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Washington,
April 28 – If former President Bill Clinton’s forecast is right, new wealth
will be created not by Wall Street or Silicon Valley
but instead by a rural American renaissance. Speaking as a former Arkansas “farm state governor” Wednesday, Clinton told a crowd of senators, senate staffers and
rural development advocates from as far away as Alaska that there’s an urgent need to
accelerate job creation in rural areas.
At
the first-ever Senate Democratic Rural Summit, Clinton agreed with other
speakers like Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) and participants from across the country
that a vital first step is to extend high-speed internet service throughout
rural America. Then he focused his remarks on rural-based renewable energy,
saying “I think we have only barely scratched the surface” and that clean
energy is the “bird’s nest on the ground.”
Former President Bill Clinton with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
at the Rural Summit. Photo: Agri-Pulse.
Clinton
said to connect the untapped wealth of rural-based energy with energy-hungry
cities “there needs to be a real rural push” to build a modern, high-voltage
electric transmission network to catch up with other countries like Denmark and
Germany which have taken the lead on generating rural jobs and prosperity with
renewable energy.
Clinton said banks
currently hold some $1.5 trillion which should be used to unleash $15 trillion
in lending to finance a rural renaissance. He called for investing in projects
to convert cellulose into ethanol and landfills into co-gen heat and power
because “a local garbage dump is money going to waste.”
Following
his speech at the summit, Clinton told Agri-Pulse that “You can’t bring back
rural America
just with agriculture. We know that the farm subsidy programs, as important as
they are, may aggregate farm income, but that’s not labor intensive enough to
make the difference we need. We’ve got to diversity the economy of rural America
and take advantage of the other assets. And also spin off the farmers into
other things like the biofuels market and different kinds of biofuels. So I
think with a focus on this by Congress, I bet you’d be surprised how much
bipartisanship support there’d be. I never had any problems getting Republicans
to help me on this stuff.”
With
good federal policy to focus resources on rural needs including jobs,
education, healthcare and broadband, Clinton
told summit participants that “Manufacturing is going to make a comeback in America,
you mark my words, because of what’s happening . . . It’s going to be an
enormous opportunity for small towns and rural Americans to get manufacturing
jobs. You ought to go home, whatever the Congress does, to make sure that your
state and your community have a strategy for going after this. . . It will help
to raise incomes in rural America.
It will help to supplement farm incomes. It’s going to come back. You need to
be ready.”
Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
hosting the Rural Summit. Photo: Agri-Pulse.
Senate
Agriculture Committee Chair Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) who hosted the summit along
with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
asked participants for ideas, saying “Senate Democrats have a strong record for
rural America,
but we can always do better.” She said that to achieve “a sustainable rural
economy,” she’s been hard at work in the Senate using her “female persistence
and perseverance which some people consider nagging” on issues ranging from
renewing the expired biodiesel tax credits to improving rural healthcare and
education. At the summit, she garnered more than just Bill Clinton’s
wholehearted support for rural development. He also promised to visit their
shared home state to help with her campaign to win a third Senate term in
November.
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