The Trump Admin Thinks Affordable Fiber Broadband Is ‘Woke’
from the everything-I-don't-like-is-woke dept
It’s understandably not going to get the same attention as the dismantling of numerous government agencies at the hands of rich unelected manbabies, but the Trump administration is also taking aim at all the promising parts of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Especially as it relates to broadband.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained a whopping $42.5 billion to expand broadband access under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program. To make sure that money wasn’t wasted, it contained a number of provisions (as the name kind of implies).
Like demanding ISPs provide at least one tier of service poor people could afford. Or encouraging networks built with taxpayer money be open access, which, as we’ve discussed at length, helps boost broadband competition and lower costs. As well as encouragement that taxpayer money be spent on the most future-proof technology (fiber) where applicable. Pretty common sense stuff.
King Trump earlobe nibbler Ted Cruz has been whining ever since the infrastructure bill was passed about how these kinds of common sense provisions are “woke.” “Woke,” you’ll recall was a pop culture term that used to mean “enlightened,” which was hijacked by authoritarians to whine about anything they don’t like. Now new Trump NTIA boss Arielle Roth has joined the fun:
“Roth has criticized the program’s emphasis on fiber and “a woke social agenda” that the NTIA has been pushing in its funding.”
Again, by “woke” we mean “trying to make sure broadband that uses taxpayer money is affordable to people” and “trying to make sure that taxpayer money is spent on the best possible technology.”
What is the extremist GOP really mad about? Well one, they voted against the popular program, only to turn around and try to repeatedly take credit for it. Two, it’s pretty clear they don’t like poor people and minorities. Three, they don’t like that a lot of the money might wind up funding popular, community-owned broadband networks, instead of being given to Elon Musk and AT&T.
I’ve been covering telecom long enough I can tell you exactly how this is going to play out.
The BEAD program is largely managed by the NTIA and States. While a lot of its is already earmarked, the GOP is going to work overtime to ensure as much money as possible goes to Elon Musk‘s Starlink. Ignoring that Starlink isn’t affordable, doesn’t really scale well, ruins astronomical research, is fucking with the ozone layer, lacks decent customer service, and is run by a giant racist toddler.
They’ll ignore all the important stuff — like making sure U.S. broadband maps are accurate. Meanwhile they’ll gut the agency in charge of keeping telecoms from ripping you off (the FCC), resulting in higher bills for everyone. Then, once they’ve redirected money to cronies and gutted oversight of the sector and mapping of real-world access, they’ll declare “mission accomplished” on U.S. broadband access.
Great stuff, very innovative. And definitely not “woke.”
Filed Under: affordable, bead, broadband, fiber, high speed internet, iija, infrastructure, ntia, telecom
Comments on “The Trump Admin Thinks Affordable Fiber Broadband Is ‘Woke’”
Well, of course it is. You can’t be anti-Nazi without being aware of bigotry, and Internet access is a big part of that.
If you see the World from a rich male POV, I guess that everything you don’t need and want to see is “woke”.
“Best stay woke, keep their eyes open” as said Lead Belly.
a MAGA dictionary
Woke: anything I don’t like
DEI: anything not exclusively made for cishet white men
CRT: don’t you dare point out how racist we are
Socialism: anything that doesn’t funnel money to the billionaire class
Gender Ideology: we can’t be sexist when gender is a spectrum
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I can simplify it further.
All three of those things mean the N-word.
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Not true; they also hate women, queer folk, immigrants, the disabled and so much more
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See also: the poor, non-Christians, rape survivors
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“Woke” is a mirror; one sees in it one’s own reflection.
Good people see woke as good.
Evil sees woke as bad.
Regular people having disposable income is woke.
"Woke"
Not quite. Of course, if there were an exact equivalent, one would not need to coin a new term in the first place, but “enlightened” is kind of an enviable end state while “woke” focuses on something that is more like a stance or attitude taking care and effort to maintain.
I think it was somewhere in the midst of “taking others’ emotions into account”, “aware”, “attentive”, “empathetic”.
At any rate, nothing that should count as being negative among civilized people. Particularly compared to the “proud to be boorish and inconsiderate” stance parading under the label of “anti-woke”.
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Specifically, “woke” as a cultural term began in Black populations; “stay woke” was a shorthand for “be aware of the social and political inequalities affecting us”. It wasn’t until after the turn of the century that “woke” became (A) a more generalized term for any kind of social inequalities, then (B) a word that was coöpted by conservatives and turned into a meaningless snarl word to serve as a derogatory insult in much the same way they did that to “political correctness”, “critical race theory” and “DEI”. “Woke”, as used by right-wingers, effectively means “people/ideas I don’t like” or—as is also the case with “DEI”—any given bigoted slur that those right-wingers would love to use if it they could use it without social consequence.
The Republicans hate anything that helps others. They want the poor to stay poor. “Woke”, is the new N-word for them. They complain about this while working on a giant tax break for the ultra wealthy. I thought the republicans were made up of mostly christians. This sort of thing puts the lie to their so called faith.
Re: Perversion of metrics is a universal problem
Whenever you create a reward metric for desirable behavior, the metric will separate itself from the desirable behavior.
You can start with the pharisees, see it with the post-Calvinistic replacement of “if God weren’t happy with how I am doing, I would not be successful” with “the more I rip off my brothers, the happier God will be”, and the most recent trillion-dollar failure is for research contracts being awarded according to citation numbers which means that nobody can afford to stray from well-trodden paths if they want to survive. Meaning that fundamental research is too risky to attempt because nobody will want to risk their livelihood by elevating stuff that is out of their comfort zone.
Republican behavior does not “put the lie to their so called faith.” as much as it illustrates human tendencies to take shortcuts to the reward stage until nothing but the shortcut is considered even appropriate.
Humans in general are scum by nature. It takes permanent effort to rise above that. The Republican party was not least founded on the premise to overcome slavery while the Democratic party stood for exploitation while it was profitable.
Post-Eisenhower however, Johnson and Nixon kind of navigated a switcheroo.
And Trump embodies the new Republican moral of “whenever I witness human suffering, I feel compelled to think about what I may do in order to profit from it”.
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This is why this is exactly the government the people deserve. If not, why wasn’t Spray-Tan Caligula targeted by any disgruntled mob? The masses in general, approve of him. And they continue to do so because they do nothing of any real value to oppose him.
He is the perfect reflection of the country’s true values.
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Tax And Spend
This program is designed to create a new entitlement program, by requiring ISPs to give out subsidized internet. Previous funding systems for subsidies relied on taxing landline phones, but the tax revenue from this is drying up. The subsidy money will eventually come from those of us who work for a living, and either get taxed more on our home broadband, or else we will pay more in state taxes.
No country has entitlement-programmed it’s way to prosperity. End the program before it metastasizes.
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You know what else no other country has done? Survived the rich making themselves richer at the cost of watching everyone else die in the streets. You have no pity for the poor, but what happens then the homeless and the broke and the barely-hanging-on people all die because of the unchecked growth of wealth inequality, rampant inflation, and people like Elon Musk caring more about carrying out their corrupt dreams of having all the money in the world instead of merely most of it?
Hell, if I recall right, Elon once said he could stop world hunger with his enormous wealth, and all he needed was a plan for that—but when UNICEF came up with that plan, he balked. Elon Musk doesn’t give a damn about people poorer than him unless their bank balances have at least nine numbers (not including cents). Republicans are in a similar boat, where they only ever give a shit about the poor long enough to win elections, after which it’s “fuck ’em, they should’ve been better people if they didn’t want to be so fucking poor” before cackling with glee as homeless people have their belongings destroyed by cops. (Democrats ain’t much better there, but at least they try to have some semblance of empathy.)
Go ahead and demand that Trump cut entitlements. Beg him to cut into Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid like the GOP has been wanting to do for years. You’ll find out, much sooner rather than much later, that entitlements aren’t the kind of wasteful spending that your oligarch-worshipping leaders tell you it is—and that when those entitlements are proven to serve a public good, no one wants those entitlements cut.
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It’s true, very few countries have been able to significantly cut entitlement spending until they encounter a financial crisis. It’s a good argument to never start.
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Here’s the funny thing, though: Conservatives (like you) will never talk about balancing the budget by raising revenues via taxing the wealthy. According to you and your right-wing ilk, the budget can only ever be balanced by cutting spending to the point where the federal government may as well not exist outside of the military (which is where most government spending in the U.S. goes anyway). You’ll kill SNAP, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and every other net-positive social spending program just so your precious oligarchs will have to find a way to live comfortably with still having more money than most people in the country combined after being taxed. This is also the same idea going into the mass firings spearheaded by co-presidents Musk and Trump—which is why those firings will come back to haunt them as government services become more inefficient due to a lack of staffing and the budget barely sees any real “balancing” from the elimination of those jobs.
You don’t give a shit about poor people, Koby. If you did, you’d be advocating for a rise in the federal minimum wage, a maximum wage that caps executive pay based on how much a company pays its lowest-paid employees, Universal Basic Income, taxing the wealthiest people in the country (and the corporations they run), and literally anything else that would lessen the wealth gap in this country that has been growing and growing to untenable levels for at least the past 40 years. But you don’t. You advocate for everything that widens the wealth gap and drives this country closer and closer to financial ruin.
Seriously, Koby: What do you think is going to happen when a majority of people in this country can’t afford the cost of living?
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Damn bro, when you’re right you’re right. Cutting entitlements is never a good place to start to try to save money in a crisis. You’re trading short term gain for long term pain.
Thanks k-dawg!
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If only there were an example in American history of a capitalist free for all ending in disaster, needing massive government spending, regulation and entitlement programs to fix the mess the gold plated toilet class caused, only to have said people spend the next few decades unpicking everything that saved them from being shot in basements by the people they’ve robbed.
The government you pine for has failed multiple times, on a county, state and national level and they best you have is screams of socialism and dog whistles about brown people getting rich from non existent programs.
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The notion of “I’d rather go poor if it means they will be even poorer than me” (where “they” can be any Repugnant Cultural Other) that fuels so much right-wing bullshit would be depressing if it weren’t so goddamned normalized in our society.
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The ISP’s are getting subsidized either way. Why are you against actually making them live up to a few simple provisions?
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At best, he doesn’t care about poor people; at worst, he wants them to actively suffer.
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K-dag is 100% fine with a boot on his neck as long as his is on someone elses.
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I bet that billionaire boot tastes good.
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There’s no way somebody who posts as much as you do “works for a living.”
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So instead of taxing phone lines to fund broadband infrastructure, a thing that is going away, we directly tax broadband for the cost of maintaining and building infrastructure? how is that any different from the old tax structure?
Were Roman roads a subsidy?
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The ISPs are already subsidized. They’ve taken tax cuts, subsidies, and federal funding to provide services and infrastructure that they literally just pocketed. You’re literally crying that the ISPs might have to provide a service they have already been paid for! They also operate using public infrastructure. And they’re making bank just in their normal business practices. Comcast made $46 billion in profits last year and they steadily increased profits almost consistently year over year for the last 15 years, except for 2020 when something big probably happened… Meanwhile municipal broadband continues to prove in the places where it’s not been lobbied out of existence by the wealthy ISPs that the service can be provider for much less.
And not that it would result in higher taxes, but I would rather pay more in taxes so that my poorer neighbors can afford better internet, so they can get a better education, so that they have a better chance of not turning into an uninformed echo chamber repeater station cheering on their own abusers like you. You’re not even benefiting from your support for the people who take you for granted and don’t give a ripe juicy shit about you.
Of course "BEAD" is "Woke".
BEAD has “Equity” and “Access” in its definition so of course it is “woke!”.
Trump’s campaign promised to make groceries affordable, but obviously his policies are doing the opposite. So in a classic “we have always been at war with Eastasia” switcheroo, making things affordable is now woke.
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When you fire your bird flu peeps, groceries def ain’t gettin’ cheaper.
It didn't work the last time.
An article by this very paper a decade ago.
https://www.bestnettech.com/2015/01/30/what-billions-subsidies-bought-final-map-verizons-fios-fiber/