I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
It almost goes without saying that national politics has become something like a madhouse, with wild shrieks and crazy mumblings punctuating the news and civil discourse drowned out by
paranoid rages and baffling goofiness mistaken for reasoned criticism.
Still, even with the madhouse blaring its nasty gibberish and wild eyed tales of horror on the airwaves, those of us who don’t live and work in Washington, D.C. can leave the electronic padded cell and try to make sense, on our own, of the major policy ideas we can’t hear about above the bedlam.
For instance, how do President Obama’s urban and rural agendas fit with his agenda on energy and the environment?
All three agendas stress job creation, conservation and infrastructure development in complementary ways, though they do not strictly dovetail and apparently weren’t designed to.
As someone who lives in an overwhelmingly rural state, averaging some 12 people per square mile, I’m interested in rural development. So I’ll be watching closely how fast the Obama administration moves on its plans. Chief among them is to “strengthen anti-monopoly laws” and “producer protections to ensure independent farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.” Passing a “packer ban,” preventing meatpackers from owning livestock and manipulating prices, is a key idea in this agenda.
Among other rural agenda items is the encouragement of local and organic agriculture, which involves helping farmers to more easily and inexpensively certify their crops as organic and reform crop insurance policies so as not to penalize organic farmers.
Perhaps the most interesting idea involves promoting “regional food systems.” The White House Web site carries no further details on this idea. But to dovetail with urban and energy agenda items, a regional food system would have to have incentives for regional transport and capital for small farm refrigeration depots so organic farmers and others can refrigerate crops on harvesting and compete with agribusiness to supply local transport companies with goods to deliver.
As in the urban agenda, the Obama administration calls for infrastructure investment in rural areas, particularly in roads, bridges and water system, as well as support for small businesses, helping farmers with capital to create “cooperative marketing initiatives and farmer-owned processing plants.”
If cities in rural states are to adequately feed themselves in a time of transition in which ready fuel supplies might be in short supply, and food transportation costs become impossible to absorb, the kind of attention that small food producers received from the federal government in the 1930s through the early 1950s will have to be revived and even more sharply focused.
This proposed support of rural business is mirrored in the urban agenda for a plan to “increase access to capital” to “underserved businesses” through the Small Business Administration, targeting funds especially to businesses owned by women and minorities. The Obama administration also plans to initially invest $250 million a year in creating a “national network of public-private business incubators” which will help entrepreneurs create start-up companies.
Business incubators are presumably in sync with what the administration calls “regional innovation clusters.” The plan is to stimulate focused efforts to reshape local economies by supporting “next-generation industries,” efforts such as the North Carolina Research Triangle Park and Nashville’s “thriving entertainment cluster.”
In New Mexico effort could focus on solar development and hybrid alternative fuels, as they’ve developed in Montana, where wind generation is augmented and stabilized by natural gas powered turbines. In one of the sunniest places on earth, wouldn’t an innovation cluster that employed public-private business incubators to stimulate solar entrepreneurship have a fighting chance to push solar technology into a period of rapid technological and production acceleration?
It’s not hard to contemplate a New Mexico/Colorado innovation cluster devoted to developing products and businesses involved in energy efficiency, combining the expertise at the Rocky Mountain Institute with New Mexico solar entrepreneurs to create a fruitful conservation industry incubator.
When the Obama Administration plans for the “livability of cities,” provisions are included for reinvigorating the Superfund Program, something which every state in the union will be grateful for, including New Mexico with its polluted groundwater. Our state, in fact, might be ideal for the creation of an innovation cluster of small businesses designed to help companies and the military clean up their industrial and radioactive toxic waste. Of course, that presupposes the National Laboratories here would be interested in an intense ramping up of public-private business initiatives.
Superfund work of all kinds would certainly fit with the Obama Administration’s energy agenda which calls for creating five million new jobs by investing $150 billion for the next ten years to “catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future.” You can’t have a clean future based on a dirty past that you haven’t cleaned up.
If the United States is to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent in the next 40 years or so, as the energy agenda plans, it will need the creative genius of all sectors of our society. To regionalize technological, industrial and entrepreneurial innovation seems like a good way to stimulate the intellectual productivity and commercial networking that would add the kind of jobs across the country that the Obama energy and environment agenda calls for.
One wonders what might happen if a serious public discussion of these agendas took place across the country. But before that could happen the loudspeakers in the electronic political madhouse would have to be turned off, and that would violate the First Amendment.
Perhaps the owners of the loudspeakers could become responsible and give voice to something other than the cackles and roars of the pundits of bedlam. It could be a long wait. There’s a whole lot of money at stake.
