One of the larger of the 94 broadband projects funded last week – $28.8 million to Peoples Telephone Cooperative (PTC) in eastern Texas – will connect as many as 190 community institutions to broadband, benefitting as many as 241,000 people and 10,300 businesses, and creating an estimated 100 jobs.

The grants and loans announced last week are only a portion of the $7 billion allocated from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for broadband. But while the administration touts its support of broadband, a recent Pew Research Center survey found a majority of Americans don’t think broadband should be a government priority.

People who don’t presently use the Internet are especially skeptical of government efforts to expand broadband access. “Fully 45% of non-users say government should not attempt to make affordable broadband available to everyone, while just 5% of those who don’t use the internet say broadband access should be a top federal government priority,” the Pew study found.

For their part, federal officials regularly extol the virtues of broadband – described by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as “enough bandwidth to enable a user . . . to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications.” Julius Genachowski, FCC chairman, calls broadband “the indispensible infrastructure of the digital age,” and a “21^st century platform for economic opportunity.” Genachowski also says “higher broadband adoption equals more jobs.”

So why don’t more people see the link between broadband and their economic future? The latest FCC report to Congress found that 80 million Americans who have access to broadband at home have chosen not to subscribe.

The number of Americans who have broadband at home has grown from eight million in 2000 to nearly 200 million last year, according to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, the government’s blueprint for broadband deployment. It proposes that by 2015, 100 million homes should have affordable access to wired broadband (deemed more reliable than wireless or satellite systems), and that wireless broadband should be available in communities across America as well.

Between 14 and 22 million Americans don’t have access to broadband, according to the FCC’s latest report to Congress on the subject. But Derek Turner, research director of Free Press, a consumer advocacy organization working on media issues, thinks the FCC overestimates broadband access. It’s hard to tell, because telecommunications companies have resisted providing detailed user information to the FCC.

Advocates for more robust broadband aren’t short of arguments. “Internet access is as crucial as electricity to improving the quality of life,” says Carol Gregory, spokesperson for One Economy, a nonprofit headquartered in Washington, D.C., that runs digital training and mentoring programs in poor, urban communities nation-wide.

“You can’t compete on a level playing field unless you’re connected,” Gregory adds, noting that nowadays, even to apply for a job one must have Internet access.

But less than half of those surveyed by Pew – 43% – say that that lack of broadband is a “major disadvantage” when it comes to finding out about job opportunities or gaining new career skills.

Their bosses, America’s CEOs, clearly feel differently, according to Darrene Hackler, a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.  Hackler has studied the link between telecommunications infrastructure, jobs and economic growth. She says that broadband is a key item on the list for CEOs looking to relocate or build new facilities. “They look at [Internet] connectivity, quickness, and file-sharing ability” when assessing business expansions, she explained.

But the U.S. is ranked 15^th in broadband penetration out of 30 industrialized nations in 2009 and 5^th among the G7 countries, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Within the U.S., there are large swaths of rural areas where broadband is still a pipe dream. And there are “digital dead zones” in the middle of our cities as well, explains Dr. Hackler – neighborhoods bypassed by fiber optic cable equipped to provide a broadband connection. Even some communities not far from the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. can’t get cable companies to provide fiber optic cable to their homes because of the cost, and must rely on aging telephone wires for dial-up Internet access.

Broadband access costs money, so it’s not surprising that many urban residents without access to broadband are low-income. However, in April, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded $28.5 million to One Economy and its coalition partner, an assemblage of civil rights organizations including the National Urban League and National Council of La Raza. The group will use the award, along with $23 million in matching funds, to expand digital awareness and digital literacy programs nationwide. The group works with local institutions to make a sustainable investment in digital technology in urban areas. It estimates that the technology and the education programs will reach 20 million people.

The public-private partnership is the best business model for extending broadband, according to Hackler of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “Municipalities can’t go it alone,” she said, citing Philadelphia’s failed effort in 2005 to establish city-wide WiFi.

The Obama administration could do more to publicize its broadband efforts. But it is using existing funding channels (remember those “Universal Service Fund” charges on your phone bill?) to make broadband available to all Americans. The FCC is now pushing for that fund – now used to bring phone service to high-cost rural areas as well as schools and libraries – to be available for improving broadband access. And Congress has approved fully $2.5 billion in loans and grants for broadband infrastructure projects in rural areas through the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS). Finally, the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) is handing out $4.7 billion in grants for broadband infrastructure, public computer centers, and sustainable broadband adoption projects.

The government should not be deterred by recent reports that reflect a public with more immediate concerns than broadband or that show the public is not sure how to make use of broadband. It should continue to fulfill the congressional mandate of affordable broadband service for all Americans. But it should also recognize the need to educate citizens on the importance of broadband — for the economy, for international competitiveness, and for the quality of life in the 21^st century.

==

More Resources

“Digital Nation: 21st Century America’s Progress toward Universal Broadband Internet Access,” NTIA, Feb. 2010

“Healing Rural Patients with a dose of Broadband,” NPR, All Things Considered, August 17, 2010

“Sustaining Jobs After the Stimulus: Building on Broadband,” Dr. Darrene L. Hackler, pub. By CGI ‘s Initiative for Collaborative Government, April 2010

“Broadband USA,” webpage for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding of broadband and links to federal department and agencies that award funds

“Broadband for Everyone,” The Kojo Nnamdi Show, WAMU 88.5 FM, Washington, D.C., July 27, 2010

It now looks like the US Department of Agriculture is encouraging California to drop certain provisions peculiar to the way the state has managed food stamp programs since 1974.

Basically, 36 years ago state officials opted to give certain aid recipients $10 extra in one type of aid, rather than having those recipients apply for and receive about the same amount in food stamps. Officials reasoned that the savings in administrative costs would be a better way to go.

But now, with California cutting cash assistance grants while food stamp allocations are inching up, advocates are urging a policy reversal.

Perhaps the L.A. Times could have conveyed this story with more clarity, but the confusion is instructive in one way. While fraud certainly exists in aid programs, generally, recipients are the nation’s neediest citizens and rarely among the highest-educated. Forcing desperate people to jump through dozens of hoops to apply for a multitude of programs with conflicting (and in some cases mutually exclusive) eligibility requirements is more iron fist than velvet glove.

According to an Associated Press brief in The New York Times, the recalled ground beef was processed by the Valley Meat Company between Oct. 2, 2009 and Jan. 12, 2010. The meat was mainly sold to institutional users: schools, prisons and the like, but also to ordinary consumers in California, Texas, Oregon, Arizona and overseas.  Consumer Reports provides links to a US Dept. of Agriculture website that will soon list retailers that sold the product. A more technical list, also from the USDA, offers the various sizes, packaging and brands of the tainted burger patties.

Federal officials were alerted to a possible problem after state public health officials in California traced six illnesses reported between April and June to the beef. A seventh case was added later.

Contaminated burgers have become something of a rite of summer in the U.S. over recent decades. And while proposed solutions, such as irradiating meat or the addition of bacteria-killing ammonia have spawned their own debates, there is something genuinely absurd about these recalls.

Granted seven reported illnesses attributed to 1 million pounds of meat doesn’t rise to the level of emergency. And USDA food labs don’t function at the speed portrayed on TV crime dramas. Yet one wonders how well the public would be served in an actual full-blown emergency if it takes a full ten months after contaminated meat first hit store shelves for the public to be alerted to the problem.

Smokey the Bear himself is now in the firing line.

According to Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times, both of California’s U.S. Senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, along with a number of Southland congressmen are demanding an investigation by the Government Accountability Office into the U.S. Forest Service’s response to last year’s Station Fire in particular and overall firefighting tactics and strategy in general. That inferno killed two firefighters, incinerated 89 homes and blackened over 160,000 acres.

Critics contend the Forest Service botched the initial response, failing to dispatch air tankers to drop water and retardant when the fire was first reported and still manageable. The fire, which ended up costing about $100 million to extinguish, generated high drama for network news crews as it threatened tony enclaves a convenient drive from their L.A. bureaus.

Fires may be fast moving and unpredictable, but political pressure may be too great for the Forest Service to dodge at this juncture. Especially after the agency responded to two L.A. Times Freedom of Information Act requests for recordings of 911 calls reporting the blaze’s outbreak by denying that any recordings exist.

This week, it was revealed that the recordings, which do indeed exist, were withheld not just from the Times, but from a Forest Service review team as well.

Hopefully, the right lessons will be learned from these events and wildfires can be better managed. But investigators should guard against an unofficial slogan talking hold in the bureaucracy: “Only you, can prevent leaks.”

A key question for both Illinois and the country is why food stamp use has singularly expanded in the recession compared to other social welfare programs like Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, otherwise known as welfare. Food stamps have lost their “stigma” with both politicians and recipients, as the New York Times has extensively documented. But the main factor seems to be that the Dept. of Agriculture reliably finances the program.  Confident that federal dollars are there, states short on money like Illinois have little concern about expanding food stamp use. Indeed, the Sun-Times article actually provides a Web link for an Illinois resident can apply for food stamps with the state’s Dept. of Human Services.  Unlike extra unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and education funding, the federal government has delivered a level of funding for food stamps that satisfies state governments.

The Depts. of Commerce and Agriculture have until Sep. 30 to allocate $7.2 billion in broadband grants.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has compared providing broadband in rural areas today to when those areas first received electricity. Swaths of Chicago, however, are also disengaged from modern technology and commerce. As the city’s debate over Wal-Mart has reminded residents, entire neighborhoods lack retail and grocery stores. Perhaps the broadband grant will make these neighborhoods at least virtually connect to the rest of Chicago and the country.

Despite the assurance of labels and premium prices, much of the oil was adulterated with cheaper refined oils, pressed from olives already past peak, damaged by heat or light or just plain old and stale, according to a story by P.J. Huffstutter and Kristena Hansen of the Los Angeles Times.

“Our laboratory tests found that samples of imported olive oil labeled as ‘extra-virgin’ and sold at retail locations in California often did not meet international and U.S. standards,” the authors wrote in the report.

A total of 69 percent of imported olive oil tested failed for one reason or another, while nine out of 10 California-produced oils passed.

The report was made public as the clock ticks down to the fall when new, voluntary USDA. rules will take effect. While U.S. law bars manufacturers from selling blended oils labeled as the real thing, no law legally defines the categories common to shoppers: Pumice, virgin and extra-virgin. As such, unscrupulous marketers apparently have no internal conflict, and face no legal sanctions, when they up-label inferior grades to command higher prices.

While some industry critics questioned the study’s methodology and assailed the results, this is far from the first time that European olive oil industry has been singled out as rife with corruption.

Often times in the real world of interest group politics, real consumer protection is waylaid to avoid upsetting a sacred cow industry, its lobbyists, and their showers of campaign cash. But the case for voluntary regulations in this case is extraordinarily nonsensical. California olive producers can’t compete on price or quality in the marketplace if unscrupulous Europeans can hide behind the skirts of toothless rules. The real question is why federal officials want to protect a decades-old scam at the expense of American consumers and farmers.

After splicing in a growth hormone gene from Pacific Chinook Salmon and a gene from another species that will force the fish to eat all year instead of in the spring and fall only, the fish reach market size in 16 to 18 months rather than three years.

The bio-engineered fish presents a possible revolution in aquaculture, which already produces half of the fish consumed globally.

Skeptics, fearing that Frankenfish will escape and degrade dwindling wild fish populations. Currently, genetically modified foods are not labeled as such in the U.S., in large part thanks to successful food industry lobbying. The Center for Food Safety is considering litigation if the FDA approves the fish.

There’s plenty of unease surrounding aquaculture. Antibiotics, artificial colors, even chemicals such as PCBs in feed, dioxin showing up in tissue samples, or a new international row after pesticides applied to farmed Norwegian salmon sickened French diners.

With the world human population growing at a seemingly unsustainable clip, the pressure is growing to find cheap sources of protein. But scientists and governments should take heed. A miraculous crop called the potato was once widely cultivated based on its promise to feed all of Ireland. Until, of course, something went horrifically wrong.

The source of the contamination is unknown.

The spinach being recalled, packed in six-ounce bags, has use-by dates of July 4 and July 8. This is not the first time E. coli has been detected in the company’s produce.  According to the AP article,

[s]pinach with the Ready Pac label was among dozens of brands pulled from store shelves in 2006 after federal authorities traced a nationwide E. coli outbreak to a San Juan Bautista processing plant that bags its spinach. Ready Pac also supplied the scallions suspected in an E. coli outbreak linked to Taco Bell that year.

Its somewhat comforting that FDA tests flagged the spinach in a more or less timely manner, even if most of the use-by July 4 batch turned for the worse days ago. FDA suffered major cutbacks in food safety testing under the previous administration. The agency previously strong reputation has tumbled in recent years, especially after officials delayed a recall of tainted meat until most of the product was likely consumed.

Getting recall information to the public has always been a challenge. Broadcasters seem reluctant to rattle off lengthy food production codes on the air to a public not likely to have a pen and paper handy. While the USDA has yet to develop an effective strategy for reaching ordinary people, it has found away to alert the nation’s tech-savvy elite. Afraid of food poisoning? There’s an “app” for that.

A new California law is settling the ruffled feathers of the state’s chicken ranchers, requiring eggs imported into the state to meet the same anti-cruelty standards as those laid in California.

Two years ago, animal rights campaigners convinced the public to approve Proposition 2, barring the dense confinement of egg-laying poultry and the confinement of sows to gestation crates or calves to veal crates. The campaign focused on California as a springboard for national efforts.

The measure was fought tooth-and-nail by poultry and livestock farmers, who argued that the costs associated with building larger cages would raise costs and make California eggs uncompetitive. They said the state would be awash in out-of-state eggs and California farmers would take their birds and 3,000 jobs elsewhere.

What a difference two years makes. On Wednesday, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill requiring out-of-state egg producers meet California’s chicken cage regulations for their eggs to be sold in the state. The measure brought applause from California chicken growers, according to Marijke Rowland of the Sacramento Bee:

‘This is a good sign that makes it seem likely that we’re going to be able to stay in business and stay in California,’ said Jill Benson, vice president of Modesto-based egg producer J.S. West.

Growers are still insisting that officials provide exact specs on how big the cages must be. Opponents argued that Prop. 2 was too vague.

To some, the fight is emblematic of states acting when federal regulators won’t. To others, regulating the size of chicken cages is a sign of government run amok.  On that subject, Rowland provides food for thought:

The previous industry standard for hen cages was 67 square inches, or less than a letter-sized sheet of paper.