TESTIMONY OF RON ARNOLD THE IMPACT OF FEDERAL POLICIES ON RURAL COMMUNITIES Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Ron Arnold. I am testifying as the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a nonprofit citizen organization based in Bellevue, Washington. The Center has approximately 10,000 members nationwide, most of them in rural natural resource industries. Mr. Chairman, I am proud to state that the Center does not accept government grants and has not received any government funds since the day it was established on American Bicentennial day, July 4, 1976. Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you on behalf of our members for holding this hearing today. It is timely indeed. For the past year, at the urging of our increasingly concerned members, the Center has been conducting an in-depth study of federal policy and rural communities. Our study, titled "Battered Communities," is being released at this hearing. You will find it attached to my hearing statement. "Battered Communities" was co-sponsored by three other citizen groups, the American Land Rights Association, F.I.G.H.T. for Minnesota, and the Maine Conservation Rights Institute. "Battered Communities" delves into serious matters of federal policy as it affects rural community life. On page 5 we address the most obvious problem, the urban-rural prosperity gap – the spread in wages and unemployment between the richest and poorest counties within each of the 50 states. While urban America today enjoys an economic boom, rural counties are finding themselves choked to death by federal restrictions designed to protect the environment from the people who live and work in the environment. The most disheartening aspect of the conflict over the environment is that rural goods producers – ranchers, loggers, miners – are becoming a despised minority, morally excluded from respect and human decency, even in federal documents such as we see on page 7 in an Environmental Impact Statement characterizing miners as costly, destructive, stupid social misfits. Now we turn to the visible damage: Rural communities are besieged by a bewildering array of federal policies forcing them to starve in the midst of plenty. These policies are listed in part on page 8. Mr. Chairman, let me call your attention to the most serious problem our study uncovered: the systematic effort of a triangle of interests to harness federal policy to their own agenda, against natural resource goods producers. The Center has identified a small corps of activist federal employees – from the highest levels to on-the-ground technicians – working to reshape federal policy from within according to agendas that paralyze goods production in rural communities. Pages 13 through 17 discuss a few of these activist federal employees. To see their impact, you will find on page 24 a chart of systematic timber sale appeals, filed in a coordinated pattern by a bevy of environmental groups. We found the frequent outcome was that the Forest Service simply withdrew the timber sale without even ruling on the appeal. The resulting mill closures are charted on page 25. This certainly appears to be undue influence. Yet that is not the whole story. These environmental groups were in many cases acting at the behest of their donors on grant-driven programs not designed by the environmental groups, but originating within grantmaking private foundations. We discovered, in documents such as this thick directory of environmental grantmaking foundations, a cluster of multi-million dollar campaigns designed to set public policy against logging, mining and ranching according to the private preferences of a few custodians of vast wealth. Some of these foundations do not even accept applications for grants, but design entire programs of social change themselves and hand-pick the groups that will act as their agents, pushing non-profit laws to the edge. In the hands of these privileged people, federal policy is being corrupted into a blunt instrument battering rural communities. Mr. Chairman, these are serious charges. On page 35, the Center recommends that this Committee continue its attention to this vital issue with a detailed investigation of the causes behind America’s rural Battered Communities. Thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing on the anguish of rural America. Read the Congressional White Paper, Battered Communities. |
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