Senator Dodd has put out his plan for revitalizing rural America.
Chris Dodd wants to help rural families meet and overcome the challenges of rural life because he knows that for all our advances, our country’s best hope in the 21st century lies in preserving the values and viability of the American Heartland and that every American benefits from the hard work of our family farmers and those living in rural America.
Read Dodd's full plan for a renewed American heartland here
Comments
While I quite agree that the American heartland has been prompted to nearly perish, I think we need to recognize that this was intentional, not accidental. It was a necessary component of industrialized agriculture, that the land be emptied of its cities and towns so the big machines could be most efficient.
It's a process which was actually also under way in Saddam Hussein' Iraq where he emptied the villages of their people and tried to resettle them in larger urban centers. The U.S., being generally antagonistic towards high density concentrations of people, has opted for the much more wasteful suburban model in which people find it difficult to interact and spend much time running around in circles (figuratively) in their cars. We do know that suburbanization was planned, and not just by land speculators and developers. The "planning" fraternity developed all kinds of codes, sometimes even in the name of "preserving open space" which ultimately served to thin the population density because "high density" living was identified as a cause of criminal behavior.
If you pay close attention, you'll hear the same kind of logic being applied to Iraq. The density is being reduced in Baghdad and "gated communities" are being created to "control" the population. Indeed, "sectarian conflict" has been created where there was none because it was determined to be a useful strategy to exercise control and a rationale for dispersing the population.
Tom Hayden said we're setting up a police state. He's wrong, but only because the police are largely ineffective. What's being set up is a military dictatorship supported by OUR military, rather than Saddam Hussein's. Disbanding the Iraqi army wasn't happenstance; it was part of the plan. As soon as it became apparent that, as Saddam Hussein had anticipated, the U.S. territorial claims would not be welcome.