rural broadband

Kevin and I are working on the Guide to Winning with Youth Voters which we'll be posting on the website soon, but it means that both of us are crazy busy writing and re-writing. We'll have a post up today about the awesome events on The Hill, but for now check out some of these stories on young voters and the Millennial Generation.

• Just because young people don't have the deep pockets older people do to donate to political campaigns doesn't mean that we don't need our own recovery package.
• Education is a key issue for first time voters. "Research by the independent education foundation, Edge, has found two fifths of young people between 18 and 22 believe education is more important now than it was at the last election."
• Golden Gate Press reports that youth turnout is expected to rise in the state of California if trends continue their natural progression. Thanks for recognizing that 2006, the primaries and caucuses of 2008, and the general election of 2008 weren't a fluke thing. I keep hearing from state party people that some still aren't considering 18-29 year olds as "likely voters." #FAIL.
• Student journalists are blogging about homelessness by taking to the streets and investigating themselves.
• Earlier this week Change.org's blog talks about how young people are pro-choice.
• CNN covers older woman who lives in rural Oklahoma without broadband. And we wonder why rural communities are dying. Its pretty hard to bring young people to small towns if you can't even get basic utilities. This week the FCC announced its intentions to build out the broadband network saying that it is a necessity and a utility that we as people have a right to.
• We tweeted about this but it should be mentioned again - AP reports that young war veterans are returning home to unemployment... what happened to the good old fashioned American GOP "Support our Troops?" Guess that's only when they're overseas that we're doing that....

"As of last year, 1.9 million veterans had deployed for the wars since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some have struggled with mental health problems, addictions, and homelessness as they return home. Difficulty finding work can make the adjustment that much harder.

"The just-released rate for young veterans was significantly higher than the unemployment rate of young veterans in that age group of 14.1 percent in 2008.

"Many of the unemployed are members of the Guard and Reserves who have deployed multiple times, said Joseph Sharpe, director of the economic division at the American Legion. Sharpe said some come home to find their jobs have been eliminated because the company has downsized. Other companies may not want to hire someone who could deploy again or will have medical appointments because of war-related health problems, he said.

"It's a horrible environment because if you're a reservist and you're being deployed two or three times in a five-year period, you know you're less competitive," Sharpe said. "Many companies that are already hurting are reluctant to hire you and time kind of moves on once you're deployed."

The Wall Street Journal has a report about the state of broadband to the sticks and its progress in an economy aching under the pressure of 8W years.

Ms. Tumbridge pays $60 a month for a sattalite service so she can have a better ISP than the dial-up her neighbors are forced to use. She makes an interesting comment that its difficult to be a small business owner in today's tech world without having high speed access.

The piece continues

"Even cities that already have successful networks up and running plan to apply for stimulus funding to expand into rural areas. Wes Rosenbalm, who runs a fiber-optic broadband network in Bristol, Va., says reaching spread-out and sparsely populated regions of southwestern Virginia will cost much more than the initial $26 million he raised. "We are committed to getting to every area we can get to," Mr. Rosenbalm said in a recent interview.

Telecom and cable providers say they’ll eventually reach the rural areas where 10 million Americans are stranded with dial-up access. But for communities wanting to ring in the 21st century sooner rather than later, municipal projects might be their best hope."

As someone who lives in a rural state higher access to broadband builds jobs not just in developing the infrastructure but in skilled workforce like technicians. It also helps young people feel connected enough to want to stay in rural areas, telecommute, save family farms that continue to falter, and build small businesses to save our small towns.

Are the Telco's dragging their feet because of the cost/benefit analysis is too small, or are they dragging their feet because they're waiting for the government to come in and build it and then hand it over?

Wednesday, President Elect Barack Obama announced the new Secretary of Agriculture was to be Governor of Iowa Tom Vilsack. In his press conference Vilsack specifically addressed his hopes for utilizing alternative fuels tapping rural America for ways to combat the climate crisis.

Back in rural Oklahoma I was spending the day with friends and farmers Clay Pope and his new wife Sarah Love-Pope who have taken family farming to a whole new level. As an environmentalists Sarah said she had never considered moving to a farm and putting her money where her mouth was.

"Some of the greatest environmentalists are farmers, because they own the land and they decide how it will be cared for," she said while driving a truck through their fields.

Clay agrees. His work as the director of the Oklahoma Association of Conservation Districts has fueled a new incentive for farmers to use techniques that reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere. A company could buy carbon credits that could then be passed off to farmers who use these environmentally friendly techniques like no-till which can both protect and repair the land. Pope has said before that carbon can be a cash crop to farmers new and established.

A major problem with rural America continues to be retention of its youth, but the Department of Agriculture has a great opportunity to utilize the existing enthusiasm for Obama to educate youth on ways they can impact their world by investing in the communities they grew up in. Turning environmentalists into farmers is one way youth can help combat global warming but other than the goodness of their heart, there is little in the way for incentives.

The Department of Ag could increase grants and scholarships to youth who seek Ag degrees or the new Associates Degree the Oklahoma State University now provides for Wind Turbine Engineers and Technicians. Additional subsidies could be provided to children who return to take over their family farms is another way. And developing our country's broadband infrastructure to enable youth to have a connectivity to their friends or to entertainment available online.

See my adventure with the Pope's in Loyal, Oklahoma here

I'm encouraged to see Gov. Vilsack take the reigns, but I hope the new Department of Ag makes an effort to reach out to youth to understand more about what is needed to revitalize rural America.

It's a bit of a slow news day (unless Obama decides he's going to announce Bayh as his VP in the next couple hours). Most of my reading today has been tech heavy. Here's what I'm looking at:

• At WireTap, Sarah has an excellent piece up about rural broadband.
• For any organizations out there thinking about revamping their website, The Bivings Report will help you figure out if you need a content management system.
• Colin Delaney looks at how CRM software can help legislators better manage constituent relations work.
• Kevin Bondelli notes that the College Republicans are trying to counter program in Denver during the DNC. I've already signed up to receive their text messages and emails. Can progressive youth groups in Denver counter-program their counter-programming?
• PEW finds that McCain's Britney/Paris ads did have some effect after all: they dragged his campaign out of the shadows, giving him parity with Obama in the media coverage for the first time in weeks. I guess in that sense they were effective.