Word: auctioner
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Although there have been scattered threats of violence among farmers who feel manipulated and want to strike out at someone or something, most of their protest has been a stolid, dignified resistance to farm foreclosures or forced auctions. Some 40 supporters of Ray Parks, 42, gathered in front of the Worth County courthouse in Sylvester, Ga., last week and joined loudly in song to prevent an auctioneer from hearing any bids on the 595-acre spread. To the tune of Home on the Range, they sang, "Oh, give me my farm, and a price that is fair, and a chance...
...When the auction began last Friday, some 150 farmers crowded around the steps of the courthouse in Gove, Kans. (pop. 140). Sheriff Dean Baum began reading off the legal orders under which the personal property of C. David Jensen and his wife Virginia, both 54, would be sold to satisfy an unpaid debt of $180,000 to the Citizens State Bank of nearby Grainfield. Someone threw snowballs at one of the sheriff's deputies, and someone else shouted at the assembled officials: "Why don't you go out and steal them?" That was a reference to the two cars, three...
...loveseat, a silver oil lamp, brass candlesticks, a woman's rocker. When Baum cited "an oak bedroom set," she lost control. "These are family heirlooms," she shouted. "They've been in our family for 150 years. They're not for sale." But they were. Under the rules of the auction, the articles could not be split up; all of them would go to the highest single bidder. A lawyer for the Citizens State Bank bid $89,000 for everything, the only bid offered. (The rule was designed to stymie a common practice at other forced sales in which local farmers...
...drive the tractor now, he leaves a piece of his heart out there." The Jensens owe another $400,000 in mortgages on their land. Their 1,120 acres, on which they have raised mostly wheat for the past 27 years, will be sold at a similar involuntary auction this week...
Under the Government program, if a farmer could not unload his leaf at auction, he could still consign it to a "pool," a farmers' cooperative that borrows money from the Government. The pool would then try to sell the tobacco. If it succeeded, the loan was repaid, but if it failed, the Government ate the difference. The cost to taxpayers was small, at least compared with other farm subsidies: $600 million total between 1938 and 1982. Yet increasingly, foes of tobacco began asking why any tax funds should go to a product that the Government itself says is a health...