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.
