Comes down. Down from a thousand hill sides, washing the top off of the valley. For 50 years we dug for cotton and moved west when the land gave out. For 50 years we plowed for corn and moved on when the land gave out. We planted and plowed with no regard for the future and 400 million tons of top soil, 400 million tons of our most val valuable resource have been washed into the gulf of mexico every year. And poor land makes poor people. Poor people make poor land. For a quarter of a century, we have been forcing more and more farmers into tenants. 10 are shared croppers down on their knees in the valley. A share of the crop their only security, no home, no land of their own, aimless, foot loose and impoverished. Unable to eat even from the land because their cash crop is their only livelihood. Credit at the store their only reserve. A generation growing up with no new land in the west, no new continent to build. A generation whose people knew Kings Mountain and shilou. A generation wh
Growing up without proper food, medical care or schooling, ill clad, il housed and ill fed and in the greatest river valley in the world. There is no such thing as an ideal river in nature but the Mississippi River is out of joint. Dust blowing in the west, floods raging in the east, we have seen these problems growing to alarming extremes. When we first found the great valley, it was 40 forested. Today, for every 100 acres of forest we found, we have ten left. Today 5 of the entire valley is ruined forever for agricultural use. 25 of the top soil has been shoved by the old river into the gulf of mexico. Today two out of five farmers in the valley are tenant farmers. 10 of them share croppers and we are forcing 50,000 more into tenancy and cropping every year. Flood control of the mississippi means control in the great delta. Control. We had the power to take the valley apart, we have the power to put it together again. In 1933 we started. Down on the Tennessee River when congress crea
Since 1933, we have subsidized farming in america. Is that a good idea . And who benefits . The small farmer big agribusiness or, at the end of the chain, the consumer . The story of the American Farmer is one of the great ironies of the modern era. Incredibly productive, but frequently unprofitable. Its a story that too often ends like this. Perfect competition and inelastic demand can the farmer make a profit . Economic analyst richard gill and i will examine that question on this edition of economics u a. Im david schoumacher. You can see the forces that control a Farmers Economic wellbeing at work here at this farmers market. Taken together it demonstrates a concept that economists call perfect competition. In other words, every farmer who raises, say, tomatoes, is in competition with every other farmer who raises tomatoes. The market determines the price through the interplay of supply and demand. So the farmer is a price taker, not a price maker, and he tries to produce at the lo
Let me tell you about the project and a lot about San Francisco and by the end of this, youre going to feel like you have been buried about the new deal. I am only scratching the surface. I havent even gotten through it. Its terrific. I recommend that is supplementary reading. Homework assignment that you have to do that. I am going to tell you about the living new deal project and a lot of stuff that got done in San Francisco and various other places as well, too. We have to really learn from the last Great Depression. Because, in fact, we might be having another one soon. The Great Depression was photo. The Farm Security division which turned good photographers into great ones. Berkeley photographer dorothy alang. These give you an idea of just how apalling bad the great reh depression was. The best we have, as well as movies, its difficult to million how it was. We tend to look back through the safety net, which was created by the new deal. It was very difficult for young people to
Panel or the second one. But i think that this joint plan of action and the diplomatic effort of the administration give us a historic opportunity we cant afford to put a cross on. The joint plan of action and the interim agreement, with in my view from analyzing it and reading analysis done by many who are smarter than me that slows and reverses aspects with not all aspects but critical aspect of the Iranian Nuclear program, which sanctions alone has not been able to do. And it also provides this country and our partners and all of our allies and the entire world a better Early Warning system about whether iran is cheating. We get more time on the clock and better Early Warning system because of the deal. We have to give diplomacy a chance. We have to. I think aggressive diplomacy has been an underexercised american muscle. In the last 15 years. We have to return to the kind of aggressive diplomacy the nation embraced when Teddy Roosevelt broke end the end of the war, won a nobel peac