Shortly after Lafayette rolled out fiber-to-the-home, a service that offers exponentially faster Internet access to citizens at a fraction of the cost they’d pay from private-sector providers, the state legislature, at the behest of telecom lobbyists, passed a series of laws, which were enacted by Governor Bobby Jindal, that made it nearly impossible for any other city in Louisiana to do the same thing. And not long after, Jindal squandered and ultimately rejected $80 million in federal broadband funding for Northeast and Central Louisiana, areas of the state that suffer from some of the worst internet infrastructure in the entire country, creating a “digital divide” that prevents rural and inner-city, predominately poor, and predominately African-American citizens from competing in an economy built and reliant on high-speed internet access. Jindal, however, wasn’t worried about providing a modern-day utility to the citizens of Louisiana; instead, he feared that a cheaper, faster, federally-funded, and locally-owned broadband service would undercut the profits being made by entrenched, out-of-state, mega-billion dollar telecommunications companies. Quoting: “This grant called for a heavy-handed approach from the federal government that would have undermined and taken over private businesses,” said Jindal. “We have an administration in Washington that wants to run car companies, banks, our entire health care system and now they want to take over the broadband business. We won’t stand for that in Louisiana.” That’s a bunch of delicious red meat. It’s also a pack of lies that distracts from the real issues here: Broadband infrastructure is not the same thing as the broadband business, and Jindal’s decision to sabotage an $80 million federal grant, at the behest of telecom lobbyists, foreclosed the opportunity to dramatically improve internet access for those in Louisiana who need it the most. But somehow, in conservative Lafayette, under a Republican Mayor-President, citizens were willing to invest in internet as infrastructure- the same way they do for water, gas, sanitation, and electricity. Today, the dividends are starting to pay back. For the first time in its history, Lafayette is now actively (and often successfully) competing for large technology companies offering high-paying jobs. Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal continues to offer countless millions, if not billions of dollars, to dirty, risky, and expensive manufacturing and natural gas production facilities throughout Louisiana, facilities that rely on a rotating supply of low-paid employees from vocational schools and the hope, despite the science, that these “technologies” aren’t actually poisoning our aquifers or contributing to seismographic disturbances or, more broadly, destroying our environment.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 10:59:03 +0000
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