[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 105 (Wednesday, July 23, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1496-E1499]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                 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.

     

                          ____________________