2/14/09 Letter to Chronicles of Hydraulic Brotherhood Email Subscribers

Volume 2, Edition 1 2/14/2009

To my email subscribers:

The past 10 days have been among the most difficult of my life with total strangers accusing me of being a racist, a TV reporter deliberately mixing separate quotes of mine together to create a false impression, and abandonment by people who I thought were my friends without so much as an inquiry to me on whether if I was guilty of blatant racism and hatred of farmworkers.

I appreciate all of you who stood by me and I hold no hard feelings against those who doubted me, given the apparent harshness of the quote. I urge you to visit my website and listen to my Feb. 13 radio show on podcast, to view the transcript of the interview the TV reporter conducted and compare it with the conflated and misleading quote which actually ran, and to view her financial connections to farm subsidies and the Big Grower culture.

To the farmworkers, you are the hardest working people in America, undocumented or not, and I hope and pray our elected officials will begin to redress the many wrongs inflicted on you and begin the rescue of tens of thousands of children raised in poverty with substandard schools, who turn to lives of crime and welfare rather than follow their parents into the fields. Extreme poverty breeds social unrest. There can be no doubt.

To the small and middle struggling farmers, I hope we can all come together, farmer, farmworker, and environmentalists and have frank and candid discussions about all the pressing problems of the San Joaquin Valley, which, according to the Congressional Research Service is the most impoverished part of America.

I've suffered a blow to my reputation but people who know me know I stand with the farmworkers and those seeking clean water and safe habitats for the campesinos. I will not be silenced by the demagogues in political office who seek only to serve the interest of corporatized agriculture or their own selfish and narrow interests. I urge our local congressman to introduce legislation in Congress that guarantees decent housing, clean drinking water, and a living wage for every farmworker.

Last but not least, I pray for rain.

Lloyd Carter

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