[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 120 (Monday, October 2, 2000)]
[House]
[Pages H8605-H8606]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 EXPANDING TECHNOLOGY IN RURAL AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Istook). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Cannon) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. CANNON. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my friend and colleague the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) for the opportunity to speak 
on his special order and for his effort in putting this together.
  Tonight we have heard about many of the blessings that we get from 
rural America. We get timber and paper products. The gentleman from 
Pennsylvania spoke about that. We have oil and gas. The gentleman from 
Oklahoma spoke about that. We have minerals extraction. The gentleman 
from Nevada spoke about that. And the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Sherwood) spoke about exporting kids.
  Also, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon) spoke about the 
number of children, the young people, from rural America who get 
involved in the military. So we have these great, great resources that 
we have been exporting.
  But on the other hand, there now is a turnaround and we are getting 
more and more people back in or at least more and more people want to 
come back to rural America, and technology is allowing that to happen.
  I would like to talk for just a couple minutes about technology and 
education in rural America and why that is so compelling and why that 
is going to change the nature of what we do in America so that people 
can go back to where they came from where they enjoy life, where they 
have clean air and they have beautiful scenery and they have good 
friends and where they can leave their cars unlocked when they go to 
church.
  We have a number of things that are happening in technology that are 
happening at a breathtaking rate. And,

[[Page H8606]]

frankly, we do not see them. We have had so much change that these new 
developments are coming faster than we can really understand. But on 
the cutting edge of technology today, we have two or three different 
things that are going on.
  In the first place, we have all seen the plummeting prices and the 
decrease in the size of computer equipment. That is going on at an 
increasing rate. And we are going to see a time within the next year or 
so when you can take a little small computer that has all the power of 
a major computer and it will operate off of radio frequency and it will 
do so at a very rapid rate, so that every kid in the world in the next 
4 or 5 years is going to have the opportunity to be educated at a very 
high level.
  I would like to think that in the next few years we will see a time 
when we will have advertisements instead of send $15 to feed a child 
for a month, we will see ads to send $15 to educate a child for a month 
and every child in the world will have the opportunity to get a post-
doctoral education off the Internet. That is partly because of the 
devices that are coming onto the market.
  In addition to those devices, we have this great new technology with 
radio frequency and the ability to communicate a signal sometimes 
through multiple repeaters, so that we should be able to take satellite 
signals and get those down to every child and every person on Earth; 
and that certainly includes everyone in rural America.
  And finally, we are seeing terrific growth in the ability to compress 
data so that we can do much, much more with a smaller band width.
  So, for instance, in my State of Utah, Emery County, a little rural 
county in the State of Utah, every person in that county, because of 
the foresight of the local telecommunications company, now has access 
to DSL broad band telecommunications. That DSL is going to be a big 
enough pipeline to do almost anything that anyone could imagine they 
would want to do. And that takes the jobs into rural Utah and raises 
the life-style there.
  Now, I would just like to wrap up by talking about the difference in 
perspective here. We have a battle going on. It is a cultural war. We 
see that battle going on with the Boy Scouts of America and the attempt 
to revoke their charter. We see that battle in many other places. But 
the battle really comes down to a battle between urban America and 
rural America.
  The Democrats have taken a very clear position. The Democratic 
Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, the gentleman from Rhode 
Island (Mr. Kennedy), in referring to the 2000 elections, said on June 
21, 1999, as reported in the Providence Journal, ``We have written off 
the rural areas.'' ``We have written off the rural areas.''
  Now, the following day the minority leader said he did not mean to 
say that. He did not say he did not mean what he said. He said he did 
not mean to say that. Because that gave away the strategy of the 
Democratic party. And it was probably unthoughtful. But it has never 
been recanted, as far as I know, by any leader of the Democratic 
National party. No one has said, we are actually going to court the 
rural vote.
  And in fact, everything they have done has been shown to be a 
movement away from rural. They tax rural people the same they do 
everywhere else, but they move the programs into the urban areas under 
the Democratic regime. That is not right.
  There is a digital divide today and that digital divide can be healed 
and overcome between rural and urban America if we let the free market 
work. But if we tax everyone in America and move that money to the 
urban areas, then we lose the opportunity to bring back to the rural 
areas the basis for jobs and economic growth that make the rural part 
of America so great.

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