My Neshoba Fair Speech
For folks outside Mississippi this may not mean much, but the reason I have not been writing much this week, is because I had been working on my speech for the Neshoba County Fair.
Here is the text of it, I will follow up with a Blog post from Sid Salter ( The Clarion Ledger's political columnist)
Good afternoon, my name is Les Riley. I am the Constitution Party Candidate for Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce.
First of all want to express my gratitude to the folks here at the Neshoba Fair for giving me the opportunity to speak but in doing so, I must confess they have given me a dilemma as well.
I have a grand total of TEN MINUTES to tell you who I am, why I am running, what the Constitution Party is, why you should give consideration to an unknown candidate from outside the two major parties, with little name recognition and little money in the campaign coffers . And I also need to convince you that someone running for a Statewide office on a right wing third party under these circumstances isn’t a nutcase.
To make things more daunting, I -- running on an very conservative party platform -- have been seemingly flanked on my right by, of all places, the Clarion-Ledger. It is a truly strange political year when there are 13 third party candidates in a state that until recently was a one party Democratic state and the state’s largest newspaper -- who traditionally has never seen a problem that they didn’t believe could be fixed with more government programs & tax money has now called for the abolition of the Dept of Agriculture.
If I were politically smart, I would run with that and declare that I wanted to be Mississippi’s last commissioner of agriculture and would work to see the program eventually closed down.
However, the main reason that the Clarion Ledger editorials called for the elimination of the Department of Ag is not because they have suddenly become believers in small government, but rather they want the wise folks over at the legislature to have more funds freed up to use them on boondoggles more in line with the Progressive priorities of the folks in Jackson and because the Federal government already provides us with meat plant inspectors and other “helps” for us Mississippian farmers.
If any Department of Agriculture needs to have its influence cut back in Mississippi -- we need to start with USDA then move towards smaller government in Mississippi -- not the other way around. The USDA is the epitome of what Reagan said about government economic policy : if it moves, tax it, if it keeps moving regulate it, then when it stops moving, subsidize it.
This is not meant to imply that USDA doesn’t have some good folks working for them or that they are the worst monster that wanders from Modor on the Potomac to harass the rest of us . We certainly have a plethora of them.
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I will try to answer the questions of who I am, why I am running, & what the Constitution Party is all in one quick pass here & then tell you what I would do if the Providence of God & the voters of the great state of Mississippi places me in the Ag Commissioner’s office this November.
I am a 8th Generation Mississippian. I am a sinner saved by the Grace of God and the blood of Jesus Christ. I have been blessed to be married to my wife Christy for 21 wonderful years and we have nine living children & two in heaven.
My family has produced elected officials for over 100 years.
With two supervisors, a 42 year chancery clerk & a 24 year sheriff among my very close relations, I grew up around small town Democratic politics. After my wife and I got married & I became a Christian, I left the backroom-deal-making of politics behind. Then, in the early 90’s we found out they had opened an abortion clinic near our home. We started going down to offer help & a real choice to some of the abortion-bound moms. Folks from our local pro-life group suggested that I consider running for office. Since Bill Clinton was president at the time, I joined the Republicans & ran for Horn Lake Alderman.
Within a couple of years, I began to see actions from the Republican Party nationally that were not in keeping with their conservative rhetoric -- the most egregious recent example of this is the doublespeak on illegal immigration that we get from our leaders in D.C.
I joined the CP -- then known as the Taxpayers Party in 1994 & have served as state chairman since 98. We are America’s third largest & fastest growing political party based on voter registration. We have been on the ballot in Mississippi for 15 years and have run candidates for everything from Supervisor to President. This year we have 9 excellent candidates for the legislature. We are Mississippi’s only 100%, no exceptions pro-life party. We have a platform & an agenda aimed at a return to limited, constitutional government. And, we’ve been right on immigration for 15 years.
I was recently asked what qualified me to run . I am , in some ways, the most qualified to represent rural Mississippi & agriculture. I grew up working on the DeSoto County crop farm that my father has been operating for 47 years. I majored in Agriculture for a while in college hoping to go back to work with my Dad, but like most Mississippi farm boys I had to leave the farm because of economic conditions created by farm, trade, economic, and monetary policies so bad that it’s hard to believe they are not aimed at driving people off the land.
Like most of Mississippi’s rural population, I have worked jobs in town & lived on a small acreage raising market gardens, chickens, & keeping some small livestock. I have worked at a grain elevator, for Soil Conservation Service, on a large scale cattle ranch, at a food distribution warehouse, managing supermarkets, as a buyer for a large food chain, in food sales, and I have fed 11 people on one income w/o accepting handouts from the taxpayers.
But the real reason I am running is because there is a view of culture & government that this country was founded upon & made us a free & prosperous people that no one else seems to talk about anymore.
The Declaration of Independence tells us that the foundation of this country was “there is a Creator; rights come from Him: and government exists to protect those rights.” They said things like “that governs best which governs least”. They expected government to do a handful of things -- at the most local level possible -- and otherwise leave people to “regulate their own affairs”.
This foundation of limited & legitimate government was also built upon Christianity, the family, and an independent agrarian culture not a worship of tolerance, money & progress. In the system we originally had there are some things government should do and some things it shouldn’t . Government at all levels has gotten so big and intrusive while at the same time failing at it’s most basic functions . . .
For one example of this , I have a friend who runs a small farm on a two lane country highway in Pontotoc County raising all natural chicken & grass fed beef for upscale restaurants & consumers around Tupelo & Oxford . This fellow is currently worried that a pending federal program called NAIS will soon put him out of business. NAIS seeks to force the registration of every single farm animal including a flock of yard chickens. This same friend recently got a letter from the District Attorney informing him that his mailbox was a few inches too low. He sat it aside, planning on getting to it a little later. Shortly there after, he got another letter threatening him to have his mailbox in compliance within 30days “or else” . I was riding by his house the other day listening to super talk and there were several new stories about the rampant crime in our capital city and a politician ringing his hands about not having the resources to find millions of illegal aliens. HOW ABOUT USING THE FOLKS THAT ARE COUNTING CHICKEN & MEASURING MAIL BOXES TO FIGHT CRIME & DEPORT A FEW ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ?
At the same time you listen to most office holders, people running for office, and talk show hosts you would think that government is our Messiah.
Promises to make Mississippi better by giving more money to the schools, or to the poor, or to the young, or to the old, or trying to recruit the next big industry. Liberal and conservative, everyone seems to believe that government exists to “help people” and as a force for good to make life better. The fact is the view that government should be a positive force to make the world better has proved to be the most deadly & oppressive philosophy the world has ever known. In fact, this utopianism led to over 170 million people being killed by their own governments in the 20th Century alone.
More directly related to the Commissioner of Ag’s race & my involvement in it. In the last 100 years we have had trillions of dollars spent by the USDA to “help farmers” and yet we have seen a commensurate decline in the number of farms and a gutting of out rural economy & culture. Thomas Jefferson believed that we would remain free so long as we remained a nation of family farms & small businesses in small towns and we would quickly lose our virtue & freedom once we moved to a focus on urbanization & centralization. He was right.
Ultimately :
Agriculture is too important to our economy & culture to trust to the politicians
IF I am elected I will seek to
1) Cut the Size and Scope of Government Drastically including a cut in the Department of Agriculture’s budget & a consolidation of functions that are currently being duplicated so long as these savings were returned to the taxpayers rather than turned over to the legislature to waste on something else
2) Promotion of Mississippi’s agriculture while providing oversight to avoid disasters like the infamous beef plant & protection of our citizen’s health from things like foreign fish labeled as catfish
3) Use Power of Dept of Agriculture to combat health risk of illegal immigrants working at meat
and food processing plants
4) Reassert the power of the State of Mississippi to interpose against the Federal government on behalf of Mississippi's citizens, using the 10th Amendment and other Constitutional limits to stand up against onerous federal regulations and other interferences into the affairs of Mississippi's farmers, rural communities, and other citizens.
5) Further interposition against those who would favor industry over agriculture and fight for Mississippi's family farms & rural communities and against the wedding of corporate & government interests in the name of economic development and the false Messiah of "progress". In essence, I will oppose selling out of our State to foreign corporations and Multi-National Bankers at the Expense of our liberty, or way of life, and our local small businesses & family farms
6) Abolition of Property Taxes on Mississippi Farm & Timber land privately owned by Mississippi Taxpayers as well as abolition of State Income Taxes on farm income produced by Mississippi families on privately held Mississippi farmland --- to be offset by increased use fees for out-of-state landowners and those who take farmland out of production to get Federal subsidies, as well as imposts and duties on foreign farm goods sold in Mississippi.
7) Use name and clout of ag commissioner to start PRIVATELY FUNDED farm research & education centers ( like the Agricenter in Memphis) modeled after the Missouri Small Farm Research Center
8) Use the "bully pulpit" of the office to show Mississippians how media filth & propaganda; moral & family breakdown; and the growth of Big Government has harmed rural Mississippi. And work for the bottom up restoration of the Christian Agrarian Culture that was the seedbed of America's liberty & prosperity.
If you are not pleased with the status quo that the two parties, big government, big business, & big media have been giving you, I would appreciate your vote & support in the November general election-- Vote Les Riley Constitution Party candidate for commissioner of agriculture & commerce.
