The President’s Executive Order establishing US Ignite came out two-plus years after the FCC introduced the National Broadband Plan (NBP). The goal of the plan is ambitious:

“The United States must lead the world in the number of homes and people with access to affordable, world-class broadband connections. As such, 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 Mbps and actual upload speeds of at least 50 Mbps by 2020. This will create the world’s most attractive market for broadband applications, devices and infrastructure.”

...

US Ignite points in the right direction, an effort to build-out the nation’s wireline infrastructure. But his well-intentioned and farsighted effort confronts, head-on, the nation’s telecom giants, the telephone and cable companies led by AT&T, Verizon, throw in Comcast and the other cable companies, who have a very different and self-serving agenda. Working together they are a ‘Communications Trust’, a cartel of companies who have taken control of communications so that they can get rid of regulations, raise rates and block competition.

But the real story is the massive skunkworks campaigns on both the state level, such as what happening in state legislatures, and at the federal level, including the FCC and Congress, to close down all wired services, including the Public Switched Telephone Networks, (PSTN) or DSL service, (which relies on the copper wiring) or even the obligation to provide wireline services in rural areas or where ever they don’t want to serve. At the same time, Verizon and AT&T have been privatizing other parts of the PSTN, such as the advanced services like FiOS or U-Verse, or the profitable business or data services, which use the PSTN wires and plant —- which have been directly funded by phone customers, many times through rate increases for ‘infrastructure’ building.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/broadband-communications-att-verizon_b_1621871.html

In fact, in several instances, it’s the Daily News editors who are bungling the facts in an interview designed to show that Sanders doesn’t understand the fine points of policy. In questions about breaking up big banks, the powers of the Treasury Department and drone strikes, the editors were simply wrong on details.

Take the exchange getting the most attention: Sanders’ supposed inability to describe exactly how he would break up the biggest banks. Sanders said that if the Treasury Department deemed it necessary to do so, the bank would go about unwinding itself as it best saw fit to get to a size that the administration considered no longer a systemic risk to the economy. Sanders said this could be done with new legislation, or through administrative authority under Dodd-Frank.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-daily-news_us_5704779ce4b0a506064d8df5

Sanders believes that such progressive ideas have a broad popularity, not just among a lefty fringe but across the working class, even in red states. And yet progressive movements in recent years have wound up marginalized in the face of establishment pushback (Dean, the Occupy Wall Street movement) or else, as in the case of support for Obama, left as promises unfulfilled. Sanders believes that by keeping his focus on economic populism, he has a shot — a long one, he admits — at beating the historical odds. "Once you get off of the social issues — abortion, gay rights, guns — and into the economic issues," he says, "there is a lot more agreement than the pundits understand."

(SNIP)

The bigger question facing Sanders, whatever you think about the merits of his ideas, is how he would ever possibly implement them, assuming he's not elected along with a Democratic sweep of both houses of Congress. Sanders, on the stump, praises President Obama for running a brilliant campaign in 2008. But then he goes on to say that the president's biggest mistake ("and I had the opportunity to tell him this — I'm not sure how happy he was to hear it, but that's what I do!&quot was to demobilize his millions of passionate supporters after Election Day: "Politics in Washington is not about a president sitting down with Mitch McConnell or John Boehner and having a drink [and] trying to work it out — that's just media nonsense. You guys want free tuition at public colleges and universities? You bring a million of your friends to march on Washington, D.C.!"

Sanders insists that the nation is less polarized than it is portrayed in the mainstream media. Through the Obama years, the Democratic Party's strategy has been to specifically target the so-called coalition of the ascendant — young people, minorities, college-educated women — by heightening contradictions with the GOP on issues like immigration, LGBT rights, overpolicing and abortion.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/weekend-with-bernie-sanders-20150709#ixzz43l0QCylQ
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