Neo-Cons and Environmentalists Target FDR's Rural Electric Co-ops

May 14 (EIRNS)--In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt set up programs to help electrify rural America. The Bush regime's Office of Management and Budget proposes to undercut a fundamental element of those programs, with the blessing of the man-caused-global-warming loons and their banker allies.

The OMB wants to end government loans to rural electrical cooperatives to build coal plants, and limit loans for transmission projects in the most remote rural areas. The co-ops plan to spend $35 billion over the next 10 years on new plants, "enough to offset all state and federal efforts to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over that time," the malthusian Washington Post complains.

Rural electric co-ops serve 40 million people in 47 states. The loan rates they get from the federal government are 2 to 2.5 percent less than commercial rates, according to James R. Newby of the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service.

The government should declare "mission accomplished," and disband the program, said a 2004 report by the neo-con Heritage Foundation. A co-author of the report and a former OMB employee, Ronald D. Utt, wants to get rid of the "remnant of the New Deal," because, he says, "Poverty is no longer a characteristic of the agricultural community as it was during the Depression."

Yet, the per capita income of co-op members and consumers is 15 percent below the national average, according to Glenn English, the chief director of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.