Benefits for legal immigrants. That, immigration policy and how the everify everify system is being used in the u. S. Host good morning. It is thursday, august 15, 2019. We begin the washington journal focusing on the issues facing Rural Americans after spending Yesterdays Program talking to City Residents, it is Rural Americas turn. Give us a call and let us know what your top issue is and how it is being handled by state and local leaders where you are. Eastern and central time zones call in at 2027488000. Mountain and pacific time zones, call in at 2027488001. On twitter it is cspanwj. On facebook it is facebook. Com cspan. A very good thursday morning to you. Rural residents only, you can start calling in now to give you a sense of the universe of callers, it is about 60 Million People, that is how Many Americans live in Rural Communities. Here is the latest information about them. 64 of that population lives east of the mississippi river. 10 of the total population in the west live in rural operations and half of all people in rural areas are in the south. Wet month on this program, were joined by former democratic senator of montana, Heidi Heitkamp. She came on to discuss rural issues. Here is a bit of what she had to say. [video clip] the question i get when i am in new york, what do rural voters want . They want what the new york cab driver wants. They want Good Health Care and quality education. In way you deliver Services Rural america is much different than Downtown Manhattan and when you look at the president s budget, which is a value document, you see there is no sport for support for Rural America. You see a decline in the Rural Economy you dont see in the urban economy. People may say this is the best economy in the history of the world, which i can dispute, but it is certainly not goodbye good for Rural America. Toy are going to continue decline with this president s failed and wrongheaded and reckless trade policy. Host former montana democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp on this program. You can watch her entire appearance on our website at cspan. Org. She talked about the economy in that statement. Here is the state of the economy or at least the stock market. Intoed investors send down freefall. Overseas omens have wall street fearing recessions. The dow losing 800 points, posting the worst percentage drop of the year. Stocks, bonds, flash warning signs, Global Economic slowdown deepens. One more from the financial times, bonds sound recession alarm as china and germany show strain. U. S. And u. K. Yield curve inverts. We are talking in this first hour of the washington journal today with auroral as it into rural residents only. In the Eastern Central time zones, 80s 2027488000. It is, 2027488000. You can call in the mountain or pacific time zones at 2027488001. More from officials around the country talking about rural issues. This from the annual state of the state address. This is kristi noem from earlier this year talking about the issue of Broadband Access. Here is what she had to say. [video clip] Internet Access is taken for granted in urban settings, but that is not the case in rural areas. There are many rural areas where the lack of access is widespread. Half of our counties have Rural Counties where 1 in 4 people do not have this kind of Broadband Access. In some counties that have rural areas where half the residents do not have Broadband Access at all and they are not even our most remote counties. County,an coddington for example, indoors for internet endures poor Internet Access. It is a south dakota issue because the small communities and rural areas near watertown or huron provide customers and members of the workforce for those larger communities. Some young girl with an aptitude for math and science could be a future engineer, but will she be able to excel without rod ban access at home . Some Broadband Access at home . Will they have the Internet Access they need to look at markets and buy new machinery . Runr spouse might want to and at home business. We must close the gap to make sure people have the ability to hire locally and sell globally. Host senator johnson john thune tweeted about the issue of Broadband Access and what the fcc is doing about it. Fcc approvedthe some 5 Million Dollars in projects throughout south dakota saying that closing the Digital Divide is one of my top priorities, glad to see the fcc announcement, that was his tweet from last week on the latest. Already talking about rural issues, talking to rural residents only. 2027488000 if you are in the eastern or central time zones. If you are in the mountain or pacific time zones, 2027488001. We will start with robert out of fayetteville, pennsylvania. Good morning. Caller good morning. Thank you for having me on. My main concern is our city politicians in philly and pittsburgh and harrisburg throwing pennsylvanians under the bus with their change in gun control philosophies because of these recent events. Owner of a semi automatic rifle and i use it to target shoot. I had hopes of going to the camp. Rifleal championship. Ompetitions every year there is a legitimate reason, other than hunting. They can be used for home defense and there is a littleknown addition to the Second Amendment called the militia act of 1793 and it explained what our militia was. We have an organized militia and an unorganized militia and our organized militia was used successfully to defend this country in new orleans. New orleansattle of because we used on organized militia, which was every man between 18 and 60 that could shoulder a weapon. Do you think there is a growing divide in this country when it comes to rural and urban residents or is it the same divide that has always been there . Caller i believe this divide is so wide we are going to have a civil war in this country if people like Kamala Harris say we are going to start going to peoples doors and confiscating weapons. The people in the city should stay in the city and keep their laws for city people and people in rural areas should have their laws. A halfs 15 minutes to hour for us to get the state police to respond to our area if we are having trouble out here. That is one of the reasons we want to keep our guns. Host that is robert in pennsylvania and this is mike in ohio. What is your top issue as a Rural American . Caller good day. How are you . Host i am doing well. Caller i will tell you what concerns me. Takei go to the city, i the back road along the river and when i go that way, i pass the National Guard depot and there is millions and millions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment. Then when i look across the river under the bridge, there is People Living in tents. The rural areas would be a lot better off if we took a look at pentagontrillion the cannot account for an we have this 22 trillion deficit. It sounds like a disney production wrapped around the twilight zone. You know what i am saying here . That is how it looks. Host where should that money go . You think to homelessness and housing issues in this country . Caller infrastructure. Infrastructure and the wellbeing of the people of this country. If we are the most privileged and the fate the richest on the face of the earth, i dont understand this war machine all the time, these covert operations, the irancontra operations and those things that go on, that is the problem here, that is where the money goes, prisons, that looks like a deal and a half for these contractors, military spending, defense, we need oversight and accountability, is the problem. Host how long have you lived out there . Caller i grew up on a farm a few miles from here as a child and lived here my whole life. Host have you ever wanted to leave . Caller i grew up on a farm. My dad used to build hot rods and stock cars and my grandfather ran him off the farm one time. I have a little shop i run i have been in business since 1977 and right now, i am a oneman operation because i cannot afford help. I am 66 years old, a cancer survivor and used to race sprint cars, quite a life. I am still here and i like what i am doing as far as a car builder. Host how has business been . Caller it is up and down like a yoyo. Insurance companies try to direct work two of you big shops and it is like they are trying to weed out the little guy. Walmartke they want one for the whole city and nothing else. This business it has been a problem, but it is all i know how to do and it is what i will keep doing. I dont know what else to say. Host is there a walmart near you . Caller yeah. There is one near chillicothe. I pass that National Guard depot and shake my head, all that money sitting there for nothing. Host talking to rural residents only. 2027488000 if you are in the eastern or central time zones. 2027488001 if you are a rural resident in the mountain or pacific time zones. Want to know what your top issues are. Having this conversation after we focused on City Residents only yesterday. Today, it is Rural Americas turn. John in jasper, indiana, good morning. Caller yes. My big concern is the environment. That we getmportant concerned about the environment nowadays, they have say alarge lawns and they lawnmower makes more pollution than a car. About farmers. Their crops are in terrible shape this year and just hope for the best in the future. Host are you a farmer . Caller i own a farm, yes. Host what kind of farm is it . Caller it is a crop farm. I have a renter on it doing the work because i am a disabled military veteran. Host there is a story in todays wall street journal about farmers in iowa, but looking at farm issues in general and where their support liza made a trade war with china, saying at least with the farmers the wall street journal talked to at the iowa state fair, that the support is still there, they are loyal to donald trump despite the trade war taking place under his administration. Are you a donald trump supporter . Caller yes. I am. He is trying to do a good job for our country, but he does not have the backing. Host the backing from who, john . Caller the other leaders of our country. Host are republicans backing him enough . Caller they are, but democrats, they dont back even they even theyw dont know how to compromise in washington, d. C. , so we are not getting anything done. Host the story from the wall street journal noting one of the reason farmers are showing so much patience with President Trump, even as Commodity Prices suffered is his administration suffered terror related aid. Disperse that will 14. 5 billion dollars following a roughly 10 billion program last year. Taylor who farms soybeans and livestock called the checks the trump payment and said last years assistants came close to making up losses and curate incurred by the trade war. With ruraling residents only, want to hear about your top issues, what is happening where you live, how local and state leaders are dealing with it. 2027488000 is the number for rural residents in eastern or central time zones. 2027488001 if you are a rural resident in the mountain or pacific time zones. One other issue we have talked about on this program before is the availability of hospitals in rural areas. Last week on this program, and Investigative Reporter discussed the decline of rural hospitals. Here is a bit of what he had to say. [video clip] rural hospitals, i think the best way to describe what is happening is to go back in history a little bit. After world war ii, the general feeling was every Small Community in the country needed to have a hospital. Hospitals sprang up all across the country. The problem was over the next 34 years, Rural Communities themselves shrank in size. People left to go to the big cities and it left Rural Communities with older,equeira, and more sicker uninsured residents. You also get a big change in the technology of hospitals where you are getting microsurgery and neurosurgery and you are requiring more expertise on the part of doctors as well as a lot of equipment that is really expensive like cat scans and it became more and more expensive for hospitals to operate and in order to cover the cost, they needed to be in larger communities, communities with 1000 10,000 people could no longer really support all the things the hospital needs to have. People started migrating to the cities for care. As they did that, there were fewer patients coming in the doors, so they started to lose money. In order to keep doors open, morehad to specialize, do emergency care. Some of them even gave up sothing centers where they dealt with senior care and maybe some dialysis and those sort of things. They specialized and needed fewer beds, but the trend continues where people would forer to go to large cities their major procedures. Host an Investigative Reporter on this program just last week talking about one of those rural issues we touched on in the past. We want to hear what your rural issue is. Rural residents only in this first segment. Kay up out of missouri. Good morning. Caller thank you for taking my call. Memphis. 0 miles from 150 miles from st. Louis. The next to largest town is 75 miles to the east. The other, 50 to the west. Are elderly, ill, poor, and you have no money and you have no relatives or family close, you become a prisoner of your dad dead and dying town. We have all the trains, public passenger trains have been were taken up in the 1960s to make way for cars. We have acres and acres devoted to new and used cars, but people spend all their time trying to keep a car going so they can go 30 miles north to the doctor. We have had two hospitals close recently. Mass transit, i would say we no longer i understand, just found out last week at the Greyhound Bus no longer stops here. This is a town of 14,000, for heaven sake. The only way you can get out of here is by private, individual vehicles with a driver. If you cannot drive or you cannot drive Long Distances, you are in big trouble. Theseave little tiny buses that will go for three hours a day to take you maybe to a doctor 30 miles north. This the thing is the train constructing this and highspeed trains will not stop here, so they are not going to do the rural, small towns any good. Host at the beginning, you called it a dead and dying town. One issue we talked about in the program is where young people are going and whether they are leaving smalltown america and Rural America. Do you see that happening in sikeston . Caller it has always happened in sikeston with a few people. Some people, young people, of course. A lot of them end up coming back. What has killed our towns is school consolidation. Or they have closed out schools in a lot of small towns to consolidate them and the children are ending up on school buses for 2 to 4 hours a day. They took the trains, there are no train stops, which are a huge economic factor in small towns. Service, movies, restaurants, hotels, it has all been taken away from small towns, not to mention the factories that were given certain Tax Exemptions and they run out the Tax Exemptions and they leave. Sites inwo super fun this town that have never been dealt with. We have huge factories or storage buildings all over the place. It is the small towns are dumps for the capitalist entrepreneurs. Host have you ever fought have you ever thought about leaving . Caller of course, but i am here now. 70s. Oo old in my late i have had heart surgery, Certain Health problems, but it is a huge problem for the iferly here and, of course, you get older, your assets are taken away to get a nursing home or something. Host the front page of todays Washington Post focusing on the shortage of Young Workers in states in this country. Their correspondence went to maine to talk about that problem. Maine crossed a crucial aging milestone, a fifth of its population older than 65, which meets the definition of super aged. By 2026, maine will be joined by more than 15 other states including vermont and New Hampshire, maines neighbors to the northeast, montana, delaware, pennsylvania, more than a dozen more will meet that criterion by 2030. The number of seniors will grow by more than 40 million, approximately doubling between 2015 and 2050 by while the population older than 85 will come close to tripling. For tens of millions of elderly people without ruining their familys financial lives. If you want to read that story in todays Washington Post. Beatrice in southwest arkansas, whereabouts in arkansas . Caller yes. Yes, i have two problems. One man was on earlier talking about the gun problem. I live in a rural area in arkansas, very rural. 30 to 45 minutes when i call the police to send the sheriff or the county out here. A lot can go on when someone is breaking into your home, you have to have a weapon to defend yourself. Another thing, when the other earlier, sheing was talking about the way it is with medical