A colossal waste!
When my late wife, Sue, was in the Navy she served on an Alaskan island in Adak…..and recently I read an article about the island she served on for awhile….
On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.
The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use.
The money being wasted is yours.
It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.
Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it.
The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)
Just another story of how the US government wastes countless dollars and yet cannot seem to help people with their problems.
Time for a change of government….we need help….and we need it now.
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
I have no trouble believing this story, as it is repeated in every country across the world. Needless waste, that nobody ever bothers to do anything about. A change of government will likely do nothing to investigate it either.
Best wishes, Pete.
It’s really sad, isn’t it? It isn’t just this, it is also outright fraud that the government turns a blind eye towards. Columbia/HCA, a major for-profit hospital chain defrauded the government out of tens of millions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid fraud. It was fined a record $1.7 billion dollars.
And the CEO of the company? He’s in jail, right? Uh, well, no. He’s US Senator Rick Scott.