Word: rural
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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...
American farmers have been crying wolf for so long that their city cousins have mostly stopped listening. But along rural back roads last week, the expressions of anguish seemed genuine. Farmers sometimes differed about the causes of their distress, but they shared a frustration, almost a sense of shame, about their plight...
...heavily subsidized farmers of the Midwest, where prices on such crops as wheat, corn and soybeans have been particularly depressed, seem to be suffering the most. The rural South has also been hard hit. California, with its wide diversity of crops (more than 200 in all) and clement weather, is faring better, but even there growers are worried. Because the large Eastern markets are close, mid-Atlantic farmers have avoided the export crunch that has badly hurt the heartland...
...business. And in Washington the Government is absorbed in a fierce debate about federal assistance to farmers. The issue: do most programs any longer make sense or, as the Reagan Administration contends, have they become an unjustifiable burden on taxpayers while serving to undermine the economic security of rural America that they were designed to protect...
That did it. "This Administration obviously doesn't give a cocklebur for rural America," stormed Democratic Senator James Exon of Nebraska. E. ("Kika") de la Garza, the Texas Democrat who heads the House Agriculture Committee, sneered that what Stockman was really saying was "Let's cut off the arms and legs of the patient. Then he'll be 30 lbs. lighter and less of a burden." Farm Belt Republicans were equally outraged. Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, in a letter to Stockman, asked him to "please refrain from sermonizing on the free market, which seems most hypocritical from a Government...