Look at this excerpt from a story on cnn.com about rural America. It speaks volumes:
‘… the (Obama) administration is pushing $350 million in additional Small Business Administration funding to rural small businesses over the next five years. The White House is also working to promote greater venture capital investment in rural startups and using more than 2,800 U.S. Agriculture Department offices nationwide to help publicize job opportunities. Loans from the Department of Health and Human Services are being made available to help recruit staff members to 1,300 rural hospitals. The initiatives are based on recommendations from the White House Rural Council, which Obama created in June to report on rural America's economic climate.’
So what is wrong with this?
Well, according to the story Obama and the Democrats are proposing more federal spending for rural America because they allegedly care so much about the people there. Yet at the same time the economies of rural America are being thwarted by the federal government itself and devastated by the environmental movement which is allied with Obama and the federal government.
For instance, consider farmers. The two biggest economic threats to farmers beyond the natural vagaries of agriculture are man-made and both come from the Democrat left:
*Heavy federal (and state) taxes. Crushing estate taxes often force families to sell off the farm after the farmer has died.
*Rabid environmental regulations. Ask any farmer about the enviro laws he has to abide by. Every squirrel and spider has to be accounted for and pesticides and herbicides can be applied only after a long training course. Then his land must be approved by enviro officials for every possible reason (wetland, soil type, habitat for ‘endangered’ species etc.) And on and on.
Meanwhile the same enviro laws are throwing the farmer’s neighbors out of their jobs by the millions. In the 1990s, in one of the most egregious cases of all, the enviro movement concocted a phony crisis over the ‘spotted owl’ and threw 30,000 loggers out of work in rural Oregon. Whole areas of the state were economically ravaged. In total many times 30,000 people were adversely affected – the loggers’ families, businesses and small towns.
Multiply that by 50 states over 40 years of extremist environmentalism and you have a major assault on rural Americans.
(By the way, $350 million is peanuts for the 48 million people in rural America…)
So in truth the federal government (in Washington) along with environmental groups (based largely in Washington, in cities and in the universities) are conducting a war against small-town America and rural America by taxing and regulating farmers heavily and by obstructing every development plan in sight from power plants to logging operations, from mines to oil drilling to ranches to factories.
Oh, never, the enviros say. We are just protecting the land!
Baloney. Environmentalists are generally urban liberals and Washington Democrats while rural Americans and small-town Americans are much more conservative.
So it is an economic assault on conservatism in areas where people have little political power compared to the massive power of the federal government and of the wealthy enviro movement and its army of lawyers and activists. Most newspapers in America also are complicit; even many papers in small towns and rural areas are liberal.
But those publications never will admit what environmentalism really is doing. No, it is always to ‘save the planet’ and make life ‘sustainable’. (Watch that word ‘sustainable’. It is a key word of the socialist left to impose government control.)
Environmentalists ultimately are seeking to literally drive humans out of rural America and to return it to pristine nature. This is part of what is called the United Nations’ Agenda 21 plan. Don’t think that this is mere speculation; it is an established scheme backed by the UN and the worldwide enviro movement. If you don’t know about it look it up on the internet. And it starts with one ‘green’ law after another after another after another. Rural people then find it harder and harder to make a living.
See the pattern?
And if you want proof just look at a state like Vermont which has been controlled by environmentalists for decades. Everything in Vermont is green, green, green. As a result the economic base has been deteriorating and young people are leaving the state in droves in what is being recognized as a major demographic crisis.
So as cnn.com reports, after the Democrats and environmentalists ruin farmers and the economic base of rural America the same liberals now are going to help rural economies with…. trumpets, please…. tax money from Washington! This is classic socialism and it is about one thing only – controlling the people.
It would be much easier and more sensible just to allow rural America to grow and prosper on its own, would it not?
Indeed.
And who is going to benefit from the government approach?
Government bureaucrats, that’s who. They will “administer” the grants and run all the “agencies” that “help” rural America. So that rural America becomes just another government-administered fiefdom like so much of our nation has become.
In one example of thousands across the nation enviro groups have been seeking to prevent Nestle from opening a spring-water bottling plant in the town of Cascade Locks, Oregon which desperately needs the jobs that the plant would provide. Look at this from willamettelive.com:
Nestle is moving forward on expanding its water operations to Cascade Locks. Its application is pending approval by the Oregon Department of Water Resources, but (enviro) organizations like Food and Water Watch are fighting the company every step of the way.
One of the concerns is that the pumping could cause water temperatures to rise in the cold water coves that migrating salmon use as a refuge in the summer when the Columbia River warms up.
Nestle hired Kramer Fish Services to carry out a study, and “the basic conclusion was that the changes in water temperature that may occur as a result of sending a small amount of warm water into the creek would not affect the salmon refuge,” says Linda Mullen, community relations contractor for Nestle.
Despite the good news for Nestle, Mullen says the result of the study won’t satisfy Food and Water Watch. “They’ll find something else,” she says.
Notice that one of the enviro concerns is that pumping “could” cause water temperatures to rise. This is a standard environmental tactic: Arouse fear about a trumped-up crisis that may not even exist or that does not exist at all.
You know, kinda like ‘global warming’.
Then notice what Nestle said about the environmentalists, that “they’ll find something else” wrong with the plan.
This is a good sign and it shows that more and more people are aware of how these environmentalists work, that if they don’t conjure up one ecological crisis they will always find another.
But don’t expect enviros to ever let up in their war on rural and small-town Americans.
Consider ethanol. For years now the federal government has been dishing out billions of dollars in subsidies to Midwestern farmers to grow corn to distill into ethanol fuel (alcohol fuel). But besides the false economics of it all – ethanol would never survive without those subsidies – it makes thousands of farmers and their families grateful to and utterly dependent on the federal government.
Yes, indeed, the very same government that is taxing other farmers out of business. The same government that is allied with the enviro movement that is strangling rural economies.
Yet rural people are by nature the hardest-working folks in America. They don’t want to be on the dole. Still the government is making them comfortable on the dole, slowly and incrementally, so that eventually the rural people start to see the Democrats as their saviors. Many already do. And it is all done in the name of political power.
Look at that CNN story again:
‘Loans from the Department of Health and Human Services are being made available to help recruit staff members to 1,300 rural hospitals. The initiatives are based on recommendations from the White House Rural Council, which Obama created in June to report on rural America's economic climate.
Yet those rural hospitals are suffering for two main reasons:
*Many of them, particularly near the Mexico border, are overwhelmed by impoverished illegal aliens whom Obama and the Democrats are ushering into the country and offering every free service, bankrupting those hospitals.
*Many rural hospitals are suffering because the economies around them are being undermined from the endless obstruction by the enviro movement.
It’s the same old story, friends, a way for the liberals to make more and more people dependent on the government but to do it in such a way that the people do not know what is happening.
Fortunately many more people than ever do know what is happening.