Comparisons of Joe Biden with FDR just refuse to die, despite the president's ostentatious return to his center-right roots, stuffing his administration with Wall Street cronies, and allowing food aid and health care and rental assistance programs to expire with his cruelly premature cancellation of the Covid-19 public health emergency.
Biden's minions are nonetheless trying to keep the FDR mystique alive by ludicrously comparing his piecemeal initiative to expand internet access to Roosevelt's own massive Rural Electrification Act. Since it's costing more in 21st century dollars to build broadband capacity than it did to electrify rural areas during the Great Depression, they're even insinuating that Biden is superior to Roosevelt.
The first trick is to call it "historic," as the White House is doing with its time-delayed dribbling out of $40 billion worth of grants to states who must submit detailed plans to get even a down-payment, possibly next year, on the promised funds. The bulk of the money would not be out the door until 2030, at the earliest. This is according to the Commerce Department, whose ex-Google assistant secretary will be in charge of vetting the applications.
And we all know what happens whenever these grants remain unused for what is deemed to be too long. As with the unspent Covid relief funds, presidents can simply bide their time and make deals with Congress to "claw back" federal grants from recalcitrant, or struggling, or corrupt states - all in the name of tackling the federal deficit and giving more tax breaks to the wealthy and buying more guns and bombs for Permawar. This is just the deal that Biden made with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on those unspent pandemic funds. They will help defray the costs of the still-enshrined Trump-era tax cuts for billionaires.
So even while the money for the broadband infrastructure projects will be cynically slow in coming, the White House itself is wasting no time in the self-aggrandizing department. When it comes to bragging in an election season, the need for speed is of the essence. Biden, his staffers and even his family members will be "fanning out" all over the country to tout both his aspirational accomplishments and his long-expired accomplishments, and to outlandishly insist that right now, this very minute, in the spirit of FDR, they "are delivering on their historic commitments."
If you dream of a high speed connection to Amazon to gawk at stuff that you can't afford because Biden reneged on his promise to raise the minimum wage, it will come. If you can't believe, or you're not fond of nightmares, then you ain't American, and you will probably vote for Trump (or what Biden once called "the other Biden.')
Of course, they will be very careful with their actual words. You will only be guaranteed future "access" to "affordable" high speed Internet, not only to connect with family, friends, school and job, but to "access" fee-for-service health care over the Internet. This will probably be monopolized by Amazon, once they get those pesky privacy concerns out of the way.
To cement the ethos that we must all strive to be good soldiers for the cause of Capitalism, the Biden administration has dubbed the program BEAD - Broadband Equity Access and Deployment. This is a triple neoliberal buzzword whammy if there ever was one.
They love to spout the word "equity" to disguise the fact that they will protect structural inequality to the death. It has been ingrained in us that it is absolute privilege to pay for the Internet - which, in a truly equitable society, would be declared a public utility and a free public service. But since this is an alleged democracy, some Internet users are more equal than others.
The word "access" is bandied about as though a thing, such as medical care, is there for the taking,, rather than of being cruelly dangled just beyond our reach, due to our inability to pay for it. It's too bad that the patient died, seeing as how in the greatest country on earth, she had such unlimited opportunity to strive for proximity to the gleaming private equity-owned hospital right down the street.
The fact that Biden is also only touting "access" to an Internet connection means that if you are very lucky, you might even get to see underpaid gig workers stringing cable from your kitchen window - assuming, that is, that if you have a roof over your head.
Finally, they just can't seem to get war and killing off their diseased minds for even a minute, what with the word "deployment". We must, apparently, never forget that life in America is a constant battle and that we must always be in competition with one another as we selfishly strive to fulfill our own individual career goals and passions.
Biden and his kin and his cronies are "fanning out" to draw a BEAD on us with their weapons of social mass destruction, even while they cynically campaign on promises magically redefined as accomplishments. This is while a third of this country's inhabitants are in dire need of a giant fan to sweep away all the choking smoke and smog engendered by the massive forest fires in Canada.
The amelioration of capitalism-induced global warming is not part of of the president's Investing in America tour. As a matter of fact, Biden added to the pollution in hazy Washington, DC when he brought the entire Beltway to a halt this week during evening rush hour -just so that he could attend a closed door fund-raiser in a nearby wealthy Maryland enclave. This is otherwise known as putting the "private" back in that ballyhooed equity.
