The Ghettoization Of Rural Wisconsin Continues

When you see those commercials telling you that AT&T's assimilation of T-Mobile will usher in an age of unicorns and lotus flowers rememebr this monster that was slipped into the Omnibus Budget bill by JFC on a (wanna guess?) 12-4 vote late Friday afternoon.

“Prohibits the Board of Regents, the UW System, and UW Institution, or the
UW-Extension, directly or indirectly, from doing any of the following: receiving
funds from any award from the National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA) under the U.S. Department of Commerce for the Building
Community Capacity through Broadband (BCCB project; disbursing, spending,
loaning, granting, or in any other way distributing or committing to distribute
any funds received with respect to, budgeted to, or allocated for the BCCB
project, and participating in the planning, organization, funding,
implementation or operation of the BCCB project.”

That means that any money that was collected by grant, any money that has already been budgeted or committed to bringing broadband communication technologies to rural Wisconsin is to be forfeit in the same way that the money for the MKE-MSN rail line was given up.

This is tantamount to standing in the way of rural electrification in the 1930's and will set rural development back decades for the sake of making AT&T's lobbyists happy.

The Darling-Vos led cabal has offered up big paybacks to the roadbuilders in this bill, they've paid back their beer distributing contributors at the expense of small brewers and now they're killing a program that directly supports jobs in rural Wisconsin for the benefit of AT&T.

The recalls can't come soon enough to stop these assaults on Wisconsin industries.