“Broadband internet is the new electricity,” declares the White House’s fact sheet on the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan the president announced Thursday in Pittsburgh. “It is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school learning, health care, and to stay connected.” If there are any positives to come out of the last year of pandemic that realization is one.
The virus forced many Americans to work or attend school from home. But that was not possible in many places in the same way electricity was unavailable until the 1936 Rural Electrification Act brought electricity to nearly the entire country and economic benefits and improved quality of life with it. An engineering professor once touted the improvement made in people lives by washing machines. They run on electricity the way businesses today run on the internet.
Biden proposes delivery of broadband to 100 percent of the country by the end of the decade while prioritizing “broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives.” He may plan to “mobilize private investment” in other areas, but not here. The goal is to provide affordable service not just to every community but to marginalized ones for-profit ventures do not.
“Government has a comparative advantage in providing public goods — education, training, roads, ports, basic research — which indeed figure largely in Mr. Biden’s plan,” the Washington Post Editorial Board notes. Biden hopes to leverage that advantage.
The Guardian adds:
The billions in broadband funds include money set aside for building internet infrastructure on tribal lands, which will be created in consultation with tribal communities, the administration said. Civil rights and internet freedom advocates celebrated the announcement on Wednesday.
“The President’s broadband announcement is a win for every family and business in America, in every part of the country,” said James P Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense, a nonprofit digital advocacy group. “Broadband for all is a policy whose time has come.”
The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts long ago eroded Democrats’ marketability in rural America where rural electrification was a past generation’s moon shot. Thanks to right-wing talk radio dating from the Reagan years and Fox News in the next decade, Republican conservatism has long held sway in parts of the country that felt left behind by an increasingly tech-driven economy. Perceptions those outlets fed that Democrats cared more about urban minorities than rural “real Americans” deepened the divide that leaves Republican senators representing tens of millions fewer Americans than Democrats do.
That 50-50 split in the Senate will make passage of Biden’s plan a tough climb. Republicans oppose government spending and tax increases (by Democrats) on what passes for principle these days. That “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke under Donald Trump barely registered with them. They have no interest in seeing another New Deal eroding their hold on red states or on the U.S. Senate and Supreme Court.
Biden’s plan, says the New York Times’ David E. Sanger, “is based on the gamble that the country is ready to dispense with one of the main tenets of the Reagan revolution, and show that for some tasks the government can jump-start the economy more efficiently than market forces. Mr. Biden has also made a bet that the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic and the social and racial inequities it underscored have changed the political center of gravity for the nation.”
Aside from improving lives in rural America and increasing job opportunities, expanding internet access there will make it easier for Democrats to reach voters propagandized for decades by right-wing media in a left vacuum. First they have to pass Biden’s plan and deliver on what has in the past been the empty promise of rural broadband.