U.S. FARM CRISIS; AUSTRALIA'S KEY ROLE IN ANZUS; THE CHANGE IN RELIGION; MR. REAGAN EXALTS HEROES
The first big domestic crisis confronting President Reagan is the explosive farm credit crunch. State house representatives from the Midwestern farm belt have trekked to Washington this past week, imploring the Administration for interest rate reductions and emergency loan guarantees for hard-pressed farmers, who might not otherwise be able to plant their fields in a few weeks. Some aid may be forthcoming, but Mr. Reagan has promised to veto any expensive measure that would seriously impact the already strained federal budget. He is proceeding from a top-level report that contends that the problem of failing farms is concentrated in about one farmer out of every 15 who got overly aggressive in buying rapidly-appreciating land in the late 1970s. Farmland values have since fallen drastically and these overextended farmers are stuck with huge indebtedness and a shrinking net worth. Of course there are other factors as well, such as depressed commodity prices, mountainous surpluses of some products, the strong dollar (which has reduced some export sales) and the carryover effects of past government political decisions, such as boycotted grain shipments to the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, the President and Budget Director David Stockman have announced their intentions of gradually eliminating most if not all farm subsidy programs. It just could be that the Republican Party could get nailed with the blame for the farm crisis by voters in the Midwest in the 1986 off-year elections. The February 4, 1985 U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT carried a feature article entitled "America's Farmers Down the Tubes?" Some excerpts follow:
A recent Agriculture Department survey found that as many as 243,000 of the nation's 2.3 million farms may have serious financial problems, and 145,000 more are in extreme trouble. Many of these debt-laden farmers fear they will be forced out of business this spring because they have exhausted their credit and will be unable to borrow money to plant crops.
As more and more farmers are driven from the land, small towns and cities are dying. Equipment dealers, grain elevators and mom and pop stores along Main Street are closing. Banks that have extended repayments and renegotiated loans to hard-pressed farmers now are threatened themselves. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's latest problem-bank list included 231 farm banks, more than double their number a year earlier. Since that June 30 report was issued, more than half of all bank failures have involved farm banks.
Almost 30 percent of the federal Farmers Home Administration's 25.2 billion dollars in outstanding loans are delinquent. The problem is most severe in the heart of the nation's breadbasket — Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, Indiana and Ohio.
The crisis had its beginning in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union began buying massive amounts of U.S. grain and predictions of worldwide famine made agriculture a fast-growth industry. Established farmers rushed to expand operations, while about 70,000 young Americans took up the occupations of their parents. Many borrowed heavily to buy land and equipment. Farm debt jumped from 73.3 billion dollars in 1974 to 182 billion in 1981.
The heavy borrowing was backed by rapidly escalating land prices. Between 1974 and 1981, the average price of farmland in the U.S. rose from $302 an acre to $795. Prime Midwestern land shot up to $4,000 an acre. The boom peaked in 1981, and land values have careened downhill ever since. Economists blame the global recession, a stronger U.S. dollar, years of high interest rates and politically inspired embargoes on food exports that made overseas customers doubt the reliability of American suppliers and provided an opening for competitors.
Net farm income fell from 31 billion dollars in 1981 to an estimated 24 billion, at most, this year.... Emanuel Melichar, an economist with the Federal Reserve System, estimates that 83 percent of the farm debt is owed by only 29 percent of farmers. More than two thirds of them have debts equal to 40 percent of the value of their farms — the point at which they owe more in interest than they earn from their crops.
A February 11 report received over our Reuters wire added the following:
Neil Harl, a professor of economics at Iowa State University,... [said that] banks. are already overextended.... They have loaned more than they can now recover since the collateral involved, the land itself, has sharply fallen in value. An acre of prime Iowa farmland which sold for $2,147 in 1981, he said, sells today for $1,357 — when a buyer can be found....
Today the total U.S. farm debt is estimated to be $210 billion, more than the entire combined debt of the governments of Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, and second only to the U.S. government's debt. Tom Curl, a farmer from Clinton, Ill...said: "Our debt is second only to the federal government's. We are forced to compete with the federal government for cred it. We have substituted credit for profit to the point where we've used up our equity. Our net income the last several years has not been sufficient to even service the interest on that debt."
More on ANZUS: The Key Role Played by Australia
So far, New Zealand has drawn the spotlight in the brewing ANZUS crisis. Prime Minister David Lange is presently on a tour of Europe, explaining his government's non-nuclear stance. He explained his position while in Los Angeles on a brief stopover. On network television, the outspoken Mr. Lange generally portrayed himself in the underdog role; it was Washington, not Wellington, he maintained, that threatened the break up of ANZUS. Asked whether the U.S. could be expected to continue to defend New Zealand with its "nuclear umbrella" he emphatically replied that his government no longer wanted such a covering, that New Zealand was more secure without it.
However, many experts emphasize that the real country to watch is Australia, chiefly due to the highly sophisticated American military installations located there. Loss of these facilities would have a sizable impact on the extension of U.S. power in the Pacific, and would affect American security itself. Because of the strategic importance of these installations, the U.S. chose to go easy on Prime Minister Bob Hawke when he announced his government was cancelling participation in an MX trans-Pacific missile test. Here first are excerpts of an article in the February 10 SUNDAY TIMES of Britain:
The blunt answer is that New Zealand does not matter much to America's defence strategy. Australia does, because it houses three crucial American military bases.
At Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, there is a satellite receiving station, codenamed "Merino," which is the principal collection point for information from America's spy satellites which pass over Russia and China on a north-south polar orbit.... The monitoring station...relays the information to the National Security Agency at Fort Mead, Maryland, near Washington, for analysis.
Six hundred miles south of Alice Springs at Nurrangar, a second station, codenamed "Casino," receives what is called "imagery" — high-definition television pictures from the satellites, which is then transmitted to Washington for analysis by the CIA.
The third major U.S. base in Australia, at North West Cape, is perhaps the most important. It consists of three naval communication installations.... The third and most awesome [of these] is a 5,500-acre, 2m watt "extra low frequency" radio transmission station. This is used to relay orders to American submarines at sea, and is the largest of the three principal U.S. submarine transmitting stations in the world. It is also the only station outside America. Without it, the nuclear-armed submarines on which America's defence partly rests could not operate in the Pacific.
So Washington chose to regard Hawke's mishandling of the MX affair as a minor irritant — and hoped it was not a signal of worse to come.
Writing in the February 17 SAN DIEGO UNION, P. Edward Haley, director of the Keck Center for International Strategic Studies, added the following in his article "ANZUS: New Zealand Pulled Plug on Pacific Pact":
Australia is the critical factor, not New Zealand.... These [above mentioned] facilities are of enormous value to the United States. They make Australia a target of Soviet nuclear weapons.
Finally, Australia could prohibit the transit of U.S. nuclear-armed ships and planes through its waters, ports and airfields. At present, U.S. "hunter-killer" nuclear attack submarines call frequently at Cockburn Sound in Western Australia. Generally, there is one American sub at Cockburn 25 percent of the time (for one week each month) to allow replenishment of supplies and rest and recreation for the crew. U.S. nuclear-armed ships can use their Australian ports because the Australian government overrides local protests by resorting to its constitutional foreign policy powers. American B-52s make regular use of the RAAF air base at Darwin in northern Australia for reconnaissance flights and conduct other types of flight training over northern Queensland.
The refusal of "transit" rights would seriously harm the ability of the United States to project its naval power into the Western Pacific. The nearest alternative facilities are in the Philippines, and the political situation there is not encouraging. The loss of surveillance, communications, and transit facilities would endanger the security of the United States itself, for it would undermine U.S. capabilities to deter Soviet nuclear attack.
Religious Tradition Changing
On a totally different topic the following article excerpted from the NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE last December shows the changes that have taken place in religious belief in the United States:
Americans are turning away from the dictates of organized religion and are drawing upon spiritual feelings of their own to define their faith, a leading researcher in religious values has found. Dr. William J. McCready, program director of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, told a group of philanthropists here that the shift represented a major change in the nation's religious character.
Religious faith remains strong, McCready said, but for growing numbers of people an individual search for meaning has become the central religious experience, replacing unquestioning obedience to religious authority. "The transition is not from authority to anarchy but to conscience," he said....
McCready's research [shows]...that 60 percent of Americans recently surveyed rejected the concept of "absolute moral guidelines." Ten years ago, only about 40 percent of Americans held that view, he said. At the same time, he said, more people appear to think of their religious faith in "mythic, imaginative and reflective" terms rather than as standards for behavior.... "Americans don't respond to moral imperatives, "he said. "They increasingly behave any way they want to. They've been told to trust their consciences, and that's what they're doing."...
Americans themselves seem to be unaware of the extent to which their compatriots hold religious values, he said. For example, he said a survey asking about the Ten Commandments found that 85 percent of Americans personally embraced them. But only 45 percent believed that the general public espoused them. "People are still religious themselves," McCready said, "but they don't think society is."
This brings up an interesting Gallup poll of teenager religious beliefs — and understanding — as summarized in the January 6, 1985 issue of PARADE magazine:
According to a poll by the Gallup Youth Survey, four out of five teenagers feel the Ten Commandments are valid. The same survey also stated that only three out of 100 teenagers can name the Ten Commandments.
How President Reagan Has Restored the Place of "the Hero"
One reason President Reagan has been so successful a leader is that he has restored a sense of honor to the nation; he continually and publicly acknowledges and awards common citizens who have performed acts of bravery or outstanding service. He is quick to give "honor to whom honor [is due]" (Rom. 13:7). His immediate predecessor in the White House (a professed "born-again" Christian) did not do much of this. The following article, which moved over our AP wire on February 19, 1985, gives another insight into Mr. Reagan's character:
"I'm a sucker for hero worship," Ronald Reagan once said.... Most politicians pay at least lip service to heroic behavior, but Reagan has sounded the theme perhaps more insistently than any president. Since his first inauguration in 1981, he has revived a program of presidential awards to young Americans for bravery and service; twice used his annual State of the Union message to Congress to recognize people he called American heroes, [and he has]...over and over again, praised "the countless quiet, everyday heroes of American life."
"The emphasis on heroes being among us in every day life is a consistent part of his populist theme that the people are better at governing themselves than the government is," says David R. Gergen, former White House chief of communications. "Heroes to him show what individuals are capable of achieving."...
When Ronald Reagan was growing up in Dixon, Ill., its main street was spanned by a reminder of heroes — an arch built for a triumphant parade of returning World War I veterans. The young Reagan also found heroes on the playing field, on the stage and between the covers of books. He read Edgar Rice Burroughs' tales of Martian warlord John Carter and Harold Bell Wright's "That Printer of Udell's," in which the hero rises from printer to successful businessman to member of Congress through hard work and Christian principles. Recalling his childhood reading when he was 66 years old, Reagan said, "There were heroes who lived by standards of morality and fair play. "...
Reagan tried his hand at some heroic behavior of his own early on. Beginning at age 15, he worked seven summers as a lifeguard at a city park on the Rock River and claims to have rescued 77 people from possible drowning....
Reagan, who began his acting career in high school, played a villain in his second production, a play called "Captain Applejack," and said, "I learned that heroes are more fun." He never played an unsympathetic character on film until his last theatrical movie, "The Killers," in which he portrayed a mobster. He has said many times that accepting the role was a mistake.
During World War II, Reagan's exploits were confined to a movie lot, making morale and training films for the armed services. "A great many people to this day," he wrote in 1965, "harbor a feeling that the personnel of the motion picture unit were somehow draft dodgers avoiding danger. The Army doesn't play that way." Reagan was classified "limited service" because of poor eyesight and said that he and others in the film units contributed to the war effort by making films that, among other things, cut the training time for aerial gunners by six weeks....
As president, Reagan's penchant for heroes became evident in his first inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1981, when he told the story of Martin Treptow, a small-town barber who joined the Rainbow Division in World War I and was killed after writing in his diary that he would "do my utmost, as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone."...
On Sept. 10, 1981, the president paid posthumous tribute to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in a Pentagon ceremony, calling the Pacific commander in World War II a "front-line general...a wise statesman...an authentic American hero." The very next day, Reagan presented medals to seven young people selected by the Justice Department for outstanding acts of bravery or service to others. Some of them had performed the deeds as long before as 1975 or 1976, but had not received the medals because former President Jimmy Carter — had not continued the practice of presenting them, although the program had been going on since 1950.
Another indication of the remarkable contrasts between Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter was the difference between the boundless, almost magnetic optimism exuded by the President during his most recent State of the Union address, and the nationwide telecast, about five years ago, by Mr. Carter, in which he bemoaned what he perceived to be a spreading "national malaise."
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