A Justified Target for an Angry President

If the president of the United States could pry himself away from betraying the country’s friends for a while, I have a project that could actually do the country some good, bring in some cash, give citizens a reason to be happy with him, and let him give useful flight to his rage.

Actually, there are two projects, though they are intertwined and one of them will annoy another country so it will be to his liking.

The first, and simplest, is to levy a hefty charge on any American company whose technical support and other “customer services” are located overseas. I very much doubt that there is a single person actively engaged in American life who hasn’t had to hang on while waiting for “customer service” only to get someone who barely speaks English and who is located in a boiler room in India. (This is not an attack on the people of India but on their unsuitability for a particular job which by definition should be local.)

It often makes for all kinds of trouble: lost hours waiting, promises made but not kept (with no way of going back to the liar later), side hustles from identity theft to straightforward swindles played on the customers, and nothing that could be described as “service.” If the president wants to make people smile, he can put one of his 200 percent tariffs on “customer service” obtained overseas by American service providers such as credit card companies and, most especially, phone and internet companies. When bad customer service becomes more expensive than good customer service, we’ll get good customer service. Despite the friendly ads on television, the phone and internet companies do not care if you are dying in agony as long as they get your money.

The second project for an angry president is to recover the money paid to telephone and internet consortia for providing rural telephone and internet service without providing (and in the rare case they did it at all, continuing to provide) reliable rural telephone and internet service: not service that worked briefly once, but that works pretty much all the time.

A fuss was made last year (because it’s a good campaign point and because it’s a stark statistic) about the $42 billion devoted by the Biden administration to connect people in rural areas to high-speed internet. The money was all paid, but not a single person was actually connected. Yes, this was in part because of Biden-era quotas on everything, and there just aren’t enough illegal-alien ex-cons whose tastes run to bestiality to go around. But the problem predates Biden and possibly even Obama. A lot has been spent for little or nothing in return, either to the taxpayer or the people supposedly being served.

I’m reminded of the years when every week there would be a flier in the mailbox offering me a free “Obamaphone.” They didn’t notice, or more likely didn’t care, that there is no cellular service where I am and in many other parts of the country, so a truckload of Obamaphones would have benefited no one except Carlos Slim, the Tracphone billionaire who scooped up the money for the phones and paid-in-advance “service.”

The president could score some points by retrieving the money, which was effectively stolen, from the companies who were given it. If it bankrupts them, well, good, just make sure the reasons are stated on the record so that the officers and boards of directors involved can be held personally responsible, singularly and severally. If the guilty company compounded the felony by selling out to a different company, the buyer could be given 90 days to make things right or to fork over the loot, with interest and penalties. (Otherwise, debarment from the telecommunications industry or any other industry that is government regulated until it complies.) If the president wants to come down like a million-pound hammer on people, here are some who actually deserve it. The court has ruled that the president can’t park illegal aliens in Guantanamo Bay prison, but it said nothing about using the place to incarcerate telephone company executives.

My non-provider, possibly called Frontier Communications because “Frontier Continuing Criminal Enterprise” couldn’t be registered, awarded huge bonuses to its officials at the same time it filed for bankruptcy. And this was after it had blown past deadlines for which it had already received money from the government. I do not know of a single Frontier customer who would not volunteer to testify against the company.

I have given up the internet and phone service for most of Lent. It was not my choice, but for more than three weeks now (this occurrance; it happens several times each year) Frontier has worked less than half the time, with “service” coming in bites of a few minutes duration, making most online activities impossible. Never mind using the phone. Two weeks ago I spent an afternoon in the post office parking lot, where there is cellular service, dealing with someone in India who assured me that they would come a week ago Monday and fix it. No one ever showed up — they never do, not in the last four or five years — and it didn’t get fixed. (I think the boiler room was hired because they are such smooth liars, as long as they remember they are talking at the moment about telephone-internet and not some new cryptocurrency scam.)

To make things worse, Frontier used the federal money not to keep things the same but to make them worse. When they hit the scene, telephone and internet were separate, so even if the internet went down there was still phone service. But now that is no longer the case. They put the phone service over the internet. When one goes down, both do. So in times of emergency there is no communication at all. It is not nice of me, but I would welcome standing over a Frontier official, stroking my chin as he flops in spasms on the floor and my saying to him, “If only we could phone for the antidote.”

But I wouldn’t really mean it. I probably wouldn’t even check the phone to see if the dial tone had returned. Frontier does not bring out the best in people. Or, in this hypothetical situation, maybe it does.

I’ve been keeping precise round-the-clock records for months of the internet and phone being down around here, and we’re approaching the time when I’ll need to do something with it.

It’s not that the problem is beyond fixing. A few years ago a local official, a pawpaw farmer and county commissioner named Chris Chmiel, joined with others for the county-wide purchase of electricity to keep the prices down. It worked. The electric company remained the same, and we still pay our bills to it. Prices actually got lower. While service was never bad, it got better. When the power goes out due to an accident or storm, an email explaining the situation is almost immediate along with an expected time of restoration, and updates as appropriate. I have no idea who is on their support line or where it is headquartered because I never have to call it. It is comforting, satisfying, and efficient.

We need something similar to that for telephone and internet, which are both public utilities. Maybe cellular service, too. The power company has proved that it can be done, and power requires the distribution of wires everywhere. Phone and internet are a lot easier. It might also be by wire, as is the case here (though with Frontier it might as well be string), but phone and net are, unlike electricity, easily transmitted wirelessly. We have a good idea how it can be done at scale — lots of bandwidth — because Elon Musk, before he was busy doing other things, established the Starlink satellite service. T-Mobile and perhaps others have done it by cellular tower, which could be a solution if and only if it were required to provide service to every home, not just the homes and businesses in cities and towns, where the marginal profit is high. There is even work underway involving transmission by laser. I can’t imagine that it would be popular with birds, but that problem would ultimately take care of itself, wouldn’t it.

It could be done and no doubt will be over time. The trick is forcing it to happen quickly. While many of us — the number grows daily — are not entirely comfortable being ruled by an angry, decrepit man with way too much power, perhaps everybody could be made a little happier if he were encouraged to focus his rage someplace that deserves it.

And if that came to pass, boy do I have the company for him.