Word: fighting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Rural banks have long been respected and profitable cornerstones of small farming towns. Now, however, many of the lenders have become both unwilling villains and victims in the grim drama unfolding in the American farm belt. Caught between their sympathy for the farmers' plight and their own fight for survival, banks have had to foreclose on loan after loan. But in many cases the foreclosures have not prevented banks from failing. Says James McDermott, senior vice president of Keefe Bruyette & Woods, a Wall Street investment firm that specializes in bank stocks: "The farm-belt mom-and-pop banks...
...tobacco program will not go down without a bitter fight in Congress. "It's war," declares Republican Congressman Larry Hopkins of Kentucky. Senator Jesse Helms passed up the chance to be chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee simply to protect tobacco as chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. The Reagan Administration has decided to separate the tobacco program from other agriculture subsidies in order to keep Helms & Co. from holding the whole farm bill hostage. If the Administration goes on to kill the tobacco program, Hopkins warns, farmers will walk away from the obligation to pay off Government loans...
...fight over that proposal is likely to make the battle over credit guarantees look like a warm-up skirmish. To Stockman and Secretary of Agriculture John Block, the current farm troubles are a sign that 52 years of heavy Government involvement in agriculture have led both farmers and taxpayers to a dead end. Rural prosperity, they believe, can be rebuilt in the long run only by a long-overdue and surely painful transition to a leaner system that forces farmers to compete with little Government aid in markets at home and abroad. Says Block: "This country can no longer afford...
...guarantee rules that the Administration announced last week. The Senators not only refused but threw at him the same "blackmail" charge he later made to the Budget Committee. Serious debate on the farm bill will probably not begin until late summer, and then it will be enmeshed with the fight over the sweeping cuts in government spending for other domestic programs that the Administration is proposing. The outcome may depend on log-rolling between rural and urban lawmakers, trading votes for their favorite programs...
Opponents vow to fight the plan in Congress, which must approve the sale. Chairman Hays Watkins of rival CSX promises that the sale "will be resisted by every resource at our command and in every forum where the challenge can be brought." Conrail Chairman L. Stanley Crane, a retired president of Southern Railway who took over in 1981, opposes the sale to any of the bidders because he thinks the asking price is too low. He wants instead to sell the company through a public stock offering. Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania agrees with that plan because it would...