Real Southern Living
Matthew Peed
January 1, 2002
In 1832, a generation before the Civil War, a deeply divisive issue threatened to tear the young United States apart. State conventions were called, acts of Congress were declared null and void, and militias were hustled up. The president found himself stabbed in the back by his own vice president, and South Carolina even threatened to secede. The issue: free trade. The agricultural South wanted access to foreign goods, while the industrial North demanded tariffs to nurture its burgeoning industries. Unswayed by northern regional despotism, the South obstinately championed the principle of free markets and equal competition, until further crisis was averted with the Compromise of 1833. How times have changed. Now Southern delegations and their Midwestern allies have banded together to defend massive farm subsidies. The passage of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 provides for over $170 billion in market-distorting payments to agribusiness, standardizing the "emergency" appropriations of the last three years and effectively wiping out the landmark reforms of 1996. Defended as a needed safety net for struggling family farms, many of these subsidies actually underwrite the big firms that are putting families out of business. But with congressional elections looming and the Senate so evenly divided, farm lobbyists found congressmen falling over themselves to line up at the trough. So ripe were the pickin's this year, my home state's Senator Zell Miller and other Southern senators even blocked a modest reform that would have capped payments at $275,000 per farmer per year. Of this humble proposal, Georgia's former governor drawled, "You know what this amendment says to the South? 'Hold still, little catfish. All ...
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