Rural Green Caucus

March 12, 2007

Federal Budget short change Rural America

The FY 2008 budget submitted by the Bush Administration again short changed Rural America. This is rather astounding considering that it was Rural America that has provided the Bush Administration with it's electoral college majorities.

The Center for Rural Affairs has outlined some of the major problems with this budget in its most recent newsletter. Rather than repeat that analysis, I would rather suggest that this administration will look for every place where they can cut expenditures in the budget to support their quixotic quest for reaching our Manifest Destiny.

There needs to be a Green Party critique of current policies. As an issue, it will not gain much press. However, such a critique can become useful for organizing rural counties. If Greens can put forward practical solutions for the problems that this administration is failing to address, then we would be one up on the Democrats.

Hopefully, we can have the time to use this space to begin the definition of that critique.

Posted by Wes at 06:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 19, 2006

Recent Elections Changes Rural Power in DC

The recent election changed more than the political balance between Democrats and Recpulbicans. One of the interesting switches comes from the fact that the shift from Republican control to Democratic control of congress meant that there were corresponding changes in the political power of supporting organizations. We have all heard that Sierra Club or the Defenders of Wildlife take credit for the greening of the 110th Congress. According to the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, they made a big difference.

Overall the Sierra Club invested in 32 major projects -- each one an effort to identify and turn out environmental voters in a metropolitan area. From that investment, we garnered about 20 new environmental votes in the House of Representatives, five new green votes in the Senate, and four new green Governors. That's a very high ROI. There have been three major turning-point election since I became an environmentalist -- turning points in the favor of the future. They were the mid-terms of 1974, the Clinton election of 1992, and now this one. The two previous ones were, statistically, probably larger. But they were largely the result of external factors -- environmentalists in a certain sense benefited from them, but did not earn them.

This was one was different. We worked this, for years. We stretched, we grew, we dared, we slogged. This one was a tribute to our commitment to Lincoln's and Jefferson's faith in democracy.

Also in the mix was the fact that two newly elected Senators, Tester (MO) and Webb (VA) are members of the National Farmers Union as is Representative Jim Walz (MN) who ousted a Republican.

Accoring to the Salme, OR based Capital Press ("The West's AG Website) this has even more meaning for farmers.

The NFU, which has 250,000 members concentrated in the Plains and Rocky Mountain states, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, which claims about 5.5 million members through its insurance sales, are the nation's pre-eminent general farm organizations. Both the NFU and Farm Bureau say they are nonpartisan, but the NFU traditionally has ties to the Democrats and Farm Bureau to the Republicans.

If that re-allignment is true, then it would be worth paying attention to what the NFU is going to be asking their Democratic friends to accomplish in 2007.

I note that they have their own Carbon Credits Program and are talking about risk managemen for weather related disasters. These are surely issues that concern rural American and should be central to Green polich.

Posted by Wes at 04:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack