FCC To End Broadband Discounts For Poor People After Republicans Undermine Program
FCC To End Broadband Discounts For Poor People After Republicans Undermine Program
The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23 million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount. While it didn’t get m…
In short Republicans are going to screw over 23 million poor Americans because they don’t want Democrats getting political credit for helping them during an election season. And because our press is generally broken and afraid of calling a duck a duck, this is going to get dressed up as a genuine concern about wasteful spending by a party that’s long been a huge fan of no shortage of wasteful spending.
Broadband is infrastructure anyway, and the way we're doing it now, letting telecoms ration it out while we dump heaps of cash into their laps and beg them to expand their network, is screwy as fuck.
Meanwhile Biden wants applause for giving this same discount to one single battleground state...
49 states lose it, one gets to keep it. And moderate Dems want us to congratulate them for it.
It's this kind of strategy that makes "moderate progress" an oxymoron. The result isnt just less progress, it's a slow backslide because gains never outpace setbacks from conservatives.
Moderates might not be the ones breaking shit, but when they're the only other option "not breaking shit" isn't good enough, they need to actually fix shit.
If they can't, maybe that's a sign 30 years of the neoliberal experiment just shows that it doesn't work and we need FDR style Dems again...
I feel like the current establishment wouldn’t allow an FDR-style candidate to succeed, they’re making too much money from protecting the status quo.
But I’ll still grudgingly support them if Trump is the other option. I’ll vote progressive in my local elections, but as long as we still have a first-to-the-post election process, it’s always the lesser of two evils.
Isn’t it the case that whoever wins this one, they’ll be the oldest president in US history? Gross.
Obama was probably out last best chance...
But the party made a lot of changes after 08 to prevent anyone except their favorite from winning.
And they put a lot of pressure on Obama to not actually be progressive, and paired him with Biden to show donors everything would still be ok.
12 years later trying to pretend Biden was/is a progressive was just a huge slap in the face. He was literally the opposite of a progressive, a sign to boomers that the young Black man who talked about "change and hope" would get all the "guidance" he needed.
But like Heinlein said:
Surely the game is rigged, but don't let that stop you. If you never play, you'll never win.
We have to be at them at their own game, there's no other option.
But it's not the first or last time the good guys didn't get a fair fight and fought it anyways.
Win or lose, we still have to keep trying.
Creating a third party isn't really an option unless the DNC goes full nuclear and ignores a primary vote to nominate their favorite.
But FDR style Dems don't collect big piles of soft money, and collecting big piles of soft money is now the one and only goal.
Yep, we're supposed to fucking cheer every time they make deals with Republicans to give them more of what they want and backslide human rights even more...
Every time they fail, we're supposed to be happy that they were aspirational towards change, as if failed aspirations mean shit. (Pro-tip: they don't)
Like, we're supposed to be overjoyed they're supporting Israel when Israel is being run by their equivalent of Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is absolutely a fascist.
They're literally, right now, making deals with a fascist, a fascist state, and acting like we're supposed to be happy about that because Trump hates Jewish people or something?
News is McConnell and Schumer are closer buddies than ever. It's a Big Club and We Ain't In It.
Democrats might not be the ones breaking shit, but they sure love throwing a bitch fit if you say out loud that Republicans are breaking shit.
They desperately want people to see them as more than mid-right Republican-lites but all they do is roll over for Republicans, explicitly game the primaries against somebody who could win, and explicitly tell anyone left of Biden "fuck you we don't need you."
They're not just gaming them...
After Biden for his ass kicked in NH last time, the DNC said they weren't first anymore.
So the DNC stripped the whole state of delegates and Biden didn't sign up to be on the primary.
That's something trump would do. And the media wouldn't stop talking about how it's an attack on democracy. Mostly because it is.
Biden and the DNC do it tho. And it's crickets
They just repeat what their donors tell them to keep their campaigns funded. They want less regulations or nothing changed because change is scary.
Never fails to amaze me how y'all can tie literally any news to how fucked up Democrats are. Like this article is literally about republicans being fucked up and yet somehow that was a prompt to say democrats are.
For those of us who have been following this, the FCC has been sounding the alarm about this for a while. It's not as though there hasn't been a budget that the Democrats were working on with the Republicans or anything recently that they could have, you know, fought for this.
Oh wait, I forgot, they let the conservatives cut a bunch of stuff to let it pass. Thank the LAWD.
"Biden has already achieved more in three years than most presidents in eight:
The biggest investment in the middle class since Franklin Roosevelt,
The biggest investment in infrastructure since Dwight Eisenhower,
The biggest investment in health care since Barack Obama
And the biggest investment in climate change and chip technology in history.
Then there’s the biggest expansion of veterans’ benefits since World War II.
The first gun safety law since Bill Clinton
And with last month's jobs report, the lowest US unemployment rate since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon."
How the fuck hasn't an admin banned that username yet?
Edit:
I've explained this to that account at least three times now, so I'm just blocking them and leaving the same evidence as the other times for everyone else.
Yet, the most infamous records of intentionally spreading smallpox to Native Americans occurred in 1763 at Fort Pitt (present day downtown Pittsburgh). On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a fur trader commissioned at Fort Pitt, wrote in his journal after a failed negotiation between the British and the Delaware tribe. He stated that they had given the emissaries food, and as Trent wrote, “Out of our regard to them we gave them 2 Blankets and an (sic) Handkerchief out of the Small pox (sic) Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.”
Later that year, the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo Tribes laid siege to Fort Pitt. The fort’s commander wrote to his superior officer, Colonel Bouquet, that he feared the disease would overwhelm the fort’s inhabitants. After hearing of the outbreak, Bouquet’s superior officer, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, sent a suggestion from New York: “Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox (sic) among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.”
Bouquet responded, “I will try to inoculate [them] with some blankets that may fall in their hands and take care not to get the disease myself.” It is important to understand that before Jenner’s safer practice of vaccination, the term inoculation specifically meant deliberate infection. While this method was the main way of producing mass immunity, it was also known to be just as likely to start an epidemic as to end one. The timing of an outbreak of the virus that struck the Ohio Valley later that year and lasted well into 1764 coincides very closely with the distribution of infected articles from Fort Pitt.
https://asm.org/Articles/2023/November/Investigating-the-Smallpox-Blanket-Controversy
And as that article states, the main reason for lack of evidence is Native populations had no written language and were stripped of their own languages later.
So the only evidence we have, is when the people doing it flat out wrote down that they were doing it.
And we've got plenty of examples of that.
Oh look, government doesn't work when you have a party that intentionally tries and make government not work.
This article is devoid of real info. It just goes over the bickering of politicians.
The program is not ending yet, It will continue until it runs out of funds. Those who are already enrolled will keep getting benefits until at least April 2024. If (Big if) Congress agrees to provide further funding before then it would be extended. New enrollment for the program is ending February 7. Source: https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/us-news/personal-finance/2024/01/21/65ad1fe4e2704ef0658b4588.html
Oh look, the Dems doing more shitty things to the population at large without a single fucking thing pushing back against it.
Are the Dems in the room with you right now?
It's not really the Dems doing it, but they're also not doing anything to stop it.... which is what they always do.
Hell, it's what they'll do if Trump wins and becomes a Dictator. They won't stand in his way, and they'll be like "bUt tHiS iS wHaT pEoPlE vOtEd fOr" as if a bunch of uneducated morons deciding to vote away democracy isn't a fucking slap in the face to every future generation who can't vote Dictatorship away.
I have no doubt in my mind if Trump becomes President, you'll see the national Democrats jump on private jets and skip the country to leave us under his fucking orange shitstain thumb while going "Boo Hoo, so sad" on CNN Europe.
For people asking why I think this: Hey, remember Ray Nagin, the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina? Remember how he bailed in a helicopter on the fucking city, leaving people to die, to go on national news and cry about the tragedy? Remember how he could have made plans to allow buses to be used to get people out of the city? Remember how he didn't? Pepperidge Farm Remembers.