Rural broadband needs a little less hooey and a little more Huey

You know, it's not necessarily cool to idolize the late Louisiana Gov. and Sen. Huey Long, who was assassinated at the peak of his power in 1935. Most people don't know who he was and, technically speaking, he was a corrupt despot. But he took a poor state, Louisiana, and brought it from one century into the next when most folks thought it'd be stuck back there forever. How? He just did it. He got the money and he built the roads, schools and hospitals. It was ugly. He fought powerful interests and used rough tactics. But his name is still on all the stuff in Louisiana.

Today, we have paved roads in northern Minnesota. They're not always great and should be improved, but they are paved. No one could fathom forcing rural Minnesota to go without paved roads just because they weren't close to the Twin Cities. Without these paved roads, we'd be mired in poverty forever just as Louisiana seemed to be in the 1930s when Long was governor and the rural roads were so bad farmers couldn't move their crops.

Well, today, the most pressing issue isn't unpaved roads. The issue is affordable high-speed internet access for every Minnesota (heck, American) at work and at home. It's the new utility that will bring us from one century into the next. It is a very expensive concept with millions of miles of cable to install. There are a lot of reasons not to do it, but those reasons will all seem pretty silly when the Internet -- and thus the economy -- is controlled by other countries in the future, counties that invested in high-speed internet throughout their population.

Here's a practical op-ed by the Blandin Foundation's Jim Hoolihan that ran in Wednesday's Pioneer Press regarding rural broadband. This is the first step toward what must be done. It's what Huey would do. We have access to as much or more resources in northern Minnesota than Huey did in Louisiana 1930. We could build the best rural internet network in the country. Not because our retiree population demands it (they don't), but because that's what needs to happen to make this region competitive in the future.