It might be difficult to decide which is most notable. Is it the fact that Vice President Kamala Harris holds a second “Czar” position, beyond her confused and meaningless post as “Border Czar”? Is it the fact that in this position, as with the first, she has been utterly feckless – a cackling wanderer in a tax-burned fog? Or is it the fact that the position itself -- the soaring and socialist, anti-constitutional post of, get this, “Broadband Czar” – should not exist, in the first place?
William Upton reports for The National Pulse:
“Joe Biden tapped Kamala Harris to serve as the rural broadband czar in 2021. Part of her task was overseeing the implementation of a $42 billion program to connect Americans in rural and remote parts of the country to the Internet. According to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Brendan Carr, however, after almost 1,000 days, not a single person has actually been connected to the web.”
Whoops.
Leave it to government to usurp your right to your own money, and then mismanage how they handle the graft.
“’Hundreds of broadband infrastructure builders are now sounding the alarm, writing that the $42 billion plan to expand Internet has been wired to fail,’ FCC Commissioner Carr wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter). He added: ‘President Biden put VP Harris in charge of this effort back in 2021 and 982 days later not [one] person has been connected.’”
And while that is a perfect example of government waste and inefficiency, perhaps it is better that no one has been connected, because, historically, other instances of the feds “connecting” to special interest groups via the establishment of welfare payoffs have shown us that those systems never die.
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For example, inspired by the fascism of Italy and Germany, in 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an Executive Order starting what his administration called “Rural Electrification,” something that Congress a year later followed with a piece of legislation, shoveling “$50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade, an amount that, when recalculated for the inflated money supply attack on our buying power, would equal approximately $12 billion, today.
And guess what? The program not only created an insulting “Rural Electrification Administration Circus” that consumed tax money to show off the wonders of electricity around the countryside, the program never ended.
It became a way to offer agri-corporations and other special interests “tax breaks” that actually were subsidies. Even when I did a journalism internship in DC in 1989, I got to attend one of the Rural Electrification Administration gatherings and see all the new “help” the feds were handing to farmers who, decades earlier, already had gotten wired for power.
In an ethical world, people might ask the primary question of whether it is moral or ethical to take money from one person in order to make life easier for another person, be that form of ease electric power, running water, air-conditioning, plush seating, clean bedding, or something else. The initial taking is immoral, full stop.
If Americans want to look at it structurally, as far as how the US government is supposed to constitutionally function, the handout of cash for “electricity” also is unconstitutional.
Which brings us to Harris as “Broadband Czar.” With audacious phrases like “breaching the digital divide,” leftist politicians have pushed their internet-welfare agenda as if they are heroes, champions of the weak and meek against those evil giants who get broadband internet.
They did so by following the path laid by the Rural Electrification Administration, which, by the way, got into the provision of funds for “cable and satellite television provision” to the “rural” welfare recipients in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The justification, perhaps, that people might need help trying to find out the weather, so, of course, the feds have to give them cable television subsidies.
As Upton notes, Kamala was named “Czar” of this massively immoral, unconstitutional boondoggle:
“The National Pulse reported on the rural broadband program’s looming failure in June, noting that no project receiving funds from the $42 billion plan will break ground before 2025. Internet service providers (ISPs) and lawmakers on Capitol Hill contend the Biden-Harris government’s burdensome regulations—including climate change mandates, union worker requirements, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies—have brought progress on expanding rural Internet access to a halt.”
Perhaps this is one moment when a person can applaud the absurd DEI mindset…
“Additionally, the ISPs point to attempts by the Biden-Harris Commerce Department to regulate consumer rates in a manner beyond the agency’s authority as a reason for the program’s ineffectiveness. This could soon change with the recent Supreme Court ruling effectively ending Chevron deference, which allowed for such instances of regulatory overreach.
Commissioner Carr has warned that the Biden-Harris government estimates claiming the program is on track to break ground in 2025 and see substantial progress by 2026 are overly optimistic. According to Carr, the projects overseen by Harris won’t be near completion in many underserved areas until 2030.”
Yes, it’s called the “Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment” (BEAD) program.
And if you’d like to retain access to your own money, good luck to you.
Because you have to “serve” the “underserved,” whatever that means. And, of course, the politicians will define what is “underserved,” in order to shine like diamonds in the welfare display case.
This all was part of the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” passed by Dems, RiNOs and Biden’s gang in 2021, and I got to write on this specific “program” at that time, and now, after nearly three years, Harris’s management of this adds clarity to the inefficiency of government, even as it reminds us that they use the term “investment” to recharacterize political theft and redistribution of wealth.
And now, we see that Kamala has been slow to upload anything on welfarist “high-speed” internet.
But, in this case, we can sigh with relief, because another layer of welfarism has not yet been established to smother more of our freedoms and take more of our money, long into the future.
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Leftist media praise Kamala Harris as a "heartbeat of hope" but told Trump to "tamp it down" after his assassination attempthttps://t.co/mTdIsTyYcM
— MRCTV (@mrctv) July 29, 2024