[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 14]
[House]
[Pages 20350-20357]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                      THE FUTURE OF RURAL AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I and a group here rise 
tonight to talk about rural America, the heartland of this country. The 
last few years we have had the most fantastic economic boom in this 
country in our history, but the question many ask is why has so much of 
rural America been left behind. Why has rural America struggled for its 
economic life when suburban America is flourishing and enjoying 
unparalleled prosperity?
  We believe that a lack of leadership is very much a part of that. 
Rural America has not fared well under the Clinton-Gore policies. We 
are also very concerned that rural America will not fare well under a 
Gore administration.
  Agriculture, at a time when this country has expanded its ability to 
grow products, wonderful products, better, better yields, better 
quality, our farmers are fighting for their economic life. World 
markets have not been opened because of inappropriate public policies.
  Mr. Speaker, public land, America owns a third of our land; and when 
we

[[Page 20351]]

have Federal public policy changes, it impacts rural America, not 
urban-suburban America. It impacts rural America, because that is the 
land we own. We are a country rich in natural resources, and many 
people claim that our strength and our great past was because we had 
those natural resources.
  Have we had appropriate policies for energy, for mining that allowed 
us to enjoy the fruit of what was here? Many think not.
  Defense, the number one issue in the Federal Government, would it be 
strong under a Gore administration? Rural education, as we have the 
debate now going on education, how has rural America fared? Most rural 
districts receive 1 percent to 2 percent of their money from the 
Federal Government when the Federal Government's claiming that they are 
funding 7 percent.
  The complicated urban-type formulas are stacked against rural America 
in many people's opinions. Rural health care fighting for its economic 
life, rural hospitals fighting to stay open. Rural America sometimes 
gets paid half as much under the current policies and formulas devised 
by HCFA that has been managed by the Gore-Clinton administration.
  Timber, good forestry, a country rich in soft woods in the West and 
hard woods in the East, we are now importing, I am told, about half of 
our soft woods. Because of policies similar to oil we are now importing 
60 percent from foreign countries.
  Endangered Species Act needing to be changed, positively, to save 
endangered species; but it has been used by radical groups to push 
their will on the American citizens and supported by the Gore-Clinton 
administration.
  Regulatory process, something Americans do not think enough about, 
because, in my view, an overzealous bureaucracy that regulates you, 
they are regulating instead of legislating. When we legislate, we 
debate. We debate the facts. We make decisions. We cast votes, but when 
the regulators have too much power, and I think everyone agrees that 
the Clinton-Gore administration has been far too zealous in their 
regulatory powers. The courts have been turning over many of their 
regulations.
  So as we go through these issues and a few others tonight, the first 
person I want to call on is my good friend, the gentleman from Oklahoma 
(Mr. Watkins), of the third district who is interested in agriculture 
in Oklahoman agriculture and energy, and how it affects Oklahoma and 
how it affects rural America.
  Mr. WATKINS. First, let me thank my colleague from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Peterson) for his concern and for his time tonight for us to talk about 
some of this inappropriateness and lack of action by this Gore-Clinton 
administration.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like first for my colleagues to know that I 
stand tonight not for political reasons, but because of an emotional 
concern, a life-long emotional concern about small towns and rural 
areas of this country, yes, our farms and our agriculture interests 
also throughout this Nation.
  Let me share with my colleagues, I loved agriculture to the point in 
small town rural America, but even to the point that I majored in 
agriculture when I went off to college, I got a couple of degrees in 
agriculture, so I stand with this emotional concern not just political 
concern.
  Back when I served as State president of the Oklahoma Future Farmers 
of America, I would stand and I shared 16 percent of our people were in 
production of agriculture in the United States. 4 years later, when I 
received the Outstanding Agriculture Student Award at Oklahoma State 
University, I stood up and said there is only 12\1/2\ percent of us in 
the production of agriculture in the United States.
  Tonight as I stand before my colleagues, I say there is only 1.5 
percent of people in the production of agriculture; that is the erosion 
that has taken place in rural America. There is no other way I can 
paint the picture any better.
  Not too long ago, earlier this year, I was invited to speak on 
agriculture before the Farm Credit Association in Oklahoma. They wanted 
to know the title of my speech. I usually do not have a title, but I 
said if you need to have a title, you can state it is ``American 
Agriculture changing from the PTO to the WTO.''
  Now, PTO stands for the power take-off on the tractors which allowed 
us to get bigger farms and bigger units and allowed us to produce the 
food and fiber for this country. We can produce. Our big problem is 
being able to sell and now we have the World Trade Organization that we 
must be able to market through, 135 countries around this world; and we 
cannot forfeit those markets.
  Let me share with my colleagues something on an inappropriate 
activity that took place in the Uruguay Rounds back in 1993 under this 
administration's United States trade representative. At the Uruguay 
Rounds, they basically had resolved all of the various disagreements in 
trade, and it came down to agriculture and they could not agree on 
settling their difference in agriculture. They established a peace 
clause. Now that sounds good, a peace clause. However, what did it do?
  Actually, the peace clause of the Uruguay Rounds, the GATT talks, 
established and grandfathered in over $7 billion of subsidies for the 
European Union. We only have about $100 million, and there is a lot of 
differences in $100 million and $7 billion of subsidies which allows 
the European Union to grab our markets, preventing us from being able 
to sell around the world in many cases. I can go on and on and talk 
about agriculture, but I had to make that point.
  But I stand with a sadness tonight, because I see what is happening 
is just pure politics concerning the energy industry. The Vice 
President attacks the fossil fuel industry; but I would like to point 
out to the American people and to my colleagues, he has no 
alternatives, he has no other options, except to attack, that would 
endanger us even more.
  One of our colleagues earlier from Florida stated the fact that we 
now import about 56 percent of our energy from oil from foreign sources 
compared to that or less than 40 percent back there in the oil barrel 
embargo. We are becoming more dependent.
  Let me say, I submit to my colleagues, I submit to the American 
people that today we are more dependent than we ever have been at a 
time when we think we are independent. We are more dependent on a 
viable source of oil supply for this country, and the fact remains 
under the 8 years of the Gore-Clinton administration, they have not 
developed a national energy policy for the protection of this country.
  We have not moved forward to try to make sure we secure the energy 
and develop the energy for this Nation, the fossil fuel, as well as the 
renewable energy. We still have today more fossil fuel reserves in the 
ground than we have mined or drilled and taken from the ground. It is a 
matter of us having a policy that will allow us to move forward.
  So the people of this Nation need to know our national security is at 
stake. Yes, we have a volatile energy policy it appears, to say the 
least, when it goes from $20 down to $8 which not only disturbed the 
energy patch. It literally took nearly 100,000 of employees out of the 
rural areas of this country that were producing the energy for our 
Nation.
  It is hurting the consumers. I have suggested that we reached out in 
a bipartisan way and we come together and we develop a national energy 
policy that would stabilize fuel prices in an amount we can all work 
with and live with and let us produce the Nation's needed energy. To do 
no less is making us subject to blackmail. We have seen this go 
overseas to OPEC and get on bended knee and beg, that is un-American.
  Let me say it hurts not only the consumers in the urban centers of 
this country, but devastates rural America.
  I hope and I pray that we will move forward, and I hope and pray that 
we do quickly because the future of our children and our grandchildren 
are at stake and the future of our country is at stake.

[[Page 20352]]

  I say to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), I think the 
gentleman is lifting an issue of rural America and the lack of support, 
the lack of effort being made in the energy and agriculture and other 
areas that our people of this Nation need to know that under 8 years of 
the Gore-Clinton administration they have done nothing, zilch, zero in 
trying to move us towards some kind of independence in the field of 
energy.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from 
Oklahoma (Mr. Watkins).
  I am not minimizing the importance of agriculture, because it is 
vital, what do we do in rural America. We farm. We mine. We drill for 
oil. We cut timber. We manufacture, all under attack, in my view, 
through the regulatory process of this administration. And it is where 
rural jobs come from, and it is why urban areas are becoming crowded 
and rural America is becoming more sparsely populated, because the jobs 
have been forced out of rural America.
  We have become as a country dependent on the rest of the world 
instead of strong and independent because of our own natural resources.
  Mr. Speaker, next I will yield to the gentleman from Nevada (Mr. 
Gibbons), who is going to talk about mining and the interest he feels 
passionately about.
  Mr. GIBBONS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania 
(Mr. Peterson), my colleague and good friend, for inviting me to join 
him in this dialogue this evening and on a very important issue about 
the future of rural America and its importance to this great country.
  As the gentleman has just said, our rural economies and our rural 
areas are so valuable to the natural resources of this Nation. Mining, 
of course, like the gentleman before us from Oklahoma (Mr. Watkins), 
who spoke about the oil industry and the fact that we are becoming so 
dependent upon industries outside of the borders of this country for 
our economy and for our well-being and for the quality of life that we 
have. Mining also fits into that very same category.
  Mining is endangered at this very point, because of the policies of 
this administration and as well as I can imagine under any type of 
administration from a Gore administration would be as well.

                              {time}  2015

  How are they doing that? They are taking the control of the public 
lands upon which most mining occurs. They are regulating through the 
administration these businesses out of business. Secondly, they are 
taking away the utility of our natural resources and our ability to 
produce them and keep the economy of this great country going.
  In doing so, what their ultimate choice is is to endanger both the 
economy and the national security of this great Nation.
  Let us look at how they control vast areas of this country. As the 
gentleman has said, approximately 800,000 square miles of the United 
States, the western part of the United States, a size equal to most of 
the leading industrialized world combined, including Japan, Germany, 
Great Britain, France, and Italy, plus Ireland, and Denmark, 
Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, as well as a few Luxumbourgs 
thrown in for good measure, 815,000 square miles of public land is 
regulated by the administration.
  Upon those lands are where we gain much of our natural resources, 
including mining. Mining is indeed part of our everyday lives, and as 
we know, most individuals, every man, woman, and child in this great 
country consumes about 44,000 pounds of mined materials in one form or 
another every year. That is 44,000 pounds of mined materials, whether 
it is coal, fuel, the electricity plant that generates the energy for 
our daily living, or whether it is metal mined for a vehicle to drive 
us to and from work, that we use in our jobs, or even the jewelry that 
we wear is part of our everyday life.
  And especially when we start thinking about medical apparati, medical 
technology, the mining industry has indeed provided us with the quality 
of health care that we have today that is indeed pushing out new 
frontiers and keeping America alive, making our own lives longer, and 
giving us a better quality of life due to mining.
  Well, with that 815,000 square miles, and this administration 
seemingly hell-bent on acquiring more land and using administrative 
procedures to push the public off the public land to push mining 
companies off of land and force them overseas, we are growing into a 
new dependence, for all the strategic minerals and metals that we need 
for our armed forces and for everyday living, on countries where they 
can go mine and have the opportunity to do so. Therefore, like oil, we 
are soon to become dependent for these metals and materials.
  We are left with two very critical choices. Mr. Speaker, we are left 
with a choice of whether we develop our own resources and keep our 
children, our sons and daughters, home, or do we go ahead and allow for 
mining activity to move overseas at the insistence of the Gore 
administration, and following up by sending our sons and our daughters 
over there to defend the national security when those vital critical 
elements to our economy are cut off at some point? So we have those 
very delicate balancing choices we need to make.
  I am really concerned about what this administration is doing through 
the United Nations as well. I heard recently that many of the leaders 
of the United Nations have tried to enlist 25 specified international 
agreements to establish a legal framework of international governance, 
a body of binding rules that would also affect how we operate in this 
country and make it even more difficult for mining to succeed.
  Such conventions and protocols are the primary interest of 
environmental programs which have been on a campaign to make new world 
environmental organizations the deciding factor in what we do at home.
  Let me say just one quick analogy here. If resources were the measure 
of a country's wealth, the United States would not be the number one 
economy in the world, Russia would be. Russia has more oil, gas, more 
timber, more mined minerals than any other Nation. But because Russia 
could not develop those natural resources, because Russia had to depend 
upon outside sources, Russia is not the number one economy in this 
world, the United States is, because the United States learned long ago 
how to develop its own natural resources, whether it is timber, whether 
it is mining, whether it is farming and agriculture, developing the 
land and making those resources work for us.
  I am interested in what these candidates stand for and how an 
administration is going to critically hurt our rural America. I looked 
at the vice president's book, Earth in the Balance. The vice president 
himself argued that some new arm of the U.N. should be empowered to act 
on environmental concerns in the fashion of a Security Council, and in 
other matters. There should be global constraints and legally valid 
penalties for noncompliance.
  Well, most mining companies today have a very strong, very hard 
dependent environmental quality that they use in their operations every 
day around this world. I will be the first to admit that there are some 
historically bad practices out there in the past that have given mining 
a bad image, but today's practice is environmentally sound. We have 
most mining companies, they are shareholder-owned, citizen-owned. They 
have a responsibility to their shareholders, a fiduciary 
responsibility, and they are going to keep our country and our 
resources in this world I think used with the highest priority and 
safety, environmental safety, that we have.
  Let me also say that the administration under Vice President Gore has 
proposed a new tax on the mining industry, a tax that amounts to a 
royalty on mined minerals that would amount to about $200 million a 
year over a 10-year period. That is a $2 billion new tax. At a time 
when our government is flush with surplus tax revenues, they want a $2 
billion tax increase.
  Do Members know what they plan to do with that money? I think they 
plan to acquire more public land, kicking the public off.

[[Page 20353]]

  Nevada is one of those States where I think it has the highest 
percentage of land in its borders that is managed and owned by the 
Federal government, at about 89 percent. That leaves us with about 11 
percent for our real estate tax base developed property. It takes away 
a lot of the area that mines could go and work with private 
individuals.
  So buying up more land only excludes the public from this land. It 
excludes our mining industries, again forcing them overseas, so buying 
up that land is not in the best interests of rural America. It puts 
people out of jobs. It puts communities on the brink of disaster and 
failure and financial bankruptcy. All of this makes those rural 
communities become more and more dependent upon urban communities for 
their support. I am sure America does not want that.
  I am also worried that the next president must understand mining, and 
our president must make great strides in becoming a responsible steward 
of the land. He must understand that mining is a responsible steward of 
the land. I would hope that he understands that mining is as important 
to our urban communities as mining is to our rural communities, not 
just for the jobs but for the direct result of what they produce and 
put out for consumption to the American public.
  We need an administration that will invite all interested parties to 
the table. When it comes to establishing public policy, this 
administration has not. It has relied solely on extremist environmental 
groups to make those decisions. They have dictated mining out of 
existence.
  It is not my nature to stand here and join with my colleague and be 
so political, but I believe this election is going to be particularly 
important to America. It is going to be particularly important to rural 
America. It is going to be pivotal to the future of this country. It 
will be pivotal to determining the future of mining.
  Because there is an old saying: Mining works for Nevada, but if it 
works for the rest of the Nation as well, then it is a good product. It 
is a good organization. It is a good industry to have.
  There is one final saying that I want to leave my colleagues with 
here today about mining. That is, in mining, you have to remember that 
if it isn't grown, it has to be mined.
  I want to thank my colleague, the gentleman from Pennsylvania, for 
allowing me to stand here and give a little bit of introduction on the 
value of mining. I just want everybody to remember the 44,000 pounds we 
each consume every year of mined minerals. It is critical to the future 
of this country and to the quality of life each and every one of us 
have.
  I thank the gentleman for allowing me to be here.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. If we are not mining it from our own 
lands, we will be buying it from some foreign country.
  Mr. GIBBONS. If the gentleman will continue to yield, as the 
gentleman says, our oil right now, we are 60 percent dependent upon 
international deliveries of oil. When we reach the point where mining 
is overseas and our metals and strategic metals are now produced 
overseas, we will then become dependent upon those countries, as well, 
and we will end up making the choice, do we send our sons and daughters 
over there to defend the vital national interests of those strategic 
minerals to the United States?
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I thank the gentleman. Most of us 
tonight that will be speaking have large rural districts, some of the 
West but some from the East. I have the largest district east of the 
Mississippi in Pennsylvania, but our next speaker, Mr. Sherwood, who 
joined us in 1998, 2 short years ago, comes from a district almost as 
large as mine, a gentleman who was a very successful businessman and 
had not served in government per se except for the school board, local 
government; I should not say except for local government. That is the 
most important government we have, local government.
  He served very well there, has been a very successful businessman, 
and has transitioned into a very successful Congressman. He brings so 
much knowledge and experience of the community with him.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to my friend, the gentleman from the eastern 
part of Pennsylvania (Mr. Sherwood), who will share with us the 
perspective of his rural district.
  Mr. SHERWOOD. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me.
  Mr. Speaker, I ran for Congress because it had been my observation 
that in northeastern and north central Pennsylvania, we exported our 
milk and our stone and our timber and our manufactured goods, but we 
had also for a couple generations been exporting our children.
  The reason we exported our children is they would grow up in these 
good families and get an education and go somewhere else to find a job, 
because we did not have enough good jobs at home. I have worked very 
hard to get more good jobs in northeastern Pennsylvania. We have been 
pretty successful at that. But the first rule if we want a good economy 
in our own districts is to protect the jobs we have.
  What do we historically do in the country? When I was a young man 
growing up in Nicholson, we had three feed mills, or excuse me, five 
feed mills, two car dealerships, three creameries. If we go through 
that town today, there are not any of those.
  Why did that happen? That happened because we lost our agricultural 
base. In the country, there are a few things we do for a living. We 
farm, we timber, we quarry stone. Those are all very important revenue 
producers and sources of employment and sources of good, stable family 
life in my district.
  I am concerned that we have policies in this country that are making 
those industries less and less viable. I am concerned that we are 
looking at an election coming up right away for president where one of 
the candidates does not believe in any of those industries, does not 
really seem to believe in a rural way of life.
  We talk about the environment and we talk about rural jobs and 
resource jobs as if they were exclusive. With a well-run country, they 
are not mutually exclusive. We can have a good economy and a pristine 
environment if we continue to manage it carefully.
  In Pennsylvania, we have the sustainable forestry initiative. We have 
the Chesapeake Bay initiative. Both are programs that have taught our 
forest industry people when they can timber, when they can't timber, 
when they have to be worried about degrading the water supply. They 
have taught our farmers nutrient management, and that everything we do 
runs downhill and eventually ends up in the Chesapeake.
  We have learned a lot in the last 20 years. We have learned a lot 
about how we are good stewards of our environment and the people that 
are downstream.
  Yet, we have an EPA now that wants to make all farming operations 
point source polluters, all forestry operations point source polluters, 
when these two issues have been very capably dealt with by our 
Pennsylvania DCNR.
  That would be an unprecedented power grab by the EPA that would 
federalize all these small business practices, all these landowners 
that are farming on their land or harvesting their timber. It would be 
an unnecessary escalation of the authority of the Federal government, 
and it would be very cumbersome, very hard to manage.
  So that is why I am concerned, as some of my colleagues are 
concerned, about the direction the country might take when we have our 
election in November.

                              {time}  2030

  We need a rural economy that stays strong. We need to protect those 
jobs, protect those families, protect the small towns that live off the 
forest products industry, the mining industry, and agriculture. We need 
sustainable agriculture. We do not need it all concentrated in just a 
couple areas of the country.
  If one has small dairy farms dispersed around the country, that is a 
very environmentally friendly way to raise our milk and our food and 
our

[[Page 20354]]

fiber. When one has huge concentrations of animals in one area, one 
gets problems like we saw in the Tar River and the floods of a year 
ago.
  So we want policies that will keep our farmers operating in the 
Northeast. To do that, we have to have a good energy policy. And we 
have to understand what we have to work with, that we need to work on 
our domestic supply, and that we have to understand the industry.
  I am not afraid of the internal combustion engine, and neither is 
rural America.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from 
the eastern part of Pennsylvania (Mr. Sherwood). Rural America does not 
go very far without it. We do not accomplish very much agriculture 
without it. So I thank the gentleman from the eastern part of the 
State.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Weldon), 
another Pennsylvanian, to share with us something that he shared with 
me earlier tonight that a large number of our Armed Forces of our 
recruits come from rural America. He is going to talk about rural 
America's concern about our defense.
  Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for 
this special order on rural America. Let me talk briefly about two 
categories of our defense. The first is our domestic defense. Our 
domestic defense relies on the 32,000 organized departments that are in 
every rural town in America. In fact, as my colleague knows, 
Pennsylvania has 2,600 of these rural fire and EMS departments. They 
are in every small town in every county in this Nation, in Montana, in 
Idaho, in Alabama, in Arkansas, in Hawaii, in New York, California. 
They are there. And 1.2 million men and women, 32,000 departments, 85 
percent of them are volunteers. In fact, they are the oldest volunteers 
in the history of the country, older than America itself.
  Now, the important thing is, what has this administration done to 
these people who are serving America, who are responding to floods, 
tornadoes, earthquakes, hazmat incidents, and fires? Well, they have 
cut the only program for rural fire departments which has been 
authorized at about $20 million a year. This administration cut it last 
year to this year from $3.5 million to $2.5 million. What a disgrace. 
The President sneezes and spends more than $2.5 million a year. Yet, 
this administration has done nothing for rural fire departments.
  Now, why should they? Well, these people lose 100 of their colleagues 
every year that are killed. Name me one other volunteer group from 
America where 100 of their members are killed in the line of duty. They 
have ordinary jobs, but they are killed protecting their towns and 
their communities.
  But this administration, they claim they are for volunteers. We saw 
them develop the AmeriCorps program. Is that not amazing, a $500 
million program supposedly designed to help create volunteers. But 
guess what, the volunteer fire service cannot apply because it is not 
politically correct to fight fires and respond to disasters. So here we 
have an administration that is so insensitive to our domestic defenders 
that they created a half-a-billion-dollar program, giving scholarships, 
incentives for people to volunteer, but they cannot volunteer in their 
communities, especially the rural communities where they so desperately 
need people to man those trucks and their ambulances. This 
administration just does not get it.
  Now, Harris Wofford, the head of that program, just called me today, 
and they now want to do something after the program has been in 
existence for about 6 years because they realize how insensitive they 
have been.
  The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) talked about our 
international defenders, our military. He is right. The gentleman from 
Pennsylvania is often right, and he is right. The bulk of our military 
personnel are from the farms. They are from rural America. They are 
patriotic. They are dedicated. They will go any place that America 
sends them, and they will perform any task.
  But do my colleagues know something? Look at what has happened to 
them. We have had three simultaneous things occur under this 
administration: the largest decrease in defense spending, the largest 
increase in the use of our military around the world, and the absolute 
ignorance when it comes to arms control and the proliferation that has 
been occurring by China and Russia to rogue states, which further harms 
our Americans.
  In fact, it was rural Pennsylvanians, 15 of them that came home in 
body bags in 1992 because this administration and other administrations 
had not done enough to build missile defense systems to stop that Scud 
missile when it hit the barracks in Saudi Arabia.
  This administration has not done well by our military. The best 
evidence of that is our retention rate right now for pilots in the Air 
Force and the Navy is 15 percent. People are getting out because they 
are fed up with all of these deployments.
  None of the Services over the past 3 years have been able to meet 
their recruitment quotas except for the Marine Corps because young 
people are saying, I do not want to join. Those farmers are saying, in 
the past, we have gone in the military, but I am fed up now because you 
are sending me from one deployment to the other.
  Our once proud Navy which went from 585 ships to 317 ships now have 
to take people off of one aircraft carrier and move them to another, 
and they are still 600 sailors short on every aircraft carrier deployed 
in harm's way today.
  What this administration has done to our military and has done to 
those brave Americans, many and oftentimes most of whom are from our 
rural areas, is absolutely outrageous. In fact, I think it is going to 
go down in history, the past 8 years, as our worst period of time in 
our history in undermining America's security.
  If we look at the history records of World War II, the Vietnam War, 
World War I, the conflict Desert Storm, our volunteers from the 
heartland of America are always the first to come and volunteer for 
this country. But, again, we have not done well by them.
  Those veterans out there across America have not been taken care of 
by this administration. This Congress had to fight to give our veterans 
and our military personnel cost of living increases because this 
administration thought it was more important to give an IRS agent an 
increase in their cost of living than they did to men and women who 
were serving and our veterans who have served.
  We have got to change that. We need a President that will lead a 
Congress in proud support of our international defenders and in proud 
support of our domestic defenders. Al Gore just does not cut that.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman 
from California (Mr. Radanovich) who is going to talk about the war on 
the West.
  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, I thank very much the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) noting that I will be talking about the 
``War on the West''. I just want to make sure he knows I define the 
West as anything west of the East Coast.
  So I appreciate this time to be able to talk on this subject, mainly 
about rural America and I think this administration's assault on rural 
America. While the ``War on the West'' might be a tired slogan, it is 
not nearly as tired as the people who continue to fight their own 
government to preserve their way of life.
  As President Clinton's reign over western lands draws to a close, the 
war has been renewed with fresh vigor. New regulations sprout like 
kudzu, an unstoppable creeping vine, it strangles the jobs and life out 
of many western and rural communities.
  During the past 8 years, the Federal Government has been a tough 
opponent. Few small businesses and landowners can withstand the due 
diligence of government lawyers who have unlimited funds and unlimited 
time.
  For the victims, bureaucratic time is like Chinese water torture, 
slowly eroding the small business owner's ability to meet payroll and 
pay the

[[Page 20355]]

bills. The waiting game is the government's most powerful weapon 
against individuals.
  Delays and uncertainty can destroy any small business. But it is only 
in the West and in rural America where the Federal Government controls 
over half of the land, where our economy is dependent on natural 
resources, that a little bureaucratic red tape puts entire counties out 
of work.
  Ask somebody who comes from rural Oregon or ask somebody who comes 
from rural California.
  An example, in 1997, the Bureau of Land Management decided to carry 
out environmental assessments on every single grazing permit renewal. 
These can be very time consuming and expensive. It was a choice only a 
bureaucrat with government time and money would make.
  Over 5,000 permits expired in 1999, nearly a fourth of the total 
number. Everybody knew that the BLM lacked the manpower to complete all 
the reviews in time. The ranchers faced enormous uncertainty, they 
feared they would have no place to put their cows and no extra feed 
available.
  The Clinton-Gore administration showed all the concern that we would 
expect from Federal agents. They did not show much concern about the 
ranchers without permits who would go out of business. Maybe, Mr. 
Speaker, that was the point.
  It took Congress to step in and temporarily renew the permits until 
the environmental reviews were completed. That move was labeled as an 
antienvironmental rider that ``offered a perverse incentive for the BLM 
to delay environmental analysis.''
  One thing people do not get is that when one puts ranchers out of 
business, they sell the ranch. The people who work there lose their 
jobs. The suppliers in the town lose their jobs. The people who buy the 
ranch, they build subdivisions.
  This destruction of America's rural jobs is the unavoidable side 
effect of the Clinton-Gore public land policies. Politics has driven 
their systemic effort to demonize people who live on the land. They 
equate producers with destroyers.
  They claim to save nature from man, and in the process, they gain 
political favor in the cities where people do not understand our rural 
culture, nor do they understand environmental stewardship.
  Another example, President Clinton's Northwest Forest Plan virtually 
eliminated timber harvesting from almost 21 acres of forests in 
Washington and Oregon. Since 1990, almost 20,000 forests and mill 
workers in those two States have lost their jobs.
  It is estimated that those industries supported another 40,000 to 
60,000 service jobs. This all happened in small communities where 
unemployment is already over 15 percent.
  This pattern has been repeated across the West. Thousands of mining, 
trucking and refining jobs have been lost by preventing the expansion 
or opening of new mines. The government has starved and destroyed 
countless small oil and gas producers and drillers by delaying 
regulatory permits.
  The Clinton administration is now taking the final step by 
restricting recreational access as to Federal lands, a move that will 
erode the very tourism jobs they promised would sustain rural America 
after they eliminated the resource jobs.
  What is most disturbing is that these unfortunate rural victims seem 
to be expendable casualties in the game of Presidential politics.
  The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the 
gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy) recently said that Democrats 
have basically written off the rural areas. That statement alone sheds 
light on the rural cleansing machine at work.
  In 1996, the year of the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign, President 
Clinton designated 1.8 million-acre of Grand Staircase Escalante 
Monument in Utah. Initially, the Presidential advisor Katie McGinty, 
chairman of Council on Environmental Quality, expressed concern about 
abusing the Antiquities Act and stated that these lands are not really 
endangered.
  But she later changed her position, apparently convinced of the 
political value in making such a designation. The process was pushed 
forward in spite of statewide outrage, and the Nation lost access to 62 
billion tons of clean coal, 3 to 5 billion barrels of oil and 2 to 4 
trillion cubic feet of clean-burning natural gas. The children of Utah 
lost billions of dollars in future royalties to pay for their schools.
  Fast forward to the year 2000. In this Presidential election year, 
President Clinton has named 10 new national monuments to the delight of 
hundreds of important urban activists.
  One of the most recent, the Sequoia National Monument, was in my 
California congressional district. In spite of an existing ban on 
logging within the sequoia groves, and in spite of scientific 
recommendations that logging provides critical fire control around the 
groves, the administration decided to clear 330,000 acres off limits to 
anybody.
  They immediately put 220 people in Dinuba, California out of work. 
This tragic result has been compounded by the fact that these families 
not only lost their primary income, but they also lost their employer-
provided health insurance.
  Possibly the worst effect of the Sequoia Monument, however, is that 
it has left the Sequoia Monument in the same position as the Bandelier 
Monument in Los Alamos, New Mexico. There is a virtual timber box of a 
forest, and prescribed burns are now the only way to control it. Just 
this year, 75,000 acres burned right next door in the Manter Fire.
  So today, at the end of the Clinton administration's sovereignty over 
western lands, we find we are still fighting a war on the West.
  City folk might be tired of hearing about this, but, Mr. Speaker, 
believe me, the people in rural America are exhausted after 8 years of 
living with it.
  I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson) for yielding 
me this time and also for bringing up this most important issue to my 
constituents and I think for the country; and that is this 
administration's attack on rural life in America.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, it is hard to hear any 
speech given that they do not talk about urban sprawl today. But one of 
the greatest causes of urban sprawl has been the slow methodical 
destruction of rural America. The economies, whether it is agriculture, 
whether it is mining, whether it is timbering, whether it is 
manufacturing, all those things we do in rural America, as they have 
been squeezed, and they have been, and made more difficult to 
accomplish, young people leave, move to the urban areas, and we have 
urban sprawl. Yet, in rural America, the quality of life is 
unparalleled, but it is not a quality of life if one cannot have an 
income.

                              {time}  2045

  So next I am going to call on my other friend from California who is 
going to talk about the fires, another failed policy of this 
administration.
  Mr. HERGER. Mr. Speaker, I thank my good friend, the gentleman from 
Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), for leading us in this special hour today 
talking about the challenges that we have in rural America, and 
particularly the challenges that have been brought about and magnified 
because of, regrettably, some of the misguided policies of the Clinton-
Gore administration.
  Let me begin by just giving a little background on the district that 
I am blessed and honored to represent in northeastern California. It is 
some 36,000 square miles, almost 20 percent of the land area of the 
State of California on the Nevada-Oregon border, just directly north of 
Lake Tahoe; north of Sacramento. There are some parts or all of 11 
national forests within this area: Mount Shasta, Mount Lassen, the 
Trinity Alps. Again, some of the most beautiful mountain terrain and 
beautiful forests anyplace in the world are located in this area that I 
represent. Yet we see a tragedy taking place, a tragedy that began 
taking place because, I am afraid, of an ignorance within the United 
States, and certainly with this administration, on

[[Page 20356]]

what is happening in our national forests.
  For example, about the turn of the century and beginning in a major 
way around 1930, we began eliminating forest fires from our western 
forests. And of course our forests in the West are very different than 
those on the East Coast because it rains all summer long here. Fire is 
not something that people really understand that much on the East 
Coast. But on the West Coast we are basically a desert in the 
summertime. We have lightning strikes, and fire has historically been a 
natural phenomenon. It would be considered a positive phenomenon as 
well. But what happened, again in early 1900s, as people began living 
in these forest areas, they began preventing all forest fires. Then 
what happened is that our forests began to become much denser than they 
were historically.
  As a matter of fact, the Forest Service has estimated that since 
1928, our forests in the West are anywhere from two to four times 
denser than they were historically because, again, we have prevented 
the natural fires that would burn along and thin out the forests, burn 
out the smaller trees, and then we would have larger trees which would 
get larger. As a matter of fact, it was estimated that prior to the 
arrival of Europeans, there were approximately 25 large trees per acre 
in our forests. Today, we literally have hundreds of trees per acre.
  Now, what happens today? Today, we see when we have a fire, either by 
lightning strike or accidental fire, we see what they call a 
catastrophic fire, where the fire begins in the brush area, it moves up 
and becomes what is referred to as a fire ladder, where it moves up 
into the smaller trees and then up into the very crowns of the big 
trees, which historically have lived for hundreds of years, and now we 
see the entire forest burn. We actually see where these fires get so 
hot, so intense, that the soil itself, the minerals within, are singed 
for two to three inches and nothing can grow for several years later. A 
catastrophic fire.
  Now, what is the Clinton-Gore administration doing about it? Well, 
regrettably, not only are we not going in, as has been suggested by 
many, that we go in and begin thinning out our forests; that we begin 
removing this brush and thinning it out and restoring it more to its 
historic level so that we can again have the more normal restorative 
fires. By the way, the Native Americans, we know, would set fires. 
Again, it was a positive thing. But not today.
  We have seen this year one of the worst fire seasons ever. The 
Government Accounting Office has estimated that there is some 39 
million acres of national forest within the interior West that are at 
high risk of catastrophic fire. They also mention in this same report 
that it has been estimated that there is a window of only 10 to 25 
years that is available for taking effective action before there is 
widespread, long-term damage from large-scale fires. That is a direct 
quote from the GAO report.
  Again, what do we see happening? Nothing. We see nothing happening. 
This administration is following what some within the, regrettably, the 
extreme environmental community are dictating. For example, the Sierra 
Club came out 2 years ago in their public policy stating not a single 
tree should be removed from the Federal forest, not even a dead or 
dying tree. And, again, we see insect infestations. This is a normal 
thing to happen, and it is something that unless we go in and take out 
these diseased trees when it is first starting, we will see healthy 
trees and an entire forest destroyed. Not even a single tree, even if 
it is dead and dying, can be removed so as to remove this incredible 
catastrophic fire hazard, according to some within the extreme 
environmental community.
  Regrettably, and the real tragedy is, that it seems very likely that 
were the Vice President, Mr. Gore, to become the President, he would 
continue this same policy that we have seen now for 7\1/2\ years into 
the next administration, the next 4 years; and we would see more trees 
burning.
  How many trees have we seen burn? Well, last year some 5.6 million 
acres burned across the United States. This year it is already, as of 
the first of September, 6.8 million acres have burned. The cost of this 
has been $626 million that has been spent; not to restore our forests 
to their historic level, but just to fight these catastrophic fires.
  And I might mention that the biggest fire was in New Mexico. And, 
guess what. The Federal Government set this fire itself. This is what 
they called ``a prescribed burn.'' Well, prescribed burn might have 
been great if we were a Native American back in the 1800s when there 
were only 25 trees per acre. But now, when we have a prescribed burn 
and we have these fire ladders, we can see what happens. Again, this 
was a tragedy in New Mexico, with hundreds of homes being burned and 
many hundreds of homes more threatening to be burned; people's lives 
being destroyed.
  In my own district of Lewiston, a town last year, we had 120 homes 
burn. The entire community of Lewiston, it was in the national news for 
several weeks, was threatened to be burned. That was also a prescribed 
burn. Again, I want to mention that prescribed burns might be fine if 
we have gone in and restored these forests as they should, but not 
certainly as we see them today.
  Is there something we can do? Yes. We passed legislation just this 
last year, legislation which I authored. I did not write it, but I 
authored it here. It was called the Quincy Library Plan. The reason it 
was called Quincy Library is because environmentalists and wood 
products people and elected officials and community leaders from within 
the community of Quincy in northern California, a small town of about 
1,200, got together and they thought, well, the only place they would 
not yell at each other was in the library. So it was called the Quincy 
Library Plan. They came up with a plan using the latest scientific 
data, along with all the current laws, put it all together in a plan 
specific for their forest.
  They came up with this plan, it was voted out of this House virtually 
unanimously, passed out of the Senate virtually unanimously, and the 
President signed it. This administration refuses to implement it. We 
have already been 1 year into it, and this plan has not been 
implemented. It was a 5-year pilot program, and they are eating up the 
time. This plan, by the way, does not cost taxpayers money. It brings 
in $3 of revenue for every $1 that is spent. Maybe this would help some 
of the 43 mills that were closed in my district alone in my 10 rural 
counties, not because we are short of trees, but because of Federal 
legislation that would not allow us to go in and thin out.
  Again, there is a tragedy happening in our national forests and to 
our environment. No spotted owls can live where a catastrophic fire has 
taken place. We need to do something different. I am very pleased with 
Governor George W. Bush and his intent to work with us on this.
  I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding to me.
  Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. We have been joined, Mr. Speaker, by 
the majority leader, such a delight, and I would like to yield to him 
now.
  Mr. ARMEY. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman; and I see the he has 
more speakers, perhaps a wealth of speakers here, so I will not take 
but just a minute or two.
  I want to thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for taking this 
special order on a very important subject, and I would like to make 
three points that have come to me while I have listened to all of these 
speakers. The basic question we are asking here is how do we as a 
Nation preserve, utilize, conserve, and develop our resources to 
achieve the wealth of a Nation in the lives of our children. It seems 
to me it takes a balanced and informed relationship between real 
people, who naturally will love their land more than anybody could when 
they make their living off it and they live on it, and a government.
  I have to say, Mr. Speaker, sometimes the government can do some 
downright silly things. Driving through Georgia just a week ago, 
looking at the beautiful landscape of Georgia, seeing the damage that 
was done

[[Page 20357]]

by what I call the kudzu government. A lot of my colleagues may not be 
familiar with kudzu, but if they were to go to south, southeast America 
they will see kudzu. My colleagues who are uninformed might say, my 
goodness, that is pretty. But what is kudzu? Kudzu is something 
introduced in rural America, in the southeast, ostensibly to control 
soil erosion. And what it does is it grows over and smothers all the 
natural foliage of the region.
  So if anyone has been fortunate enough to have been given kudzu, a 
gift from the government, and it has been in their neighborhood for 
very long, they know that it has killed everything, even what they 
wanted to keep. That is so like the government: comes and shows up and 
says, ``I am Mr. Kudzu, I am from the government, I am here to help 
you.'' And before we know it, they have smothered and destroyed 
everything that is dear to our native regions.
  A look at mining reclamation. I wish everybody in America would go 
out to our great mining States and see what they are doing in mining in 
America today; to see how quickly they take the ore, the coal, out, 
extract it, clean up, replace and refill. It is not unusual to see the 
mine operating very productively, producing the minerals and the ores 
and the energy that we want, and within hundreds of feet we will see 
the natural wildlife of the region grazing on what had been, and is 
today again, the natural foliage of the region.
  Once again, the government of the United States might have been 
helpful and encouraging in that. But today it says we are so extreme, 
as they did in the Grand Escalante, we will not allow the mining, we 
will not allow the reclamation. We will deny the Nation the resources.
  One of the great philosophical questions of our lifetime is, If a 
tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, will anybody hear it? 
Well, if Al Gore becomes President, we might ask the greater question, 
and the one that has greater relevance to our life, If a tree falls in 
the forest, will anybody clear it? And we just heard a discourse on 
that.
  There is a place in Idaho, in the district of the gentlewoman from 
Idaho (Mrs. Chenoweth-Hage), where you can stand and see that the 
environmental extremists allowed an experiment. They allowed somebody 
to do the natural, normal, sensible thing that we would all do as we 
cleaned up our own backyards and take the fallen trees, the underbrush, 
the fire hazard, and clear it. And there is a section right across the 
road where that was disallowed. The fire came, and it is not difficult 
to see where the fire's devastation ended. It ended where people did 
the sensible thing with their land and cleared the fallen trees and 
stopped the fire hazard.

                              {time}  2100

  There are many things that we can see in rural America in our 
wonderful countryside, resources, wealth, that should be unlocked from 
rigid, inflexible, dogmatic Government controls that are naive in their 
understanding, innocent of their awareness, and arbitrary in their 
implementation.
  Let America be what America has been and has built itself from, a 
free Nation of real people making a living and living on their own 
land.
  I think we should return to this subject again soon.

                          ____________________