Fighting the digital divide in New Mexico A4 Tuesday, July 15, 2014
The digital divide in America –those who do and those who do not have access to the Internet –runs especially deep in rural New Mexico. Is it digital injustice or just the painfully slow development of the necessary infrastructure? Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, visited New Mexico recently. He confronted that question and a challenge on the confusing issue of net neutrality, the argument over whether some content providers can get favorable high-speed access to the network at the expense of other users. Though he spoke with obvious conviction, some audience members were unsatisfied with his answers. After visiting Acoma Pueblo, Wheeler spoke and answered questions at a forum sponsored by the New Mexico Media Literacy Project and other organizations
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belonging to the New Mexico Digital Justice Coalition. “Digital Justice” is fighting terminology. It implies that the lack of access is a political decision rather than the absence of resources. Wheeler said he is committed to universal Internet access. The FCC has officially taken notice that fewer than 10 percent of Native Americans have broadband connectivity. What they have, he said, is unacceptably limited and expensive. Acoma, he said, has a library with 10 connected desktops, costing the
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pueblo an outrageous $1,700 per month. The system is left running at night so students can access the Internet from their cars in the parking lot. Wheeler encouraged the use of an FCC subsidy program, called the E-rate program, which can help schools and libraries obtain broadband services at affordable prices. His answers on the net neutrality issue caused controversy. Wheeler said he is committed to an “open Inter net” where nobody has priority based on price. But he opposes defining the Internet as a common carrier. He said such a definition might result in excessive regulation and market interference that would stifle innovation. The “common carrier” definition would define the Internet as similar to the phone company. Under Wheeler’s predecessor, the FCC adopted regulations to
support net neutrality, but the regulations were overturned by a federal court decision last January. New regulations are now in the rulemaking process. Jason Marks, former Public Regulation Commissioner, was in the audience. Marks explained to me that the court decision was inevitable as long as the Internet is not defined as a common carrier, and that future regulations will run into the same obstacle. He didn’t agree with Wheeler’s reasons for refusing to adopt the definition. The other issue of the day was that troublesome digital divide. New Mexico’s poor rural areas are really poor, really rural and really lacking in modern life’s necessities. Internet access is the latest addition to a broader problem that includes bad roads, lack of services and places without electricity or running water. Part of the urgency around Internet
access is that it could help solve other aspects of the problem, such as healthcare through distance medicine and education through distance learning. State Sen. Jacob Candelaria (D-Albuquerque), who was on the panel, referred to a bill he cosponsored that appropriates $50 million ($10 million in each of the next five years) for education technology infrastructure, the hardware needed to provide Internet connections for schools. If we were rebuilding roads, we could be laying cable under those roads. New Mexico has a road funding crisis, remember? Infrastructure is what we need, it’s a logical investment at both the state and federal level, and I’m just as frustrated as anybody that the federal government’s paralysis and New Mexico’s lack of money are preventing it from
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EDITORIAL
Europe needs a strong france It's not every day that Americans ought to pay attention to France. Then again, these are far from ordinary times. The simple fact is that Europe is now way more important than our leaders are giving it credit for, and France is the most important country in Europe. Don't be fooled by all the press that Germany has gotten since the financial crisis. A couple years ago, there was an almost universal consensus that, love it or hate it, Germany controlled Europe's destiny — because it controlled Europe's finances. As students of political history have known all along, however, there's more to international relations than money. It was painfully clear in 2008 that Ger many couldn't bankroll Europe's way out of its economic doldrums, which mattered most because of their political implications. Plus, Germany was far more interested in clinging to the pretense of fiscal responsibility than bailing out the Mediterranean countries like Greece, Spain and Italy, which sank into the Continent's worst jobs funk. Now, we're hitting a crisis point in the cultural politics of Europe's failed moneyfirst plan for a more perfect union. Just last year, pillars of the global media establishment, like the Economist, still spoke glowingly of Germany's status as the most powerful country in Europe. In the wake of Europe's most recent wave of elections to the EU Parliament, however, that picture has been hopelessly complicated. Anti-EU parties have swept to power, and nowhere with more force than in France, where Marine Le Pen's National Front has scrambled familiar ideological battle lines and upset both the socialist left and centerright. Ms. Le Pen is shameless in her condemnation of German-led Europe, and the superficially strong, but deeply uneasy, balance struck by German leadership hangs in the balance. Today, France is the only European country sufficiently large, stable and selfimportant to provide an alternative to German leadership. Getting out from under the EU's regulatory rule and Germany's financial domination will have to be a broader effort than France alone can muster. But that effort won't come together without French leadership. So it's hugely important that Marine Le Pen has already publicly reminded Germans that her country, not theirs, is the "political heart" of Europe. What Americans have missed is just how hollow the EU's promise became — and how different a promise France can make Europe. In an effort to escape any kind of nationalist domination, Europe put its hopes behind the power of money to unify the Continent. All it took was one economic meltdown to show that a project so sweeping needs more than green eye shades to capture the hearts of millions. Whereas the EU can deliver openness and togetherness in good times, in bad times it offers mostly red tape, deficits and bureaucrats. What's more, bad times reveal just how much more Europeans want than a nice feeling. Thanks to the justifiably lingering ghosts of World War II, Germany can't lead Europe in a politically inspiring way. So the task falls to France. Surely Britain, Italy or Poland can never do the job. Whatever the French are becoming in the process, the time is over when they could be safely lampooned as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. REPRINTED
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ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Don’t need Washington for roads
The next manufactured crisis coming from Washington, DC involves the federal highway program. According to news reports, the Federal Highway Trust Fund is on the cusp of insolvency, with a cash shortage looming before the end of July. Despite the deadline, lawmakers are at an impasse over how to replenish an account that funds the nation’s highway projects. U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is warning states would, on average, see a 28 percent reduction in federal dollars to cover the costs of current needs if additional funding is not found. One potential source of funding is a hike in the federal gas tax. In its current form, the federal highway program is financed through an 18.4 cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline and a 24.4 cent tax on diesel fuel. Unfortunately, while the gas tax more closely resembles a user fee than other taxes charged by Washington, it isn’t. If it were a
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user -fee, gas taxes would finance roads, bridges and other items that benefit motorists who pay the tax. Instead, over the past decade, Congress has diverted more than $55 billion of gas taxes to non-highway projects, most notably mass transit. Whether you want more mass transit or less, the fact is that transit riders don’t pay the gas tax, rather motorists subsidize these systems nationwide. Ideally, Congress would create transportation policy under the principal of “user pays.” Unfortunately, Washington seems to be utterly incapable
of making even the most basic reforms. Worse, transportation policies that work in New York and Chicago may not work so well in Albuquerque or Farmington, New Mexico. The solution is simple: get Washington out of transportation policy and hand it back to the states. After all, as the Highway Program currently operates, Washington simply takes in the gas tax money, adds a bunch of requirements (like costly Davis-Bacon labor rules), diverts for pet projects and mass transit, and returns the money to the states. This is silly. Washington played an important role in the creation of the Interstate Highway System, but that was completed in 1992. Several bills have been introduced in Washington over the years that would devolve all or most of the program – thereby eliminating the federal gas tax – to the various states. The latest proposal called the “T ransportation Empowerment Act” was introduced by
Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Tom Graves (Georgia). States would then be able to experiment with transportation policies that make sense for their own populations. Gas taxes could be raised or lowered. Or, as Oregon is considering, motorists could be charged based on miles driven. Priorities like transit could be emphasized or reduced also depending on the particular state. Lastly, absent federal mandates favoring prevailing wage laws, Davis-Bacon states could decide for themselves whether they want to pay union rates for construction projects, build 15 percent more infrastructure, or save taxpayers up to 15 percent. New Mexico is a Davis-Bacon state, but neighboring Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Oklahoma are not. Amazingly, Texas is the only adjacent state that, like New Mexico, unnecessarily inflates labor
cholesterol to HDL cholesterol. ("Total cholesterol" is the sum of LDL and HDL cholesterol in your blood.) Your total:HDL ratio is 282:122, or 2.31. Based on data from the Framingham Heart Study, that means you are at less than half the average risk for a heart attack. So that would seem to be good news. However, the Framingham Heart Study included very few people with an HDL cholesterol level as high as yours. So does the formula really apply to you? I just don't know. By way of background, LDL is a substance in your blood that carries cholesterol to plaques of atherosclerosis. As a result, the plaques swell with
more cholesterol. That's why we call LDL cholesterol "bad." HDL is a substance that removes cholesterol from plaques of atherosclerosis. Presumably, that's why people with high levels of HDL have lower rates of heart attacks and strokes. Until recently, your doctor would have looked at your cholesterol numbers to decide whether to prescribe cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. But the most recent cholesterol guidelines, issued last year by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, take a new approach. The new guidelines focus on overall heart disease risks, rather than cho-
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Heart disease is risk is not based on cholesterol alone
DEAR DOCTOR K: I am 71 years old. My LDL cholesterol is 160, but my HDL is 122. Does my high HDL cancel out concerns about my high LDL cholesterol? DEAR READER: I can't give you a definite answer for a simple reason: There are very few people like you. Therefore, there are few studies of people like you. Here's what we know. For the vast majority of people, the higher your LDL ("bad") cholesterol, the greater your risk of heart disease. In contrast, the higher your HDL ("good") cholesterol, the lower your risk. What does this mean for you? Your HDL cholesterol is very high. I've had only one patient with an HDL level that
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high. Most people have an HDL level of 40-55. We call an HDL level "high" when it is over 60. Yours is 122. That's very high. Your high LDL cholesterol puts you at higher risk. But does your high HDL cholesterol cancel out that risk? There is a formula that could be used to answer that question. That is the ratio of total
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