The biggest Internet service providers will dominate a $42.45 billion broadband grant program unless the Biden administration changes a rule requiring grant recipients to obtain a letter of credit from a bank, according to a joint statement from consumer advocacy groups, local government officials, and advocates for small ISPs.
The letter sent today to US government officials argues that “by establishing capital barriers too steep for all but the best-funded ISPs, the LOC [letter-of-credit requirement] shuts out the vast majority of entities the program claims to prioritize: small and community-centered ISPs, minority and women-owned ISPs, nonprofits, and municipalities.”
The rule is part of the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program that’s being administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
If progressives can come up with messaging that wins elections, great. So far the messaging appeals to a fraction of the voting public, and has zero working strategy for how to effectively deal with the right coopting, twisting and ridiculing the progressive agenda. Inequality is growing faster than ever for people of all skin colors, and yet progressives have essentially stopped giving a fuck about labor and switched over to race. I’m not saying that racism isn’t a problem in this country, I’m saying that the research shows that you get a SHIT TON more support if you don’t tie the messaging of a social policy to a particular race. I’m worried that in the (perhaps distant) future, progressives challenging racism, examining race as a social construct, etc. will have the perverse effect of reifying and reinforcing race and othering.
I sure did hear a lot of neo-lib politicians in my area saying that same thing when there was a push for Medicare For All. “It’s confusing and nobody knows what it means” is what some centrist dem congress people kept saying where I’m from. A few years on, now that the steam has been tapped and those same politicians are putting “healthcare for all” in their literature. The co-option against progressive policy is coming from inside the party and old railway Joe (not a progressive) outlawed a strike for… the railway workers.
Also, not seeing this abandoning of labor to focus on race you speak of. People flooding the streets over police murdering POC isn’t a political maneuver. Could you lay out where your seeing this focus on race and not labor from progressives?
I’m not talking about Biden, I’m talking about progressives. I am not talking about people protesting racist corrupt murderous pigs. Literally every progressive I know is using race as the primary critical lens they use for seeing the world. Folks give lip-service to instersectionality, but for the life of me, the discourse is being defined by the right. The right acts racist and persecutes LGBTQI+ folks, so those issues end up taking up all of the air in the room to the expense of everything else. A couple of years ago, I was at a social justice exchange in a poor white area, and the subject was food deserts in the area. I got shut down because I was steadfast in asserting that the reason that there were food deserts in the area had next to nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economic inequality and rural underinvestment.
Oh, I guess I’m just not hearing those same things where I’m at. Are these progressives POC?
Everything you just said is bullshit. The reason progressives don’t do well is corporate media does not want them to.
Stop watching msnbc fox cnn npr and many others and it becomes completely obvious.
I watch precisely zero of my news. I read. More importantly, I am in the orbit of grassroots organizers and social justice folks, and at least in my location, they are great at talking to each other but not so great at connecting their messaging with average people.