Republicans, the party of rural America, the party of real Americans — working Americans, patriotic Americans — are, as usual, looking to screw those Americans in favor of their new corporate gods.  And the FCC doesn’t care, either.

One of the goals of the Federal Communications Commission is to get more people fast access to the Internet.  They’ve struggled for years with it.  There are many reasons why it’s so hard, but let me summarize: money and disinterest.

Maybe that’s a little too high-level.

Think about electricity in the US.  In the middle of the last century, most rural homes didn’t have electricity, and couldn’t get it.  Even in the places with high-power cables stretched right overhead, you couldn’t get wired.  Why?  Big, for-profit electric companies made tons of money in cities.  Sparse, rural places didn’t spin off anywhere near as much cash.  (The “Fuck those pig-farmers” part wasn’t spoken as loudly.)   Rich corporations weren’t about to give up huge city profits for small towns and their small(er) profits.  That’s why farmers couldn’t refrigerate their food, or run electric machines, or get electric lights.

And small towns didn’t get electricity from companies. They were frozen out until the government insisted that all Americans deserved electricity, even if it was hard.  Rural electrification took a lot of work, a lot of dedication, and it’s one of the great American victories.

Rural electrification required strong leadership from the government.  IT wouldn’t have happened without it.  The government offered subsidies, they financed loans, they created markets, and sometimes, they just said “Do it anyway.”  We eventually succeeded, and yes, those same corporations dragging their feet continued to make tons of money.

Fast-forward.  After decades of government subsidy and development, we turned all that those networks over to for-profit corporations.  Unsurprisingly, these megaliths have no inclination to push high-speed Internet services outside the big cities with their big profits.  And besides, fuck those people in flyover states.

Calling Internet access a ‘utility’ means quite a lot.   The law requires that a utility provide broad access.  It’s why we have widespread electricity today, and it’s why Obama tried so hard to include the Internet in that same structure.

And then the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United case, decided to gave big corporations a much louder voice than those flyover fucks.  The Republican party, already beholden to the rich, simply stopped listening to any of the voters, and began passing laws literally dictated by their corporate masters.  Obama couldn’t get past that solid opposition.  After legislative limits and court cases, the FCC couldn’t make Internet access a utility.  Republicans rejoiced, because profits, and fuck those farmers.  They’re probably all brown anyway.

But there’s a problem.  We charged the FCC with getting more people fast Internet access.  They’d have to change the laws to get relief, and that’s too obvious.

And now we have a newly elected Republican administration and their new Republican FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, who has a new approach to solving the problem of getting more people fast Internet.  It’s innovative and different: Republicans just redefined ‘fast’ to mean ‘much slower’.

As god is my witness, their response to bad grades is to re-grade themselves on a curve.

So the Republican answer is to stop caring about all those people.  It’s so much simpler than doing anything.  And — big surprise! — it’s more profitable for their major corporate donors.

Also, fuck those flyover states.  Don’t pretend you’re surprised.