilizing food prices, also the intent. Its just incredibly draconian. Can you imagine such a thing happening today? zOMG the outcry would be biblical in proportion... What they are doing now is bad enough and too far. Its the same sort of thin, only instead of Farms getting massacred, its Medicine.
Considering its DOCTORS rather than farmers... its more than a little scary, because a lot of doctors will have to do what the share croppers did. Leave. THAT is scary.
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